23 August, 2003
The Den of Forgetfulness

If Lyndon Johnson misrepresented the case for making war on North Vietnam, why did Congress pass the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution almost unanimously? If Richard Nixon was too crooked to be President, why did he get so many votes? If smoking is self-destructive, why do so many normal people take it up? Any such backward-hopping dance of persuasion would probably keep a letter to the editors of The Washington Post from being printed, but the editors' own epistles are another matter. Consider the editorial of August 10, 2003, entitled "Mr. Gore's Blurred View," which takes Al Gore to task for saying that President Bush has misled the American people on issues ranging from national security to the environment. The Post's rebuttal goes this way:

Mr. Gore believes, for example, that the Patriot Act represents 'a broad and extreme invasion of our privacy rights in the name of terrorism.' But then how to explain that 98 senators — including all four Democratic senators now running for president — voted for it? The president's economic and environmental policies represent an 'ideologically narrow agenda' serving only 'powerful and wealthy groups and individuals who manage to work their way into the inner circle.'

But then why do so many other people support those policies? Mr. Gore has an umbrella explanation, albeit one that many Americans might find a tad insulting: 'The administration has developed a highly effective propaganda machine to embed in the public mind mythologies . . . . '

Then again, many Americans and even their representatives in Congress may find it a tad flattering to be told that they're more than a match for those who control the intelligence-gathering and public-information machinery of the US Government, supported emotionally by elements of the mass media such as Rupert Murdoch's television and publishing empire (see "A Media Empire's Injustices" by Richard Cohen in The Washington Post, April 22, 2003).

The Post forgets how the Patriot Act was rushed through, and how much misdirection has clearly occurred in other matters. It's one thing for the President to advocate going to war on uncertain premises, and quite another to rig the premises themselves. It's one thing to take a skeptical stance on the subject of global warming, and quite another to expunge the subject from an official scientific report. The American people are not transcendental savants. Selectively screen their view of facts and theories, and you can make them reach false conclusions. Sell a tax cut by means of humbug economics and glib allusions to the pocketbooks of working families, and how are most people to know that their interests are under attack? Today, sound reasoning about environmental issues or economic policy or war is possible only for those who have come to distrust the President of the United States so much that they rely entirely on alternative sources of information. That's the point that Al Gore was making when he said, in his speech at New York University on August 7, that President Bush "has used tactics that deprived the American people of any opportunity to effectively subject his arguments to the kind of informed scrutiny that is essential in our system of checks and balances." The Washington Post scoffs at the idea.

Now, it's understood that the Post's chief intent is not to praise Mr. Bush but to bury Mr. Gore. That may explain the rashness of its reaction on one particular day against a protest which it has tolerated on other days, piecemeal, from a variety of prudent people: economists, scientists, intelligence analysts, career diplomats, politicians of both major parties, and journalists writing in its own pages. Still, it's a rash rashness. For the sake of shunning Al Gore, the Post has backed into the rhetorical opium den of George W. Bush's apologists. The sophistry of its editorial merges almost indistinguishably with that of an essay by Rich Lowry, editor of the conservative National Review, which appeared in the Post on the same day.

Mr. Lowry's main argument in his essay "The President Keeps His Distance" is, in essence, that liberals dislike George W. Bush because their knees jerk at the sound of his diction and at the cultural statement he makes when he "hooks his thumbs, cowboy-style, in his jeans." If only they could see beyond his style, Mr. Lowry argues, they'd find something to like. And just what would they find? Mr. Lowry points to the compassion that Mr. Bush evinces "when he is urging tolerance for Muslims. Or comforting the stricken. Or explaining his global AIDS initiative. Or advancing the idea of universal human rights." What Mr. Bush's critics must learn to do, it seems, is to split his veneer between the layers of manner and rhetoric, and pretend that the manner is style and the rhetoric is substance. In the same vein, but with greater insensitivity, Mr. Lowry writes, "When he says 'bring 'em on' of anti-American fighters in Iraq, his macho challenge makes his critics crazy. It advertises Bush's identification with what they consider Backwater America, the Bible-believing, pickup-driving, NASCAR-loving gun-toting part of the country."

