One year ago, after his re-election, President Bush brashly asserted: “I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it. It is my style.” Twelve months later, Republicans were thrashed in elections for the governorships of Virginia and New Jersey. In St. Paul, Minnesota, the Democratic mayor who endorsed Bush for re-election a year ago was defeated by another Democrat by 70 percent to 30 percent.
Then the Republicans in the Congress split and failed to pass Bush’s budget. That was followed by the Senate’s rejection of Bush’s torture and detainee policy by a 98-to-0 vote and by the overwhelming passage of a resolution stipulating that the president must submit a strategy on the withdrawal of US forces from Iraq.
The turn against him in public opinion has been slowly considered and is therefore also firm. A majority believes his administration manipulated prewar intelligence to lead the country into the Iraq war, and two-thirds disapprove of his policy on the war. His political capital already appears spent, and he has retreated from the ruins of his grandiose agenda into a defense of his past.
In the immediate aftermath of the Iraq war, Bush was the man of action who never looked back, openly dismissive of history. “History. We don’t know. We’ll all be dead.” But his obsessive interest in the subject is not posthumous. The Senate’s decision to launch an investigation into prewar disinformation has provoked a furious reaction.
On Veterans’ Day (Nov. 11), Bush addressed troops at an army base: “It is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began.” He accused “some Democrats and anti-war critics” of lying in stating that “we manipulated the intelligence.”
Later, Bush spoke before troops at an air force base, where he stated that the Democrats “now rewriting the past” are “sending mixed signals to our troops and the enemy.” The soldiers “deserve to know that their elected leaders who voted to send them into war continue to stand behind them.” Unless “our will is strong,” disunity will threaten “victory.”
While the “ruthless enemy determined to destroy our way of life” besieges us from without, the most insidious undermining comes from within. Thus an American president has updated the “stab in the back” theory of General Erich Ludendorff, who stated in February 1919 that “the political leadership disarmed the unconquered army and delivered over Germany to the destructive will of the enemy.”
The former Republican speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, always notable for his visions, has compared George Bush in his travails to Abraham Lincoln before Gettysburg. Gingrich, who has recently written a series of counterfactual novels depicting a southern triumph in the civil war, communicated his latest flight of fancy to a longtime former diplomat. “We are at war,” insisted Gingrich. “With whom?” he was asked. “The Democrats,” he apparently replied without hesitation.
For Gingrich, ever the Republican guru, history is a plaything of the partisan present.
Bush’s adoption of the Ludendorff strategy of blaming weak politicians for military failure and exalting “will” sets him at odds with liberal democracy. His understanding of history also clashes with the conservative tradition that acknowledges human fallibility and respects the past.
Bush’s presidency is an effort to defy history, not only in America, writing on the world as a blank slate.
Now he wants to erase memory of his actual record, substituting a counterfactual history. “Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history,” said Lincoln. Never mind.
