While the official party line out of the White House -- and parroted by most of the right's pundits -- continues to be that everything's fine in Iraq (also: in Baghdad, the grass is blue and the sky is purple), your more intelligent conservative writers have shifted to a more, shall we say, nuanced view. Iraq may be, in the words of The National Review's Jonah Goldberg, "a mess," in large part because of the president's bungling, but that's not necessarily any reason to vote against him. "So sure," Goldberg concluded, "[George W.] Bush hasn't done everything right -- never mind perfectly -- in Iraq. [Winston] Churchill didn't conduct World War II perfectly every time either."
Max Boot, house neoconservative on the Los Angeles Times op-ed page, reached for an analogy to Abraham Lincoln, who "is remembered, of course, for winning the Civil War and freeing the slaves" despite the fact that "along the way he lost more battles than any other president."
On the surface, it's a fair enough point. Mistakes happen, and perfection is not a reasonable standard for political leadership. The problem with this case for Bush, however, is precisely that it isn't Bush's case for Bush. Instead, the president wants us to re-elect him because he's a flawless leader whose mistake-free policies have created a lovely situation in Iraq, where freedom is blossoming and the war has made Americans safer.
At an April 16 prime-time press conference, Bush was asked "After [September 11], what would your biggest mistake be, would you say, and what lessons have you learned from it?" If the president wanted to admit to the American people that he had made some mistakes while also reassuring us that he, like the great leaders of the past, had learned from those mistakes and was prepared to lead us to ultimate victory, this would have been a good moment.
Instead we got, "You know, I just -- I'm sure something will pop into my head here in the midst of this press conference, with all the pressure of trying to come up with an answer, but it hasn't yet." These are, perhaps, the words of a hardened liar, or just of a self-deluded man who has chosen to surround himself with sycophants, but in the tradition of Lincoln and Churchill they aren't.
Another good opportunity was present in late July, when the president received a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) reflecting the consensus view of the intelligence community that the range of possible outcomes in Iraq was bleak to very bleak. Instead, the White House sat on the report for months until it was leaked to The New York Times in September. When simply hiding the NIE from the public was no longer possible, Bush explained that the CIA was "just guessing" and mischaracterized the content of the report, saying that under one scenario for Iraq, "life could be better." In fact, the report stated that, at best, things would stay the same.
On Saturday, Knight-Ridder obtained a report from the Iraqi Health Ministry on civilian casualties, which revealed that more than 3,000 Iraqis have been killed since April 5. Worse, U.S. and Iraqi government forces have killed twice as many civilians as have the insurgents they're supposed to be protecting the population from. The response from Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, who's been hanging out in the United States and operating as a part of the administration's spin machine, was to rule that the Health Ministry will stop releasing casualty figures.
Boot wrote that "most of the Union's failures were because of inept generalship, but it was Lincoln who chose the generals." And so he did. But Lincoln, famously, also fired the generals. Lots of them. When Lincoln decided that a general was making mistakes, he would get rid of him and find someone new. If the new guy proved to be no good, he would be sacked as well. Meanwhile, commanders who proved themselves competent at lower levels found themselves getting promoted. As a result, the Union shifted strategy over time, and by the end of the war, solid leadership was in place in key positions (even though the bulk of the most talented high-level officers of the antebellum Army had gone over to the Confederacy).
By contrast, Bush has fired precisely no one for making mistakes. And why would anyone be? After all, Bush maintains that no mistakes were made, or at least none noteworthy enough for him to remember. Most of the errors that Bush won't acknowledge were caused by his decision to take advice from the vice president, the secretary of defense, and people on their staffs instead of listening to the sound advice provided by officers in the State Department and the CIA. Dick Cheney, of course, is still on the ticket for re-election, and the president's standard stump speech describes him as "a man of great experience, sound judgment … a man who can get the job done." Cheney certainly is experienced, but if the president thinks his judgment has been sound, we can be sure that a second term will mean getting the job done by making the same mistakes over and over again. Donald Rumsfeld hasn't been fired. Instead, Bush says he's "the best secretary of defense the United States has ever had."
Even such shrill left-wing partisans as The Weekly Standard have suggested that Rumsfeld should go, but Bush will have none of it. Even more frightening is the persistence in office of some of Rumsfeld's subordinates, notably Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith. General Tommy Franks, who commanded the Iraq War and has endorsed Bush's re-election, describes Feith as "the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth." Feith's office was responsible for bad intelligence on Iraq's alleged weapons-of-mass-destruction programs, and worse intelligence on Iraq's ties to al-Qaeda. His subordinates have been arranging secret unauthorized meetings with a shady Iranian arms dealer despite repeated warnings from the CIA that the man in question is not to be trusted. Worst of all, Feith and his subordinates were responsible for torpedoing the work of the State Department's Future of Iraq Project and, instead, structuring the occupation around a too-small force and Ahmad Chalabi, an unpopular exile who turns out to have been doing some freelance spy work for Iran.
None of the guilty parties has been fired, though the situation is so out of control that several are under investigation by the FBI's counterintelligence division. Nor have they learned from their mistakes. Instead, Newsweek has reported on their plan to repeat the Iraq debacle in Iran, to "oust the existing regime, swiftly install a pro-U.S. government in its place (extracting the new regime's promise to renounce any nuclear ambitions) and get out." Naturally enough, the plan -- like its predecessor in Iraq -- "horrifies U.S. military leaders."
And rightly so. But these are the men in whose hands Bush has placed U.S. defense policy. And it's not as if no one has been fired from the administration. General Eric Shinseki, who correctly estimated that Bush's plans for Iraq involved too few troops, was forced out. Larry Lindsey, who correctly estimated that Bush was understating the costs of the venture, was fired. Jay Garner, Iraq's first civilian administrator, was fired for his entirely warranted skepticism about plans to bring a crash program of neoliberal privatization of the Iraqi economy.
In light of all this, the president should, for once, be taken at his word. Where Goldberg and Boot see errors to be corrected, Bush sees flawless policy-making. Where the Standard sees a stubborn, inept secretary of defense, Bush sees a legendary leader. If re-elected, Bush will be confirmed in all of these beliefs, employing the same strange logic that led Cheney to say that Ronald Reagan "proved deficits don't matter." If you agree with the president about all this, you have good reason to welcome his small, but real, lead in the polls. If not, then, well, not. The idea that he'll do something different in the future, though, is just wishful thinking.
Matthew Yglesias is a Prospect staff writer.
