Constructive Murder
Off the top of my head, I'd have to say that I've never had anything good to say about President Bush, not ever. His impact on events is, in my view, purely negative. It's only now, though, as the depths are being sounded by writers such as Bob Woodward, Ron Suskind and James Risen, that I'm getting a sense of how negative that impact is, and it surprises me that I am surprised. Suspecting that someone is up to no good is very different from finding out the ways in which someone has been up to no good. Mark Danner, reviewing books by each of the authors I've named in a very long essay, "Iraq: The War of the Imagination," has shaken me in a way that I didn't expect to be shaken. One passage in the review just won't go away. Both excerpts below appear on the same page of the current New York Review of Books.
Irresistible as Rumsfeld is, however, the story of the Iraq war disaster springs less from his brow than from that of an inexperienced and rigidly self-assured president who managed to fashion, with the help of a powerful vice-president, a strikingly disfigured process of governing.
Woodward tends to blame "the broken policy process" on the relative strength of personalities gathered around the cabinet table: the power and ruthlessness of Rumsfeld, the legendary "bureaucratic infighter"; the weakness of Rice, the very function and purpose of whose job, to let the President both benefit from and control the bureaucracy, was in effect eviscerated. Suskind, more convincingly, argues that Bush and Cheney constructed precisely the government they wanted: centralized, highly secretive, its clean, direct lines of decision unencumbered by information or consultation. "There was never any policy process to break, by Condi or anyone else," Richard Armitage, the former deputy secretary of state, remarks to Suskind. "There was never one from the start. Bush didn't want one, for whatever reason."
Yes, I thought as much - except that I didn't. The anatomy of the Administration's recklessness is a truly shocking sight. "Unencumbered by information or consultation" - what a phrase! For the sake of such convenience, thousands of people have died in Iraq, many of them GIs. I remember, years ago, comparing the Bushies to teenagers too young and unseasoned to drive the family car, but Mr Suskind's analysis is more devastating. Teenagers don't listen. Mr Bush and his cronies deliberately silenced the inputs.
Talk of impeachment is back in the air, and I won't be surprised if it gets positively noisy by the beginning of summer. I feel more strongly than ever that impeachment is the wrong way to go, because it mixes up the office of the presidency and its incumbent. I should like to wait until the government of the nation has passed to other, unavoidably more capable, hands before pursuing Mr Bush, preferably in a state with the death penalty, for the first-degree murder of several thousand American soldiers. There is no statute of limitation on murder, and I am convinced that a plausible case can be made. The president's reckless disregard for human life, amply hinted at during his governorship of Texas, is implicit in every Iraqi failure, from the decision to invade the country without a plan, to the de-Baathification program (for which no one currently takes final responsibility), to the shoddy state of our military's body armor - to name only three of the more egregious mistakes to which Mr Bush's willful ignorance has committed us. He has worked the levers of government without a shred of diligence, and brought deep shame upon his country.
Ever since the election of 2004, I've found it more useful to contemplate the electorate's seriousness than to fret about the Administration's incompetence. The more recent election, and the return to reality-based journalism that's ever more in evidence, didn't change my thinking. But Mr Danner has.
