The Man Who Isn't There
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Let me be very clear about this: It's not the label itself I object to; these were all bad regimes. It's the use of it. It raises the basic question of whether America should be the world's moral policeman, ridding the globe of bad guys who pose no imminent threat to us except in what they might do at some future time. In other words, preemptive war; as Shakespeare's Brutus said, in determining to join the assassination plot against a too-ambitious Julius Caesar, "Then, lest he may, prevent." But does brandishing your intentions in public create a safer world—or a more dangerous one? In the case of North Korea, it is likely that the "axis of evil" speech created exactly what we feared, spurring that country to resume its nuclear weapons program. The speech and the policy it produced reopened the political divisions of the 2000 election by forcing each of us to decide what kind of values we expect our country to uphold. I am 100 percent in favor of hunting down terrorists to the ends of the earth and bringing them to justice. But it's not justice if the government can hold suspects indefinitely without charging them. I know the counterargument, that the Constitution is not a suicide pact. But requiring the government to have some evidence against suspects to produce in court is not tantamount to suicide. And it doesn't necessarily advance the war on terrorism to wage war on spec against states; indeed, it may cause us to shift our focus from the greater danger to a lesser one.
These are truly momentous issues. The president did not seek them out; they were forced upon him by 9/11. It's hard to blame him for going to the utmost lengths to protect the nation; that's his sworn duty. What concerns me is whether we can trust the decision-making apparatus around him. In the governor's office, Bush had advisers and top aides who were totally loyal to him. In the White House, he has advisers and top aides who have a long history of intellectual and ideological loyalty to specific policy positions. This is not to say that they are disloyal, just that they think the way ideologues always think—that their interests and the nation's interests (and the president's) are one and the same. One day after 9/11, the National Security Council met to plan the response. According to Bush at War (which is based on interviews with the principles), one of the first comments was by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, asking why we shouldn't go after Iraq, as his chief deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, famously supported. Colin Powell warned that neither the coalition America was seeking nor the American people wanted a war against Iraq. At first, Woodward writes, Bush worried about diluting the mission against Al Qaeda, but the proponents were relentless—in particular, Cheney, who repeatedly said that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and ties to Al Qaeda, two assertions that remain unproved—and they must have known that the boss's proclivity for boldness would work in their favor. Once Bush decides to take a bite of the apple, it's going to be the biggest chunk he can sink his teeth into. The argument that the status quo in the Islamic world would not change unless America did something to change it would have appealed to him. Of all the reasons to oust Saddam, the boldest was to change the paradigm. I admire the play, and I hope it works, even as I doubt its likelihood of success and fear that it targeted a less dangerous enemy than Al Qaeda. Few things in international affairs are more risky than to view the world as you wish it to be, rather than as it is.
A COUPLE OF DAYS BEFORE CHRISTMAS, I went to Washington for an interview at the White House with a senior administration official, who imposed the condition of anonymity. My editor and I had talked by phone earlier in the day, and he had told me to stick to the big stuff. "If you bring up arsenic in drinking water, they'll laugh you out of the office," he said. The SAO and I exchanged pleasantries, and I mentioned that I had written only a couple of stories about Bush since he became president. "I know," the SAO said, tapping a red file folder resting on the table. It contained copies of what I had written: one pre-9/11 article expressing puzzlement over Bush's policies and another, from last fall, about Texas Supreme Court Justice Priscilla Owen and her nomination to the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. "You got it completely wrong," the SAO said. "But you didn't come here to talk about that." "That's okay," I said. "Let's talk about it." And the first thing the SAO brought up was . . . arsenic in drinking water: how they had no choice but to reexamine the scientific evidence or else the rule left for them by the Clinton administration would have been subject to a court challenge.
That's pretty much how the interview went. The SAO had plenty to say, but the old atmosphere, so impressive in my Texas interviews, of open and big-picture discussions was nowhere in evidence. This was all about staying on message—and the message was that the national media have consistently failed to report Bush's policies accurately. Earlier in the day, I had had lunch with Paul Begala, the Democratic consultant and co-host of CNN's Crossfire. He had told me that the Democrats felt lied to about Bush's education bill, which Bush did not fully fund, falling $15 billion short. The SAO's response to my mention of this widely reported issue was that the White House had increased education funding by 60 percent since 2000, the largest increase in history. I turned to Iraq: What about the slow pace of rebuilding? No such thing, was the answer—no food crisis, no breakdown in health care, electricity back to pre-war levels, no refugees.
I confess that this aggressive defense took me by surprise. Perhaps it shouldn't have. This White House is famous for its antipathy to the national media, and the president himself makes no secret that he neither reads nor watches the news. This goes back to the campaign; I remember one Bush aide telling me in 1999, as the media clamored to know Bush's stance on issues, that "we intend to run this campaign on our timetable, not the media's." Still, I was from Texas. They knew me. Didn't that make a difference? Well, those days are gone. When I got home that night, I told my wife about the interview and said, "I felt just like a member of the national media." She gave me her best you-idiot look and said, "You are a member of the national media."
The thing I most wanted to ask about was Bush's desire to change the culture of Washington and what had become of it. The SAO told me that the president never criticizes Democrats directly; he always says something like "some in Congress." The Democratic leadership, on the other hand, wants total war. The SAO told a story about a trade bill, giving more authority to the president, that a number of House Democrats had supported during the Clinton years but opposed when Bush wanted it. Bush met with the D's, but all but a handful rejected his overtures. One of the Democrats, the SAO said, complained that a Republican chairman had been mean to them, shutting them out of conference committees and heaping other indignities on them. The SAO presented this as a silly reason to be against a public policy issue, as if, What is the president supposed to do—call up the chairman and say, "Be nice to the Democrats?" In fact, if Bush is serious about changing the culture of Washington, I think that is exactly what he should do. "Look," he could say, "I'm trying to get reelected, trying to help us keep our majorities in Congress, trying to pass important legislation, trying to unite the country in the war on terrorism, and I don't need you guys screwing things up." But I don't think he's serious about it—not serious enough to do the hard stuff, like take on the petty princes in his own party.
I STARTED THIS ARTICLE BY SAYING that I never expected to know a president of the United States. The truth is, I don't know President Bush. The person I knew was Governor Bush. I really liked him. I still do. But I'm ambivalent about his alter ego. On the one hand, the issue that matters most to me is the safety of my family and my country, and I cannot imagine that anyone, Republican or Democrat, would be more resolute and vigilant than Bush; on the other, I disagree with so many things that he has done.
