GEORGE W. Bush is writing a book. No conventional memoir for this president. He is not going to bore us with a blow-by-blow account of his days in the White House. Instead we are getting a book tentatively called “Decision Points” which will focus on 12 key decisions he has taken in his life and explain why he took them.
I never thought I would say this about George W. Bush, and I take a breath before uttering this hitherto inconceivable sentence, but Bush is writing a book I would like to read! Just thinking about it has pushed me to think of my own life and consider the decisions I have made. Could it be that Bush has a future as a self-help guru? Could he be the next Paolo Coehlo or the next Stefen F. Covey? It is, after all, a very lucrative business and this is a man who did turn his life around.
There will, for instance, be a chapter on the decision to quit drinking. When you consider all the alcoholics out there and all those who decide and then fail to quit drinking, maybe Bush actually has something useful to tell you. Maybe for once he could do something with a positive impact on people’s lives.
Decision making is a skill. Most of us are pretty bad at it. Often we avoid making decisions or we leave others to make them for us. More commonly, we make decisions based on erroneous information or based on an inadequate assessment of all the options available to us and the full consequences they engender. Bush cannot be accused of avoiding making decisions; quite the opposite. He liked making decisions and famously referred to himself as the Decider. It was how he defined his job. However, I strongly suspect that he was only good at taking decisions because he only considered limited options and consequences. Bush’s rhetoric has always been simplistic and categorical: You are either “with us or against us”, countries are either allies or members of an “axis of evil”. It will be interesting to see whether his decision-making suffers from the same blinkered view of the world.
He is clearly someone who thinks good decision-making is rigid decision-making. Nobody could accuse him of being a ditherer or of having flip-flop opinions. He chooses his line and sticks to it. Clearly that is easier to do if you simplify your world into one of a road with few crossroads. The more options you consider, the more factors you add to the equation, the more nuanced, ethical and complex you are, the harder the decision-making process.
Of course, what we all want to know is not how he turned his life around from heavy drinking wild boy to churchgoing neoconservative teetotaler but why he invaded Iraq when anyone with two brain cells knew that it would be catastrophic. In essence, what Bush is trying to do by writing this book is escape from the judgment of hindsight. He is keen to recreate the situation as it lay before him then, to somehow make us forget what we know now and convince us that with the information that lay on the table then, he took the only possible decision he could make.
And so what this book may teach us in the final analysis is the control others had over him by controlling the facts that were put to him. Did Messrs. Cheney and Rumsfeld put forward a biased dossier showing Iraq to be a clear threat to the US, with a population who would welcome the US with roses and smiles? Or was Bush simply swayed by the prospect of getting his hands on Iraq’s oil supplies? Or could it be that it was just a case of making someone pay for 9/11? Perhaps this book will finally answer those questions.
Back in November 2002, I took part in a rather futile endeavor to put forward a different point of view to decision-makers in Washington. It was clear at this stage that an invasion of Iraq was on the cards and I was part of a delegation that met with lawmakers and others to try to convince them to reconsider. What struck me at the time is that almost no one believed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, but many were taken in by the idea that democracy could be imposed. Most important, there was a view that the status quo in the Middle East could not continue and that if change was not imposed from the outside, things could only get worse. It was all summed up to me by the words of one Washington policy adviser who, when asked if they had given any real thought to what would happen in Iraq and the rest of the Middle East once Saddam Hussein had been overthrown (the easy part), answered with this unforgettable one liner: “I am minded to let the chips fall where they may”. Ever since that day I have wondered whether Bush’s foreign policy decisions could all be summed up by that one phrase.
