Bush's Rules of the Game

Bush's London press conference, June 16, 2008:

Q: "Mr. President, in his last major speech, Tony Blair said on Iraq, 'Hand on heart, I did what I thought was right. But if I got it wrong, I'm sorry.' Is it possible you got it wrong? Would you share at this point those slightly more reflective sentiments? And in particular, should you, in retrospect, perhaps have concentrated a little more on Afghanistan?"

A: (President Bush): "History will judge the tactics. History will judge whether or not, you know, more troops were needed earlier, troops could have been positioned here better or not. Removing Saddam Hussein was not wrong. It was the right thing to do."

From numerous accounts I have read of Bush's early life, he had the disconcerting habit of changing the rules of contests as he went. If the basketball game was supposed to end at 20 points, he demanded his opponent play to 30 if he was behind when the game was over. A baseball game that was supposed to end in 9 innings would extend as far as Bush needed to catch up, or if that didn't happen, until the other players simply quit out of boredom or disgust. Many of his boyhood friends attested to this quality. He had to win, perhaps one of the earlier signs of serious emotional insecurity.

The boy is father to the man. Now that it is 2008, and we have been in Iraq more than five years after Bush himself said the game was over, that the mission had been accomplished, Bush has changed all of the rules of a game once again. If we can dimly recall, the only rationale that Bush really sold the American people in the run-up to the Iraq war was the defense of the United States. In point of fact, this is the only principle under international law or the Charter of the United Nations which would permit an attack on a sovereign nation. Bush called it "preemptive defense." Saddam's advanced nuclear program would soon announce itself over America in the form of a mushroom cloud. Saddam was going to run a Big Box store for terrorists called "Anthrax, Nerve Gas & Beyond." We were in grave peril, in danger so great that the negative findings by Hans Blix and the UN inspectors were clearly meaningless, the result simply of Saddam's treachery; the inspectors needed to go home so the real inspection by the Third Army Division could begin.

This was the reason that Bush gave for removing Saddam from power in Iraq. The invasion of Iraq was not undertaken as a social studies experiment in spreading democracy in the Middle East.

From the same press conference, here is Bush's snide rejoinder to the naive who believe that democracy cannot flourish in Iraq:

"Now, there are many doubters. I understand that, because there is some who say that perhaps freedom is not universal. Maybe it's only Western people that can self-govern. Maybe it's only, you know, white-guy Methodists who are capable of self government. I reject that notion. I think that's the ultimate form of political elitism."

Trying to ignore the awful grammar for a moment, and concentrating on the "substance:" no one is really saying anything of the kind; however, you can see the completion of the rules-changing trick in his comment. Bush now has set up a game in which the winner will be decided based on who's right about the following propositions:

Bush's Argument: I believe that it's good to overthrow Saddam Hussein, although many others think it's not a good idea. Also, I believe that Arabs can govern themselves in a democracy even if they're not white-guy Methodists, unlike there is some people who aren't smart like me who doesn't believe that. Also, if we said the war might cost $2 billion, we would be welcomed as liberators and the whole thing would be over fast, which we did, we now need the judgment of "history" to tell us whether we've made any tactical errors.

Bush's Straw Man: We think Saddam is a good guy, and it's better that he remain tyrannically in power, oppressing, torturing and gassing his own people. Also, we don't think Arabs can have a democracy, because we're stupid.

Well, the results are in, and Bush has won the game, except for the parts where it's too soon to call, because history can't be written yet. Not surprising, because only Bush was smart enough to set it up so he couldn't lose. Unless, of course, you're like one of those annoying friends of George the Boy, down in Midland, who's ahead 6-3 in the tennis set he just won from Jr., only to learn that he must play on and win 8 games, or 12 or 327, or whatever number Bush needs to come out ahead. In which case you might point out:

There are many tyrants in the world, many despotic governments. North Korea, Myanmar, Saudi Arabia, the People's Republic of China. It would be "good" to get rid of all of them. It would be the "right thing" to do. No doubt the homo sapiens living in all of these countries could respond to the idea of self-rule in one form or another, Methodist or not. But the United States cannot undertake wars of invasion against all of these countries, and as the Iraq war has conclusively shown, against even one such country, unless we essentially have no choice. It's way too expensive, it's too destructive, we don't have the resources, we have too many pressing needs of our own, and it doesn't even work. If Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize winning economist from Columbia, is mostly right and this war will eventually cost $2 to 3 trillion, and if the military has been severely damaged, and if we have in fact killed 4,000 + American soldiers, and mutilated another 30,000, and killed somewhere between 200,000 and 1,000,000 Iraqi citizens, and blown the country apart, then it's obvious that this colossal blunder needs to be one of a kind. We need to admit it was a huge mistake and cut our losses.

He'll never see it that way. It's getting dark out, we're hungry, we've been having these dumb arguments for more than seven years, and we're just worn out by a Man-Boy who cannot admit the game is over and he lost. So okay, George, you win. Now please take your ball and go home.