For the editor of a magazine that prizes intellectual rigor, Mr. Lowry is remarkably content to fight straw men. The problem with Mr. Bush's notorious remark, "Bring 'em on," is not a question of style. To understand what the problem is, it's necessary only to consider that America's Commander-in-Chief is no Agamemnon or Alexander leading armies in battle, but an executive who sends others into battle from the security of a mansion far away. Imagine, then, how it must sound to people sweating and praying through tours of duty in Iraq, or to their relatives, when the President impetuously dares enemy guerrillas to do their worst. At the time of the Vietnam War, young George W. Bush apparently felt that there was no point in tempting fate by going over there when he could serve his country almost as well in the Texas Air National Guard. Venturing into the corners of foreign fields was for high-minded squares like Al Gore. But it's said that among those who do go to war, few enemies inspire more loathing than the comrade-in-arms who itches for action, not to mention the virginal civilian who wants to see heroes made. Whether Mr. Bush understands all that or not, a proper respect for the value of the lives being laid down at his command should have made him incapable of loose-lipped bravado. Since it didn't, here's a suggestion. He ought to cut short his "working vacation" down on the ranch and spend the summer in Iraq inspiring the troops with his toughness. He wouldn't have to do much, really: just walk the streets of Baghdad crying, "Bring 'em on!"

Together, the two pieces in The Washington Post give a pretty good reading of the spread of escapism in American political commentary today. For every conservative who would rather not be seen to endorse apocalyptic conservatism, there are two moderates who would rather not call it by that immoderate name and risk being dismissed as so many Jeremiahs. And so they make their way, in ones and twos, to the den of forgetfulness. There, where the smoke from each pipe loses itself in a common cloud, it's normal enough to assure one's neighbors that George W. Bush is not a puppet of the Religious Right, forgetting that that's immaterial if he's something even more dangerous: a self-contained believer with an infantile, egoistic conception of divine will. There, it's conventional to cherish up Mr. Bush's words about compassion or democracy or human rights, forgetting his demonstrated preference for useful authoritarian states, his almost palpable abhorrence of dissent, his ideological hostility to social welfare provisions, and his commitment to the concentration of wealth. The conservative frequenters of the den exhale delicate wisps of smoke tinged with blue in token of their disappointment (but bearable disappointment) at finding their President so very far gone in compassion and moderation. The moderates' smoke is rosy and circular, repeating that Mr. Bush can't be destroying democracy because the destruction of democracy is bad and Mr. Bush is not a bad man.

No, actually, he's not a bad man in the way that his harshest critics or his fondest apologists mean. And that recognition is the key to the innermost room of the den, where the degrading truth about President George W. Bush is kept. What's degrading about it is that it's largely an absurdity: a stupid, insouciantly destructive burlesque of national leadership. Its elements are naïve faith, fixed ideas, laziness, and — not least — a very clumsy way with words.

When Mr. Bush found himself compelled to comment on attacks against American troops in a supposedly conquered Iraq, he surely didn't mean to speak heartlessly or irresponsibly. Any politician would have liked to make a statement without a downside — the kind of thing most national leaders could say without much effort, something about our people in uniform being more than equal to any challenge — but he lacked the requisite command of language. It was all he could do to say, "Bring 'em on. We've got the force necessary to deal with the security situation" and "we've got plenty tough force there right now to make sure the situation is secure." The elder George Bush never ate his broccoli, and the son never gave his native language the attention it needed if he meant to lead millions of people and not merely pose as an iconic Regular Guy.

Mr. Bush's verbal vices are not a necessary consequence of his Texas upbringing, nor do they qualify him to be called "plain-spoken." Lyndon Johnson was plain-spoken. He delighted in using the Hill Country vernacular to crude effect, when it served his purposes. He was also capable of august dignity, Western style, without the aid of his speechwriters; and he always knew where his next word was coming from. His was the pungently articulate speech of a common man who had lived with other common men. George W. Bush's speech is a mess. When he tries to speak forcefully, the effect is wasteful and dangerous. The rest of the time he may say the opposite of what he means, or his shallow well of language may simply run dry and leave him unable to express any meaning at all. The worst part is that it doesn't seem to matter: his words are not letting down any substantial thoughts.

