Sunday January 23, 2005
Here’s a long article about the Bush presidency from back in the heat of the ’04 election. It has a lot to say regarding his approach to governance — and why we’ll need to keep our eyes wide open for the next four years. It’s worth the time — very deliberative and balanced. (A tip of the hat to lirantha for the link.)
24 January 2005 at 12:23
Well I read the whole thing and disagree that it’s balanced. “They wanted action, and George W. Bush was ready, having never felt the reasonable hesitations that slowed more deliberative men, and many presidents, including his father.” This is pertaining to Bush’s approach to taking military action. The most “reasonable” hesitation has to be the loss of life of our soldiers, and my impression is that Bush cares deeply for them and has agonized a great deal over putting them in harm’s way. And we didn’t “rush” to war in Afghanistan or in Iraq. Iraq in particular, Bush waited until the last possible moment, in March of 2003, before making the final call to oust Saddam. What he knew, and what we would later as a nation come to understand, is that this was the last possible moment to really consider taking action in Iraq… anytime later the high temperatures combined with the heavy equipment our troops needed to carry would have made it too hard on the troops. And as for Afghanistan, I don’t think anyone would characterize FDR as not being deliberate enough after Pearl Harbor, for sensing that decisive action was needed, yada yada.
I think i got the jist of this point of view when i saw Fahrenheit 9/11, this is nothing new for me, but it could be for some i suppose.
25 January 2005 at 9:45
I disagree. The most “reasonable” hesitation will consider future impacts, not just immediate ones. I don’t think we had any business being in Iraq without having considered, for instance, just how on earth we were going to get out. There’s difficulties, in that not everyone likes the idea of democracy, especially one sponsored – enforced – by a country that has such a bad international image. Funny thing about democracies… if many people aren’t behind them, they tend not to work. In the U.S., we are part of a political and intellectual tradition stretching back to the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. It’s where we get all our funny ideas about natural and inalienable rights (religiously grounded in the New Testament’s proclamations of basic equality in Christ, I assume) and government responsibilities and so forth. The people of the Middle East have never had a similar home-grown movement. The basic mental groundwork and set of assumptions that make democracy possible simply are not widely present there; where they are, I’d say it’s safe to assume they’re imported from the West and therefore subject to suspicion. This is one of the considerations that should lead to reasonable hesitation.
Do I think the President made his decision carefully, agonizingly? Sure, I’ll give him that benefit of the doubt. But I have not seen evidence that he made it quite carefully enough – that he considered complications of situation beyond the need to act on what he saw as a moral issue. The article is balanced, I think, because it counts Bush’s conviction as a positive characteristic – it refrains from jumping to the conclusion that the “reality-based” mindset is the “right” way, as opposed to the simple moral mindset that Bush has, I think, repeatedly evidenced.