Throwing the Books at Them: Kakutani Does Bush

If there’s ever been any doubt that we’re being led by a junta of amateurs who confuse rashness with courage and hubris with gutsiness, the books written over the last four years by administration insiders and outsiders, by reporters, by ideologues and by reclining analysts, by detractors and supporters of the administration, should have been putting those doubts to rest. If it’s not Fred Barnes, an administration courtesan, admiring in Rebel-in-Chief how Bush “operates in Washington like the head of a small occupying army of insurgents” (is that really a wise simile when we’re mired in Iraqi time as it is?) or as a visionary who loves to “overturn major policies with scarcely a second thought,” it’s his former speechwriter David Frum boasting that Bush “discarded thirty-five years of American policy in the Middle East and repudiated the foreign policies of at least six of the previous seven U.S. presidents.” No argument about the facts. But look at the results. The world is in shambles, the Middle East is either in flames or enflamed with hatred for all things American—draining the attention of Arab and Muslim populations from the repressive and backward regimes, where it ought to be, and redirecting it westward. It’s the mark of a good leader to detect a region’s latent energies, at least those that don’t have to do with fossil fuels, and direct them toward the right, hopefully progressive goal. Bush claimed to be doing just that by aiming, as he said in his second inaugural, for a sweep of Arab and Muslim regression in favor of liberty and democracy. Words. Just words. His method achieved the opposite result—in Egypt, in Lebanon, in Syria, in Saudi Arabia, it’s the same old faces, the same old games. In Iraq and Iran, new faces, to be sure, but also more, not less lethally devoted to conflict, revenge, old-style repression. That’s what you get when you get a bunch of gut-worshipping amateurs dismissing anything deliberate, any constructive debate or dissent, ridiculing the slow-moving analyses that prepare such a thing as, say, an invasion, the occupation of a California-size nation, the re-acculturation of an entire people to less tyrannical modes. Read the rest...