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“It Seems a Age”
 Hurricane
Katrina’s devastation of New
Orleans is the second great event of George W. Bush’s presidency. In
contrast to the first, it’s one he can’t capitalize on.  He can only try to defer
its cost. But he may figure that that’s the next best thing.
Four years ago, President Bush
could use the profound shock and horror of the 9/11 attacks to mount his
almost unopposed and unspecified “war on terror.” Only four
years ago, but, as Mr. Bumble in Oliver Twist, says of his marriage after
just two months, “It seems a age.”
It would be bad enough for Bush if
the war had merely been discredited; but something that may be even worse
has happened. It has gone out of fashion.
Oh, the war still has its defenders,
in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post,
the Washington Times, The Weekly Standard,
and elsewhere, but they are forlorn. Today they are talking to themselves,
like old men recalling their glory days in another era after the rest of the
world has moved on.
Even at that, their tone has
changed. They no longer try to persuade us that Saddam Hussein ever posed
a fearful threat to the West, with a terrible arsenal, maybe a nuclear one; or
that his fall — “regime change,” as the hawks eagerly
called it, smacking their lips at the prospect — would usher in a new
rage for Western-style democracy in the entire Middle East.
Can anyone even remember the
last time Dick Cheney used the word nuclear, or Condoleezza Rice
warned that the smoking gun might be a mushroom cloud, or any of that
nonsense? That stuff belongs to the ancient era of duct tape and
“freedom fries.”
Most telling of all, Colin Powell now
admits he’s embarrassed to recall his speech to the United Nations
Security Council, so riveting at the time, justifying war on Iraq. He’s
the only one we might expect to come clean, somewhat; the others are
letting their old stories stand, though taking care not to remind us what they
were saying.
![[Breaker quote for 'It Seems a Age': How Bush thinks]](2005breakers/050920.gif) Though
polls show Bush’s approval rating very low, and
popular support for the war even lower, there isn’t much of an anti-
war movement to speak of. Few want to bother attacking what even fewer
are now trying to defend. The American body count in Iraq, just over 1,900,
isn’t high enough to command attention; and the dead are, after all,
volunteers.
It’s nothing like the
Vietnam era, when more than a hundred body bags came home to the United
States every week, most of them containing the remains of draftees. In
those days a huge anti-war movement was fueled by the fear and fury of
young men on campuses who still faced the live possibility of conscription.
The Iraq war invoked a certain
nostalgia for World War II, the subject of best-selling books about “the
good war” and “the greatest generation”; opponents of
the war similarly invoked nostalgia for the anti-war and
“countercultural” mood of the 1960s. But neither really fit
today’s circumstance. Saddam Hussein was no Hitler, and Bush and
Tony Blair weren’t Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. Nor did
the youth of today’s America face any danger from their own
government.
The only real danger has come
from bad weather along the Gulf Coast, which has underscored the unreality
of all the dangers the Bush administration has warned us about. Once again
he has pledged limitless resources (but no taxes) to meet the problem. He
pretends, as usual, that the mission of government can expand without
increasing its power over us.
Bush is said to be trying to avoid
his father’s mistakes, especially violating the famous promise of
“no new taxes” and losing the 1992 election. Well, he
hasn’t raised taxes and he has won reelection.
But by occupying Iraq and getting
into an endless war with a hostile population, he has made the one big
mistake his father took care not to make. Apparently he doesn’t mind
mistakes if he doesn’t have to pay a political penalty for them. If the
actual costs of those mistakes will be borne by the future, after he has left
office, they’ll be someone else’s problem.
Bush’s legacy may be
summed up in an old quip: “You can fool all of the people some of the
time, and you can fool some of the people all of the time, and those are
pretty good odds.”
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2005 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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