Via Ross Douthat comes this Mark Danner piece based on a transcript of a meeting between in Crawford between President Bush and Spanish prime minister Jose Maria Aznar, on the eve of the Iraq war. Here's Danner:
There is difference between being sure and being right. Bush's conviction, here as elsewhere came not from an independent analysis of the facts—of the interests and intentions of the nations involved—but from the wellspring of faith. He has confused rhetoric however uplifting, and reality. Aznar, the sophisticated European, comments wryly on this. It is the most Jamesian moment in the playlet of Crawford; one can almost see the subtly arched eyebrowAznar: The only thing that worries me about you is your optimism.
Bush: I am an optimist, because I believe that I'm right. I'm at peace with myself. It's up to us to face a serious threat to peace.It is worrying, as Aznar remarks, to rely on optimism grounded only in belief. The Spaniard knows that gaining that second Security Council resolution, and thus the critical international legitimacy for the war, will be very hard; in many nations, launching a war against Iraq, particularly before the UN inspectors have finished their work, is deeply unpopular. Faith cannot replace facts, nor can a historic sense of mission. Both may be personally comforting—they plainly are to George W. Bush—but they don't obviate the need to know things.
Faith in our own good intentions and moral integrity as guarantor of a happy ending. That's America and Americans. When you lack a tragic sense as part of your national character, you end up bogged down in places like Iraq.
It is difficult to hold a tragic worldview without yielding to fatalism (i.e., the sense that no matter what you do, you can't change things, so you might as well not try). But it seems to me to be essential, for individuals and nations alike.
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Rod is smart to highlight this (again). Bush cannot distinguish, it seems, between the certainty of faith and the certainty of fact. If it's true for him, it's true, period, end of story.
Given his power, this is frightening. This "optimism" is related to the idea of faith creating a new reality that Ron Suskind found in the Bush administration in an important New York Times magazine article back in October, 2004. (Can't link here, sorry.)
The article stands up as well as anything ever written about Bush, and foreshadows a lot of the Republican doubts that have since begun to coalesce around this disaster-prone president.
Suskind foresaw quite precisely the way the Bush administration would work (or not) when its ideology was challenged by an inconvenient fact, be it misleading "confessions" from CIA torture victims, the destructive nature of climate change, rising oil prices, etc.
"This is one key feature of the faith-based presidency: open dialogue, based on facts, is not seen as something of inherent value. It may, in fact, create doubt, which undercuts faith. It could result in a loss of confidence in the decision-maker and, just as important, by the decision-maker. Nothing could be more vital, whether staying on message with the voters or the terrorists or a California congressman in a meeting about one of the world's most nagging problems. As Bush himself has said any number of times on the campaign trail, ''By remaining resolute and firm and strong, this world will be peaceful.''"
Faith in our own good intentions and moral integrity as guarantor of a happy ending. That's America and Americans. When you lack a tragic sense as part of your national character, you end up bogged down in places like Iraq.
Part of the whole unique experience of being Southern has seemed to this outsider (a decidedly non-Southern descendant of four Southern grandparents) to be exactly that Southerners (both white and black) do sometimes seem to have that tragic sense, at least to a degree, which ought to help them inhabit the real world (as opposed to us gnostic/chiliastic yankees). And maybe it does partly explain the overrepresentation of southerners among paleos. Yet it seems that over the last ~30 years or so the public face of the South has been positively ultramontane (compared to the nation as a whole) in its embrace of aggressive nationalism, rather more so than other equally "conservative" regions like the intermountain West.
Yes/no? If true - discuss.
But, Mr Dreher, if I feel it's right, it must be right!!!
Relativism gone very wrong.
there is a way to avoid yielding to fatalism. It's very simple. We KNOW we could change things, but we have no right to do so. We need to let other people sort out their own problems, even if it doesn't benefit our interests. Manifest destiny is dead, we don't have to go out and make the entire world in our image (which could be seen as Revelations coming true...the world having one government). No two nations or peoples will operate in exactly the same way, and forcing our model on others invariably leads to negative consequences (for them, and eventualy for us). I was against the Iraq war from the start because I knew that no matter how hard we try (tried) there is no way to reconcile the different factions there (it's been tried to little or no effect for 3000 or so years).
Ironic that Aznar should be so clear (and well-intentioned and CORRECT) to President Bush, only to lose his office for being so fuzzy (and, to his people, as transparently ill-intentioned as American liberals think of Bush) in letting people WRONGLY think ETA and not Al Qaeda committed the Madrid bombings.
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