Killing The Bear
by digby
Since Hullabaloo seems to be obsessed with Josh Marshall’s posts of yesterday, I will continue with this observation from one of our readers on the subject of Stanley Kurtz’s offensive proposition that poor little Bushie was unduly constrained by the cowardly American public from doingwhatneededtobedone:
The other side of this stupidity is that Bush is under no real constraint to care what the American on the street thinks of his war, and in fact has not really given any indication of doing so.
Exactly. How many times have we heard this?
PRESIDENT BUSH: …Look, people didn’t agree with my decision on Iraq, and I understand that. For Europe, September the 11th was a moment; for us, it was a change of thinking. I vowed to the American people I would do everything to defend our people, and will. I fully understood that the longer we got away from September the 11th, more people would forget the lessons of September the 11th. But I’m not going to forget them. And, therefore, I will be steadfast and diligent and strong in defending our country.
I don’t govern by polls, you know. I just do what I think is right. And I understand some of the decisions I made are controversial. But I made them in the best interest of our country, and I think in the best interest of the world. I believe when you look back at this moment, people will say, it was right to encourage democracy in the Middle East. I understand some people think that it can’t work. I believe in the universality of freedom; some don’t. I’m going to act on my beliefs so long as I’m the President of the United States. Some people say, it’s okay to condemn people for — to tyranny. I don’t believe it’s okay to condemn people to tyranny, particularly those of us who live in the free societies.
Bush really believes he’s some sort of Jesus-like figure and he’s made his disasterous decisions without any regard to the desires of the public.He has made a fetish of it. He believes he is morally superior to the hoi polloi. To now say that he has been restrained by the people is ridiculous. When he got into office with a dubious one vote majority on the Supreme Court he governed as if he had a mandate. He never cared what the congress thought — just ran roughshod over them. The man has always done exactly what he wanted to do.
The only public support he has ever cultivated (at Rove’s careful direction) was the 35% or so of his red-meat base or the business interests that paid for his presidency. On foreign policy he operates from his “gut” which means that he picks and chooses, without analysis or informed knowledge, from a variety of advisors with no thought to coherence or how such decisions might be implemented. Even Cheney cannot adequately control him. It could just as easily be decisionmaking by Ouija board. The problem is not that the public failed to approve of Bush’s harebrained schemes. The problem is Bush’s scemes themselves.
The Iraq invasion was the result of an absurd amalgam of greed, rage, naivete and hubris that was Shakespearean in its complexity. But for the president and many of his followers it was quite simple:
In State of Denial, Woodward recounts how Michael Gerson, at the time Bush’s chief speechwriter, asked Henry Kissinger why he had supported the Iraq war:
“Because Afghanistan wasn’t enough,” Kissinger answered. In the conflict with radical Islam, he said, they want to humiliate us. “And we need to humiliate them.” The American response to 9/11 had essentially to be more than proportionate—on a larger scale than simply invading Afghanistan and overthrowing the Taliban. Something else was essential. The Iraq war was essential to send a larger message, “in order to make a point that we’re not going to live in this world that they want for us.”
He is, of course, being disingenuous. (It’s Kissinger, after all.) Iraq was a secular government, for all its ills. Invading it had nothing to do with radical Islam. Kissinger may be a nobel prize winning Harvard professor but his remarks are entirely based on lizard brain primitivism. And it’s that primitivism that informed George W. Bush’s vaunted “gut” and led the most powerful nation on earth into Iraq for no good reason.
It’s similar to what happens when a wild animal like a bear comes down out of the hills and mauls someone. Back in the day they used to round up a posse (now they call in the professionals) grab their guns and go out to kill the bear. It doesn’t really matter which bear just that the defenders of civilization can bring home a bear carcass and show everyone that if a bear kills one of them they are going to get revenge — preferably by killing one that was even bigger than the one that did the killing. They always say that it was because the bear was dangerous and it had developed a taste for human blood or something like that. (The people don’t ever really know if the dead bear is the one, do they?) The purpose isn’t really to kill the bear that did the deed. And it isn’t as Kissinger says, to show the other bears that they will be killed if they do this again. It’s to quell their own fear by proving to themselves that they are not helpless.
George W. Bush was very, very frightened after 9/11 and for a variety of motivations his administration persuaded him that killing the Iraq bear would make him feel better. The public’s support or lack of support was irrelevant.
Update: For a perfect example of post 9/11 pants-wetting masquerading as Kissingerian message-sending, here’s Tom Friedman:
No, the axis-of-evil idea isn’t thought through – but that’s what I like about it. It says to these countries and their terrorist pals: “We know what you’re cooking in your bathtubs. We don’t know exactly what we’re going to do about it, but if you think we are going to just sit back and take another dose from you, you’re wrong. Meet Don Rumsfeld – he’s even crazier than you are.”
There is a lot about the Bush team’s foreign policy I don’t like, but their willingness to restore our deterrence, and to be as crazy as some of our enemies, is one thing they have right. It is the only way we’re going to get our turkey back.
You can smell the fear all over those words, can’t you?
h/t to Glenn Greenwald for reminding me of Friedman’s inchoate rage and incoherent CYA. It’s been an amazing sight to see these last three years.
Update II: Just so there is no mistake. I am not insulting hunters or any other professional who deals with wildlife. This is a (lame) parable not a comment on the culture of gun owners. Nor is it meant to imply that people who work for animal control do not care about the animals or do not try to insure that the animals they kill are indeed dangerous animals. My point was that it didn’t matter if the animal that they killed was the “guilty” party in order that the fear in the community (or among some hunters who are more like George Bush)is quelled.
No disrespect was intended toward bears either.
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