President Bush is, despite adamant protests to the contrary, clearly concerned with his legacy. And has made a few simple, predictable gestures in the final weeks of his administration toward articulating his own sense of what that legacy is, or should be. In his televised farewell address last Thursday, he made clear that the 9/11 attacks were not only the defining events of his presidency, but that they actually should provide the interpretive lens through we view his presidential legacy now. The fact that the homeland has not been attacked since then is, he suggests, the signal achievement of his administration, along with the new federal agencies he has created and the new executive powers has claimed for the office.
The problem with this claim is there is just no way to measure deterrence—not for the death penalty, and not for terrorism. We cannot know, except in very rare cases, what attacks did not materialize, or what crimes were averted, because of our prior actions. The President really is suggesting that there have been many potential attacks on his watch and that his new security state has successfully thwarted them all.
Perhaps. This we simply cannot know. What we can know, and what we should say clearly, is that the culmination of eight years of “security” measures under this President have left us with a radicalized and increasingly anti-American zone that now runs from the mountains in western Pakistan all the way to the Mediterranean Sea. Gaza is simply the last in a long line of Islamic states and territories that identify the US as the major source of their current troubles. That is a devastating source of global insecurity, and not only for the United States of America.
It has also stained our national honor. In that regard, the most important lines of President Bush’s farewell address were these:
As we address these challenges – and others we cannot foresee tonight – America must maintain our moral clarity. I have often spoken to you about good and evil. This has made some uncomfortable. But good and evil are present in this world, and between the two there can be no compromise. Murdering the innocent to advance an ideology is wrong every time, everywhere. Freeing people from oppression and despair is eternally right. This Nation must continue to speak out for justice and truth. We must always be willing to act in their defense and to advance the cause of peace.
Bush’s self-styled “war on terror” has always been conceived by him in moral terms, as an uncompromising battle of good against evil. I have been critical of his overuse (and cheapening) of these categories before. In this context, Bush’s confident assertion of “moral clarity” should give the morally serious citizen some pause.
Note how the President defines evil: as “murdering the innocent to advance an ideology.” That is precisely how many Gazans interpret the latest Israeli incursion into their territory. And, once the pretense of weapons of mass destruction was dropped, that is how many Iraqis viewed the US invasion of their sovereign state as well. As murder, not a Just War. And conducted in the name of an ideology.
Good is also defined in fairly simplistic terms. as “freeing people from oppression and despair.” The closure of Guantanamo Bay would be a significant moral achievement in this view, though the President continues to refuse to see it this way. For he is as blinded by his own ideological commitments as he has been unable to see past the horizon of smoke and debris that has clouded his vision since the fall of 2001.
It is not the rhetoric of good and evil that is objectionable here; it is the use to which such rhetoric is put. Name your enemy as “evil,” and you can justify doing almost anything to them. Name yourself as good, and any possibility of self-criticism or recrimination is rendered moot.
And still worse: Name your war as a battle between good and evil, and it is sure to be “uncompromising.” You do not negotiate with, and you do not talk to, the enemy; you simply demand unconditional surrender and envision a world in which all of your opponents have been captured or killed. As the Roman historian, Tacitus, put it two millennia ago: “They create a desert and call this peace.”
The final legacy of the second Bush presidency is not merely the carnage of ongoing wars, nor the wreckage created by fiscal irresponsibility, excess and greed, nor the abandonment of our diplomatic responsibilities in the Middle East, nor exponential increases in global warming, nor the collapsing US currency, nor record spikes in oil prices worldwide.
No, the truly challenging legacy is the profound sense of a nation and its civic institutions set morally adrift.
It is galling to recall how, just prior to Bush’s first controversial election, he and his Vice Presidential running-mate proudly announced to US military families that “help [was] on the way.” That has not proven to be so. Hence, some of the most significant immediate activities of the new administration will be to restore moral clarity, a sense of moral purpose, and a sense of honor to institutions like the Pentagon, the CIA, the Attorney General’s office, and to hope that these renewed ideals will trickle down into the economic sector, both public and private.
Here is a battle with many fronts, and we must be diligent as well as delicate in its pursuit, forgiving wherever we can be, firm when we must be, and in every case, attending carefully to moral consequence.