It's another convention of the den to point out, in Mr. Bush's defense, that intellectuals have not made especially effective Presidents — forgetting, here, that the issue is not the bookish quality of intellectuality, but mental curiosity, discipline, and energy. Most successful leaders do excel, for better or worse, at a practical kind of sustained thought. They're able and willing to think their way through a scheme to its likely outcome without either overlooking the details or getting bogged down in them. Mr. Bush seems at least unwilling, and probably disabled by the mental laziness of a lifetime. We hear that he likes to delegate the planning work to others while he concentrates on the big picture, but if that were true he should be able to explain the big picture. When his people came in with only a sketchy plan for the occupation and reformation of Iraq, his comprehensive view of that great geopolitical challenge should have revealed that much more was needed. The careless invasion of Iraq, the banished subject of environmental protection, the fiscal drive into darkness: all suggest an indolent non-thinker acting on fixed ideas and faith in pre-ordained success. Even the meaning of "success" may not be clear in Mr. Bush's mind.

This is the awful truth that will probably come out someday when the secretive and wanton Presidency of George W. Bush is past: not a tale of any special wickedness concealed from view, but of an emptiness where there ought to have been something, wicked or otherwise. For all the questions about lives destroyed and national interests sacrificed, the answers will turn out to be cruelly insipid.

The Nixon crowd had its tellers of horror stories about life on the inside. The Bush crowd, when it starts to disperse, is bound to yield horror stories of its own. We can be sure that there are people in the den of forgetfulness, too, who know the stories pretty well by now. What wry looks they must give each other between pipes.

NB: Before writing to report that Al Gore's record of service in Vietnam is fraudulent, please follow the link below. Mr. Gore was not an infantryman, but an Army reporter who often traveled with the 20th Engineers. Like non-combat specialists in Iraq, he was subject to the dangers of life in a war zone, and with the engineers he came under what he describes as harassment fire. He was in Vietnam for seven months: not a full year's tour of duty, but longer than American forces have been in Iraq at this writing. George W. Bush never went.

Urban Legends Reference Pages (Al Gore in Vietnam): http://www.snopes.com/military/goreviet.htm

•

6 June, 2003
Hitler Between Them

Who is Hitler? Hitler metamorphosed for our time, that is. If we sight Elvis, we'll know our man. But how can we know if we've sighted the animus of Hitlerian tyranny, or even whether we should believe such a thing possible? After the Bush Administration started promoting the idea of regime change in Iraq and the President took to speaking of an Axis of Evil, we often heard Saddam Hussein compared to Adolf Hitler. Meanwhile, the German newspaper Schwaebisches Tagblatt quoted Germany's Justice Minister as implying a similarity between Hitler and President Bush himself. The Minister had supposedly accused the President of trumping up a war with Iraq for domestic political reasons and added, "It's a method that is sometimes favoured. Hitler also did that" (translation: BBC). The Minister denied using those words, but the report outran the denial and the Minister had to resign. The White House denounced the reported remark as an outrageous insult to the President, while the Anti-Defamation League made the point that such a comparison "only serves to fuel the gross trivialization of World War II and the Holocaust." The likening of Saddam Hussein to Hitler invites the same objection, as the first President Bush found in 1990 when he had to retract a reference to Saddam as "Hitler revisited." Bad as Saddam was, Hitler was crucially worse.

