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Neocon Nuttery See other Neocon Nuttery Articles Title: Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W Bush by Robert Draper Mens sana in corpore sano is a fatuous tag for a political leader to adopt as a guiding principle. Some of the greatest in history have been physical wrecks. The delusion that pursuing fitness to the point of obsession is likely to make one a better president or prime minister would be risible if it were not now so widespread. Even Vladimir Putin no longer wears a shirt for photocalls. If George W Bush spent a fraction of the hours that he devotes to speed-cycling listening to wise counsellors, his presidency might not be ending in a shambles. Robert Draper describes the president on a morning run, two days after being reinaugurated in January 2005: “A thousand calories in 80 minutes. . . that was Bush’s crazed baseline .. . It was about more than making girlymen out of two Secret Service agents, two White House photographers, and a media guru. It was about more than holding his own against arctic conditions, beating the damn snow – that was classic Bush, upping the ante wherever possible. But it didn’t account for the frenzy of his pace. This was about release.” If Bush’s administration has been crippled by his rash choice of political instruments – Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz – he has also picked the wrong chroniclers. Bob Woodward’s privileged access to the White House resulted in three volumes that might collectively be dubbed Decline and Fall. Next up, Bush invites Draper, a correspondent for GQ magazine, to share a nonfat hot dog and gives him two long interviews, which have contributed to this profoundly unflattering study of this presidency. He trusted the guy, it seems, because he is a fellow Texan. But Draper is a million miles from the kind of Texan who shares Bush’s size in cowboy boots. Every page of the book is shot through with contempt. “The fundamental question,” Bush told the writer earlier this year, “is: is the world better off as a result of your leadership?” To an awesome degree, the president’s own self-belief remains undented. The imbecile grin reflects a man who has built a career on personal buoyancy that would be world-beating if translated into the manufacture of life rafts. He doubts nothing. He is “dead certain”. Draper, on the other hand, perceives a shallow, unreflective sunshine patriot; defiantly proud of his Texas machismo; wholly uninterested in learning from experience: “an idealist, a promulgator of grand, risky visions .. . [who] evinced an almost petulant heedlessness to the outside world”. In his youth, Bush made some easy money in the oil business, but at 29 still looked like a lazy drifter. “Do you make any money?” a friend asked him. George W shrugged: “I had a pretty good week last week. Made a hundred bucks in a poker game.” But he liked people, and people liked him. A rancher told a mutual friend: “George was at our house. He’s the nicest fella! I wonder if he’d like to meet our daughter?” His political ambition was slow to ignite, but when it caught, burned furiously. His skill as a flesh-presser, matched by focus, optimism and peerless family political connections, eventually carried him to the White House. On the stump in 2000, he showed none of the messianic fervour that came later. Debating with Al Gore on October 11, he rebuked the vice-president’s apparent enthusiasm for American interventions abroad: “Now, we trust freedom. We know freedom is a powerful . . .powerful force much bigger than the United States of America .. . but I think the United States must be humble and must be proud and confident of our values, but humble in how we treat nations that are figuring out how to chart their own course.” The attack on the Twin Towers, eight months into his first term, changed everything. Bush spent many of the first hours of global trauma at Barksdale Air Force Base, Louisiana. When Air Force One landed, an armoured vehicle raced the president and his chief of staff at manic speed towards a bunker, past a line of bomb-laden B52s. “Slow down!” Bush shouted at the driver. Draper writes: “Both he and [Karl] Rove were seized by the thought that this day would culminate in the president’s crashing into his own nuclear arsenal.” In the weeks that followed, the author describes the transformation that overtook his man: “After 9/11, George W Bush filled the arena. All the man’s undersized, self-conscious ways – the smirk, the reedy defensiveness, the exaggerated imperiousness of his executive stroll – had collapsed into this new persona, which seemed in fact not to be a persona but instead a natural habitat, waiting for his ownership all this time. He was a war president now, and perfectly at ease with the role.” In the six years since, Bush has addressed the political, cultural and criminal challenge posed by Al-Qaeda overwhelmingly by military means. This has been at the root of his huge failure. Draper describes how the president deluded the American people, and probably also himself, into acknowledging an entirely fictional link between Saddam’s Iraq and the attack on the Twin Towers. Once he had asserted the false proposition, “unreflective self-certainty” made it impossible for him to pull back. The book has a good description of Bush haranguing the United Nations on September 12, 2002, telling delegates: “You can either be the UN or the League of Nations. Take your pick. And we want you to be a strong United Nations” – which meant backing his invasion of Iraq. Draper writes: “Bush thought he was doing the UN a favour by shaming it. It didn’t occur to him. . . that this might not feel like a favour – a mighty, fabulously privileged country telling lowly nations how and when they must act. It didn’t occur to him that though [these nations] bore no love for Saddam Hussein, in many ways they identified more with him than with this all-powerful man standing behind the podium.” Draper is a first-class reporter. His book is full of good gossip and sharp insights, though he tells us nothing significantly new about Bush or his presidency. I would like to have learnt more about the special relationship between Bush and God, and about the role of Dick Cheney, the most powerful and disastrous vice-president in history. Draper is no admirer of Condoleezza Rice, whose intellect is alleged to have exercised a moderating influence. Clever Condi may be, but history will allot her a manly portion of blame for all that has happened, and not happened, in Iraq. Draper’s portrait of White House life will be familiar to any fan of The West Wing. Bush’s staff are called Bartlett, Josh, Karl or Darby. It defies sitcom scripting to learn that each morning, chief of staff Josh Bolten tells Bush: “Thank you for the privilege of serving today.” With minions like that, a president has no need of foes. The book notes the naivety of the neo-conservatives’ enthusiasm for promoting democracy in the Middle East, heedless of the sort of regimes popular consent is likely to produce there, with Hamas offering an early sample. Draper does not, however, reflect on the lessons to be learnt for the greatest democracy of all from the election and reelection of such a catastrophic leader as George Bush. There is every likelihood that the system will in future produce more tenants of the White House just like him: simple, folksy, sublimely ignorant of the outside world, unwilling to learn and possessed of enormous power. Rather than encourage the Saudis to dump their kings and start electing governments, Americans might conclude from the Bush experience, so caustically portrayed here, that a hereditary monarch, or a president chosen in a raffle, could rule their country more intelligently.
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