A Classic Example of Self-Defeat
Note: I've decided to change my screen name to my real name, Jonathan Schwartz. Mainly, because the surname thing just isn't me. I prefer it if people know the real me. Also, I've long since started to feel that a screen that mixed Socrates and Decartes was a little on the presumptious side.
Cross-posted from Moral Questions Weblog.
Today, Ed Kilgor points out something I was wondering about myself.
One point it makes is a really interesting question: why didn't Bush appeal explicitly to anti-Iraq-war Americans to put aside their disagreements over his original decision to invade Iraq and focus on the broadly accepted negative consequences of abandoning the country to chaos? He could have quoted a long string of Democratic opponents to the original war resolution, including Howard Dean, who are on record as emphatically saying we can't accept defeat in Iraq now that we're there, rightly or wrongly. He could have helped marginalized the fixed-deadline advocates. He could have been a "uniter, not a divider." And he could have probably bumped up support for his current Iraq policies, not just for a moment but for a while, by decisively severing the link between support for past Bush policies and support for what he's doing now.
Instead, Bush strengthened the link between past, present and future Iraq policies by repeatedly returning to a rationale for the original decision to invade that, frankly, is losing credibility every day: it was all about 9/11. Yes, yes, I know, that was his strategy for deflecting criticism about Iraq in the 2004 campaign, but now Bush isn't trying to get re-elected; he's supposedly trying to avoid a nosedive in public support for what he's doing in Iraq today. And the fact that he still cannot let go of his dubious ex post facto rationalizations of the Iraq venture is a bad sign about what we can expect between now and the day he finally goes home to Crawford.
This is something I'll never understand about Bush. Why, when he has the oppurtunity to transend partisan politics does he refuse to do so? And why so gratuitously? We've seen this throughout his presidency. On virtually every front, even when it would have been much more politically expedient, he has elected to utilize methods that are as divisive as possible. Somehow, it has just never occurred to him that it might actually be worthwhile to act like a real President.
I have to admit, that as a true-blue Bush-hater, even I am growing a little tired of the whole game. I am really starting to long for a real head of state, someone who speaks not just for his party, but for his country as a whole. Someone who actually thinks that way.
At this point, I would even take it from Bush if he would give it to me. But he's not going to.
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