It's safe to say that there was only one Adolf Hitler. No combination of character traits, personal experience, and events is ever repeated, and yet one feels that Hitler does exist around us in pieces; even in pieces large enough to worry about. Several of the more obvious pieces seem to have been present in the makeup of Saddam Hussein. Both he and Hitler, in childhood, lived under harshly oppressive fathers (a stepfather, in Saddam's case). Both had mentors who filled them with romantic notions of national grandeur. Each experienced a sense of personal humiliation on being rejected by an academic institution. Then there was the fairly typical dictator's career of violence and treachery leading to absolute power and a cult of personality, but with a peculiar element: evildoing as destiny. Where other dictators resort to cruelty as a means of holding power, it seemed that Saddam, like Hitler, consumed power to feed some flame of cruelty burning in himself. These two men are not the only hate-driven tyrants in history, but they do have that conspicuous trait in common. Both men used the power of the state to commit mass murder. It's hardly necessary to add that both were anti-Semites.

That still leaves some important pieces missing. It's not simply a matter of scale or result; not simply that Saddam Hussein's victims were fewer than Adolf Hitler's or that his territorial ambitions came to nothing. A comparison of the two tyrants only heightens the feeling that some of the most dangerous pieces of Hitler remain unaccounted for. If they're nowhere to be found in today's world, all well and good. But what makes them dangerous is their transparency to the moral optics of many normal people: a quality that contributes to that deadening and ultimately damning effect which Hannah Arendt called the banality of evil.

Let's imagine a political leader, one not at all like Saddam Hussein, who has entered office through the democratic process — who has, roughly speaking, won an election — and who presides over an industrialized nation with a well-educated citizenry, a nation renowned for its technological prowess and its cultural refinement. Germany was such a nation when it put Hitler in power. The United States, apart from lacking cultural refinement or a well-educated citizenry, is such a nation today. Circumstances like these tend to defeat the faculty of moral judgement. Surely a modern, politically advanced nation wouldn't give itself over to barbaric tyranny? Never having followed a wantonly destructive leader before, can it really be doing so now? Unthinkable. A country with the industrial resources and technical expertise of Germany in those days or of the United States today could possess a nearly unstoppable war machine. Ruled by a reckless, insensitive egomaniac with no qualms about expending human lives, that country would bring great misery to the world. But never fear: the political works of an enlightened people will always embody humanity and wisdom, won't they? And we're an enlightened people, aren't we? By thus working backward through conclusions and premises, a nation can teach itself to believe that ominous developments in its political life are not really so very bad.

Confronted with the accomplished fact of a radical faction's rise to power, even conscientious journalists may take a second look and conclude that these are essentially reasonable people. Then the journalists consult conscientious scholars who've also taken a second look, and hear it confirmed: these are, at bottom, reasonable people. After all, the radical pegs have fitted themselves into the holes of a perfectly respectable political system. The system is bound to bring out the reasonableness in them.

Next, war comes — not unbidden — and duty calls. If it's the duty of youth to fight, then it's the duty of all others to back up the boys and girls overseas by supporting their commander-in-chief. If it seems that everybody's sense of duty is being manipulated, then there must be a good reason. If so many normal people are going along with the official rationale for war abroad and the infringement of civil liberties at home, then going along must be the normal thing to do. Desperate measures for desperate times, and all that.

Hitler probably never theorized the banality of evil as Arendt did, but he understood how a society's more thoughtful people can be swept along in a crowd of less thoughtful ones and gradually taught to think less themselves. The staging of his public moments, expertly conveyed through the mass medium of film, had an intoxicating effect. As Joachim C. Fest illustrates in his incisive documentary Hitler: a Career (1977), Hitler liked to give people the thrill of seeing him arrive by air, descending from the sky in a shining silver plane like some kind of god. Hypnotic torch-lit rallies overwhelmed even those too sophisticated to be dazzled by an airplane. And images of apple-cheeked youths happily donning uniforms to serve their country made Hitler's dominion seem almost irreproachable. The title of Leni Riefenstahl's propaganda masterpiece, The Triumph of Will, makes a fitting epitaph for a society in which highly competent minds with a certain degree of media literacy were conquered by a propaganda machine astutely tuned to that degree, which tempted them with aesthetic pleasure and emotional indulgence till they didn't mind being mere receptacles for expressions of one man's will. His will became their will, the national will, and after that there was no pit into which they wouldn't follow him.

