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End of a Dream
 As
I watched President Bush Tuesday night, for the first time I felt pity for him, in the same way you
can’t help feeling sorry for any man at the end of his rope, even if he has brought it on
himself.  It
isn’t a matter of desert; it’s beyond that.
I felt a
similar emotion when Saddam Hussein was hanged: A man was finally being
crushed by the natural result of his own acts. He was cornered at last, with
no way out. It was painful to witness.
For once
Bush spoke without conviction. He was trying to salvage a desperate
position. The message was no longer that we are winning in Iraq; it was that
all is not quite lost.
Which way is
the wind blowing? In controversies like the debate over this war, I have a
simple rule of thumb: I step back and ask which way the conversions are
going. The war has been losing supporters; it has ceased acquiring them. You
might expect the Democrats to solidify against it, but the really telling fact
is that the Republicans who used to back it are scattering.
After the
severe shock of the 9/11 attacks, our natural impulse was to strike back.
But at what? At the killers who had killed themselves along with their
thousands of victims? That was obviously impossible, but we were so
outraged that we were disposed, like a lynch mob, to take revenge on the
first plausible suspect presented to us.
And while we
were in that mood — after all, the lynch mob may be sincerely indignant
about a crime — some men around Bush and in the media saw their
opportunity. They had been waiting and planning for years for a new war on
Iraq, one that would “finish the job” they felt Bush’s
father had left incomplete in 1991. All that remained was to connect Iraq, in
the public mind, to 9/11.
Over the
next few months, a concerted effort was made to shift public attention
from Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda to Saddam Hussein and Iraq. For a while
the War Party tried to find, or at least posit, ties between al-Qaeda and Iraq,
as if the terrorism of the one had something to do with the tyranny of the
latter. The hypothetical nexus was Saddam’s supposed
“weapons of mass destruction,” which, we were told, he might
hand off to al-Qaeda, which actually regarded him as an apostate, a traitor
to Islam.
![[Breaker quote for End of a Dream: As Iraq burns ...]](2007breakers/070111.gif) Many
Americans, mostly Bush voters, couldn’t
distinguish clearly between bin Laden and Saddam; some thought the two
were the same man. This made them receptive to the administration’s
warnings that an even greater shock than 9/11 might be forthcoming, in the
form of “a mushroom cloud.”
Bush made
another false connection when he asserted an “axis of evil”
comprising not only Iraq and Iran — which, in truth, were bitter enemies
— but also, absurdly, North Korea. Far from being a working alliance,
this was a mad miscellany. More recently Bush has been blaming the chaos in
Iraq on Iran and Syria. Now Iran is said to be the great threat to American
security.
Meanwhile, of
course, the United States has become almost isolated in the world. Our
traditional friends in Europe have resisted Bush’s attempt to rope
them into backing his war. He has indeed spent the political capital he
boasted of having after the 2004 election. His most reliable ally,
Britain’s Tony Blair, is finished, along with Bush’s own
Republican majority at home. Has any president ever gone so swiftly from
seeming invincibility to near-disgrace?
And does
anyone still think our freedom depends on military victory in Iraq? Bush got
the “regime change” he coveted, but what has it gained us?
Those who doggedly support the war are now reduced to vain recriminations
against the liberal media who have been skeptical of it, though many
conservatives are (at last!) just as skeptical.
Bush’s dream of a peaceful, democratic Middle East now
seems as insane a misreading of history as the old Marxist dream of a
Workers’ Paradise. He sounds like an arsonist trying to convince us
that the blazing city can still be saved. Has he forgotten who lit the match?
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2007 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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