The propaganda machine of George W. Bush, too, makes unusually heavy use of images to override thought with visceral persuasion. Since Mr. Bush's thrilling descent from the sky to the flight deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, media critics have been remarking how carefully his public appearances are staged, with the President himself always heroically lighted against some inspiring backdrop. The Bush Administration is not the first to use techniques of suggestion. The techniques themselves don't necessarily do any harm, but they will do harm if used to exalt a mean and overbearing ego ("When I say something, we actually go do it," declared Mr. Bush the other day). Even without sound, the state of the President's ego is clearly visible in one of his more frequent moments, the arrival by helicopter on the White House lawn. Other Presidents, after they alighted, would generally stroll along in a relaxed manner almost like hosts at a garden party. They'd chat with aides or pet the dog as they went. They looked comfortable and calmly self-confident, glad to get home, ready for a shower and a bite to eat. Altogether reassuring. But this President struts pugnaciously, practically snubbing his people when they approach him, jabbing his forefingers this way and that as if deploying imaginary troops. He does not look calmly self-confident, but grimly threatening. And the sunlight doesn't seem to agree with him. He makes a bee-line for the building about as fast as he can go without breaking into a run. War councils await, no doubt.

Then there's the matter of lies. Hitler exploited the principle of the Big Lie, which he had picked up from the Marxist rhetoric that had infuriated him in the aftermath of World War I. A true connoisseur of lies was Hitler. He understood that the size of a lie contributed to its credibility because, as he explains in Mein Kampf, most people are only up to furtive lying on a modest scale and therefore fail to comprehend audacious lying on a grand scale.

George W. Bush, to be sure, doesn't exploit the Big Lie of Adolf Hitler. It's hard at first to find just the right name for his kind of fabrication. There's a temptation to call it the Routine Lie, considering how readily he says things for effect regardless of their truth or falsehood, but that term suggests nothing more than the kind of lie that's used by politicians generally, the common brick in the political road to perdition. It's not that. Mr. Bush and his associates seem to have grasped a phenomenon at the theoretical level and put it to work in a systematic way, as Hitler did. It goes like this: Most people today reside partially in a media community that exists in parallel with the real community of personal experience. They don't confuse the two, as some media critics have supposed; on the contrary, they let the two remain strangely separate. In reality truth is established by some kind of process, investigative or constructive, that requires factual, logical, or moral integrity. In the mass media it's established by a narrative process, and what is required is emotional or aesthetic integrity. For a town meeting to be satisfactory, the talk has to make sense; but in a President's appeal to the nation, conveyed by television, the talk may be incoherent or disingenuous and yet satisfy many people if the scene as a whole advances an agreeable story.

The story that most Americans want spun for them now is one in which the United States, besieged by terrorists, buckles on its six-shooters and fights back. There's a period of dramatic tension while the Secretary of State is seen to be a reluctant gunslinger symbolizing Americans' essentially peace-loving nature. The President, however, believes that a man's got to do what he's got to do, which is another good trait. Then a lot of foreigners start saying that America's wrong. In that case, there has to be a war: they can't talk that way about America. Sure enough, the Secretary of State walks into the United Nations and proves that America will be right if it attacks Iraq. Legions of the faint-hearted fill the streets of the world to protest, while America carries on with a few stalwart allies. Some good kids die (but not you or I), the tyrant's statue falls, and the liberated people celebrate. The end. Epilogue: Henceforth, this President is not to be doubted. Sure, he's a rich man with a big ranch of his own, but so was Gene Autry. Now everybody stop carping about his lack of a plan for securing Iraq, his perverse assault on the natural environment, his plot to cause an economic train wreck for the benefit of the rich, and all those other unhappy unending subjects. Do you want to spoil the story?

If people found themselves in a town meeting with George W. Bush, they might suddenly feel like putting some hard questions to him. But for nearly all Americans the President of the United States exists only in the mass media, where it's the narrative that matters. His propaganda specialists understand that this allows them to overshadow the truth of reality with an illusory media truth. Their kind of fabrication could go by various names, such as the Big Lie in Little Pieces or the Cheesy Screenplay Lie, but to keep this concept from being lost to history (till one of them writes a book) let's give it a more dignified name: the Parallel Lie. They calculate that by keeping many Americans tuned to an engrossing and gratifying media narrative, a President can make the nation sleep-walk through reality; follow him unthinking down his autocratically chosen road, at least until the way back is lost in darkness.

To some hermit who had just wandered out of the mountains understanding nothing but reality, it would be an astonishing spectacle: millions of people gladly following an elitist leader, the favorite of sleek industrialists, who throws sops of rhetoric and stirring images to ordinary citizens while casually wasting their lives on his geopolitical schemes. That hermit might well imagine that he had stumbled upon some missing pieces of Hitler.

•

19 May, 2003
Rallying Round the Mechanism

Speaking for Hollywood, Humphrey Bogart once said of fellow actor Spencer Tracy, "Spence is the best we have, because you don't see the mechanism at work." Nobody speaking for Washington could say the same of George W. Bush or the people who manage his political fortunes. Mr. Bush's chief handler, Karl Rove, is a man who studies the annals of politics to see how things were managed before and then plans the most favorable track conditions for his horse. His horse is surely equal to any horse in breeding and spirit, and intelligence, but he lacks the great heart of a champion, not to mention the legs. Better put him on rails and run him around the track by means of the surest possible mechanism. In the annals of American politics, no mechanism has been surer than war.

It may be only natural that wartime tends to become a time of national solidarity. It's not a peculiarly American phenomenon. But in the United States, especially since the outbreak of World War II, wartime national solidarity has expressed itself as broad support for the incumbent President. Franklin D. Roosevelt's domestic policies made him both the most loved and the most hated President of the twentieth century, but war made him one of the world's three big Good Guys along with Churchill and, er, Stalin. In the election of 1944, it made him the horse that one does not change in midstream.

The Vietnam War was more complicated, but it was not the exception that it may seem in distant retrospect. Certainly the war brought Lyndon Johnson down. It was bound to bring that President down because it was especially withheld from him as a source of support and therefore could only work against him. The main reason was not that he was disliked for being unscrupulous; lack of scruples is something that people love to condemn in politicians without actually punishing it. It was that many liberal Democrats had been demoralized by the assassination of John F. Kennedy, if not positively disgusted to see the Presidency pass thereby from the hands of a suave Northern elitist liberal to those of a crude Southern populist liberal and an erstwhile antagonist of their favorite. It's hard to believe that Kennedy, had he lived, would have seen his Presidency damaged as decisively as Johnson's was by the Vietnam War: a war to which Kennedy had committed the country and for which his brother Robert, as Attorney General, had toured the world drumming up support. He at least would not have had that same brother dogging his footsteps as a charismatic peace candidate, and it's all but impossible to imagine America's college-bred youth chanting, "JFK, JFK, how many kids did you kill today?" in front of the White House. Long before 1968, the people who would normally have led the wartime rallying-round for Lyndon Johnson, a liberal Democrat, were instead looking ahead to a post-Johnson renewal. Yes, he was brought down by opposition to the war, but the opposition was more intensive than extensive. It's one of the little-remembered facts of that era that public opinion polls in the US continued to show majority support for successive Presidents' commitment to military involvement in Southeast Asia until the last American troops were removed. Not long afterward, when Gerald Ford ordered a military operation against Cambodia in response to the seizure of the American freighter Mayaguez, his critics thought it possible that he was motivated by a desire to raise his standing in the opinion polls. Such is the reliability of armed conflict as a booster of Presidents.

The salient point in all this for a student of American political forces is not that war's rallying effect has its limits, but that even a war of doubtful necessity may go badly for quite a long time before those limits are reached, if only the President can count on a normally disciplined party. When most people believe that war is necessary, it makes the President practically unassailable. Edward R. Murrow, in his audio documentary I Can Hear It Now, describes the reception that Roosevelt received in the US Capitol after the attack on Pearl Harbor:

... a joint session of Senators and Representatives, many of them bitter foes of the man on the rostrum, cheer him madly because, like most Americans, they are angry, frightened, and confused — and he is the President of the United States.

These lessons won't be lost on any President, but just how much do they mean to George W. Bush and his advisors? His determination to have a war in Iraq has been explained in so many different ways, before and during and after the fact, by insiders and by outsiders, by those who really want to explain it and by those who want to give it a certain appearance, that the subject has become a hall of mirrors. He was, or he wasn't, setting out to finish what his father had started. His main concern was, or wasn't, the danger that Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction. His aim was, or wasn't, regime change in Iraq. His policy was, or wasn't, driven by (1) a new fear of terrorism or (2) associates who had personally declared war on Saddam Hussein even before taking office or (3) an extemporaneous impulse to fight a winnable war against an enemy with a known address. And the Bush Administration was, or wasn't, every bit as cynical as it seemed: cynical enough to go to war for political gain.

Most commentators seem inclined to give the President of the United States the benefit of the doubt on that last point, especially now that Iraq has become hallowed ground for the armed forces of the Coalition. It's one thing to say that a President is about to risk human lives for his own political benefit, and quite another to say that he has already shed blood from such a base motive. In view of the other things that must have been on any President's mind since September, 2001, it would indeed be perverse to believe that this President had been motivated only by the polls. Still, it would take a romantic faith in the ennobling properties of White House air to believe that neither he nor his advisors had considered that factor at all. This is an Administration in which, according to a former insider such as John J. DiIulio, Jr., "What you've got is everything — and I mean everything — being run by the political arm." On the anniversary of Al Qaeda's attacks on New York and Washington, Elisabeth Bumiller and David E. Sanger of The New York Times remarked that "wartime presidency" had become "a phrase that Mr. Bush's aides now often toss around casually, even though it seems jarring to many Americans who see the country in a struggle with terrorists, but not a global all-out war."

If George W. Bush had a single conscious motive or rationale for sending Americans to war in Iraq, it probably was not a base one. He probably would not have allowed himself such a motive, consciously. But what about the motive for his more general will to establish himself as a wartime President?

Mr. Bush himself, and not only his staff, began soon after the September 11 attacks to talk as if an open-ended age of war had begun. Before the attacks he had been a common object of ridicule for his ignorance, his clumsy way of talking, his lack of focus and careless detachment (remember that month-long vacation in the summer of 2001?), and his dubious legitimacy as President of the United States. He'd had little to recommend him as a leader except to those who wished to see mediocrity vindicated. Then came the national crisis, and a wave of patriotism lifted his boat high above the rocks of normal consequences for a mediocre President. How could he help but wish to ride the wave as far as possible? It's an understandable impulse, but one that has to be resisted. If the President won't resist the impulse, the American people have to resist the President. George W. Bush has shown no sign of resisting the impulse since his first chance to preside over a nation unified, or psychologically controlled, by patriotism and anxiety.

September 11 did require a response. The question is how to tell a proper response from an improper and self-serving one, and the answer lies in the pattern of things done and things left undone. Ever since 2001 people have been pointing out the vulnerability of America's seaports, but Mr. Bush has made little effort to secure them. That effort, however important to the nation, would be inefficient as a way of rallying support for the President. The ultimate value of victory in Afghanistan depends on helping rebuild the country so that a benign regime can take root, but Mr. Bush lost interest in Afghanistan when his moment of triumph had passed. The attacks of 2001 announced their perpetrators' intent to fight the advance of modern secular civilization, but Mr. Bush has done the opposite of reaffirming America's dedication to the principles of liberty and justice that define that civilization. Such a response would have involved declining any special powers to deprive Americans of their freedoms and legal rights or to wage war without the express consent of Congress. It would have involved allowing a full test of the President's ability to lead a nation of the brave and the free. However, that's among the things not done. The things done fall into four categories:

1. Gaining extraordinary powers for the Chief Executive and his Attorney General.

2. Waging war and establishing premises for war.

3. Fostering a sense of domestic crisis, and giving an impression of crisis management, by means of institutionalized terror alerts and conspicuous law-enforcement activity.

4. Making it taboo in such extraordinary, war-torn, crisis-ridden times to criticize the Administration.

The classic definition of chutzpa is an anecdote in which a man murders both his parents and then, at his trial, pleads for leniency on the grounds that he's an orphan. A good topical variation would be the one about the President who contrives to lead America to war and then stigmatizes anyone who would challenge a President's leadership while American troops are in harm's way. Talk about human shields.

Underlying the political phenomenon of rallying around Presidents in wartime, there has usually been an assumption that the President was not going out of his way to bring on a war. The enemy in question had attacked American interests or had committed some act of aggression somewhere that defied the United States to ignore it. Whatever doubt there may have been about the rightness of going to war, it did not seem that the establishment of a wartime Presidency was central to the Administration's political strategy. Now it does. The President may be less to blame than his advisors, since he's probably less alive to his need for war points in the opinion polls. But if so, he's apparently not above making their strategy his own. He did understand his need to gull the American public by misrepresenting his reason for sending Americans off to Iraq to kill and die. His secrecy in all things, not only his war policy, shows a lack of genuine confidence in his own ability to lead a democracy. Self-confident leaders don't shrink from the public eye. They don't abhor press conferences or face-to-face meetings with the leaders of other countries. They don't avoid the necessity of organizing and explaining their thoughts, and then standing by their explanation.

George W. Bush is a man desperately in need of compensation for his deficiencies as a leader. He's really no leader at all, but only a headstrong individual who aims to have his way without leading. His publicists have put out a line about his having been transformed by September 11, but his detachment and lack of focus really haven't changed. He's not even focused on fighting terrorism as most leaders would be. After all, he wages war in Afghanistan and then walks away, leaving the country's friendly new government without the vital economic support that he had promised. He starts a war in Iraq, and toward the end it becomes public knowledge that neither he nor his staff had given much thought to what would become of that country afterward. Now Iraq is in a state of near-anarchy, Shiite holy men are winning hearts and minds while secular democratic nation-building goes nowhere, and the Bush Administration has just made it known that Iraqi self-government is not coming soon, after all. Mr. Bush once said that he thought God had wanted him to run for President. He must have thought God's will was all it took to be a competent leader, because his behavior in every field from fiscal policy to international affairs shows a clear tendency to smash what exists and then wait for Providence to make something out of the pieces. He lacks the mental discipline to think his way past the bold-stroke phase of a project.

Mr. Bush needs his secrecy, his extraordinary powers, his Karl Rove, and his war points as no President has needed such an array of equalizers in modern times. At present, many Americans seem content to give him the war points regardless of the news from Iraq or even the news from inside his own government. US specialists in ferreting out weapons of mass destruction have given up trying to find any in Iraq. Giving up made sense when official sources had recently explained to ABC News, "the administration emphasized the danger of Saddam's weapons to gain the legal justification for war from the United Nations and to stress the danger at home to Americans," while the real reason for the war was that the Bush Administration wanted to be seen doing something about terrorism. "We were not lying," ABC quotes an official as saying. "But it was just a matter of emphasis." Still, the latest opinion polls show that most Americans don't mind the deception and do continue to give their deceiver a high approval rating. It's too early to say whether they mind the consequences of carelessly throwing Iraq wide open to the intrigues of Arabs, Persians, and Turks: all past masters of an ancient power game that the Bushes and Bremers of the world — put together — have only studied at second hand. Well, it's an unparalleled chance to witness the will of God.

For now, the mechanism of wartime support for the President is working smoothly and the horse is zipping around the track like a winner. Those who think he'll go down in history as a winner are probably wrong. Others may hope to see the mechanism break up in a sudden shower of springs and gears, but that's as reckless an impulse as any of George W. Bush's. Let's hope instead that millions of American voters will firmly pull those levers that can bring the mechanical Man o' War to a safe stop.

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