At a Loss for Words? Or Just Plain Lost?

I saw the link to BushBuzz yesterday at Pandagon, but didn't get around to looking at it until today on my lunch break. It's instructive--the Quicktime movie clearly demonstrates that the man running for Texas governor is not at all the same individual serving as commander in chief.

The movie suggests that Bush suffers from some sort of cognitive impairment. Well, maybe. However, I'm beginning to wonder if instead he's simply overwhelmed by the responsibilites. Consider: some folks allege that the reason Bush gave up on his pilot's gig because he developed a debilitating fear of flying. The next time you see Dubya--say, tomorrow during the debate--pay close attention to his body language. I'm wondering if he's likewise developed a debilitating fear of speaking in public and/or being president. And, having heard or read the gossip surrounding the dauphin's relations with his parents, this could be especially troublesome for Bush the Younger--once again, he can't live up to his old man's legacy. It must pain him.

Bush has always tried to adopt a sort of tough guy posture--a good example during the last debate was brought up by Jeanne at Body and Soul--Dubya, when asked about abortion, said, among other things:

I signed a bill called the Unborn Victims of Violence Act. In other words, if you're a mom and you're pregnant and you get killed, the murderer gets tried for two cases, not just one. My opponent was against that.

To which Jeanne replies:

Okay, the nonchalant way he said "if you're a mom and you're pregnant and you get killed" was downright creepy. A Kitty Dukakis raped and murdered moment. But except for the fact that he's unaware that women are more concerned with not being murdered in the first place than how much retribution he gets to exact if they are -- really, why does every issue become a matter of punishment to this guy?

But the fact that he speaks this way also underscores a degree of desperation, if you ask me. It's as if Bush must PROVE, both to himself and the world, that he's got what it takes to be at the top of the food chain. Which, to me, means that, deep down, he's not so sure he really DOES have it. Sure, he was comfortable being governor of Texas, which involves little more than signing off on death sentences for convicted murderers (whether or not they're actually guilty is a whole other question, but Dubya never really let that get to him) President of the United States, though, is a whole different ballgame...

In this light, I came across a link from Swopa at Needlenose to a post by Rick Freedman at World On Fire. Freedman compares and contrasts the Iraq non-crisis to a genuine episode where the United States was threatened by and was threatening use of Weapons of Mass Destruction: The Cuban Missile Crisis, which occurred forty-two years ago.

The intelligence was clear—a small country in a highly strategic part of the world was arming with weapons of mass destruction. The threat was undeniable. An unstable leader with ties to a homicidal ideology was working overtime to build nuclear and other offensive weapons, despite repeated assurances that no such activity was underway. The American President had to act—he couldn’t allow this imminent mortal threat to go unchallenged.

The entire post is well worth reading, so I'll link to it again. However, if you're very short of time, here are a few choice paragraphs:

Robert Kennedy’s contemporaneous notes, later distilled into the memoir “Thirteen Days”, are widely acknowledged as the definitive inside study of the policy-making process during that period...

As [he] characterizes the interaction [among excomm members],

the group met, talked, argued, and fought together. They were men of the highest intelligence…it was no reflection on them that none was consistent in his opinion from the very beginning to the very end. That kind of open, unfettered mind was essential. From some there were only small changes…for others there were continuous changes of opinion each day...

It was during these initial deliberations, listening to the proposals for a surprise military action by the American superpower against a small, defenseless nation, that Bobby Kennedy passed the famous note to JFK: “I now know how Tojo felt when he was planning Pearl Harbor”...

[JFK] ordered his advisors to split into teams, which they dubbed the “hawks” and the “doves” (according to Schlesinger, the first use of those familiar terms in this context), and asked them to write their recommendations, including the speech the president would give to announce their decision, and to anticipate all contingencies with recommendations on how to mitigate or react to them. The teams then reconvened, exchanged plans between teams, and each team critiqued the arguments of the other side. Papers were returned to the original groups, and the comments were responded to.

When JFK finally made the decision to apply the blockade of Cuba, Bobby remarked that

the strongest argument against the all-out military attack, and one no one could answer to his [JFK’s] satisfaction, was that a surprise attack would erode if not destroy the moral position of the United States throughout the world...

One of the key elements of the drama surrounding the blockade was JFK’s determination to leave Khrushchev room to maneuver. He had just finished reading historian Barbara Tuchman’s book “The Guns of August”, which described the great European powers blundering into WWI. Kennedy was determined to avoid that error...

When the crisis finally cooled down, and the Soviets agreed to remove the missiles from Cuba, certain things were clear, as Robert Kennedy detailed in his book. RFK’s conclusions fall into two basic categories: the deliberation process and the policy decisions it produced.

In terms of the deliberative process, Bobby noted;

I believe our deliberations proved conclusively how important it is that the President have the recommendations and opinions of more than one individual, of more than one department, and of more than one point of view. There is an important element missing when there is unanimity of viewpoint. I have frequently observed efforts being made to exclude certain individuals from participating in a meeting with the President, because they held a different point of view. He [JFK] wanted to hear presented and challenged all the possible consequences of a particular course of action. From all this probing and examination, President Kennedy hoped that he would at least be prepared for the foreseeable contingencies and know that he had made his decision based on the best possible information. His conduct of the missile crisis showed how important this kind of skeptical probing and questioning could be.

It also showed how important it was to be respected around the world, how vital it was to have allies and friends. If we are to preserve our national security, we will need friends, we will need supporters, we will need countries that believe and respect us and follow our leadership.

Bobby’s conclusions regarding the actual policies is also instructive:

The final lesson of the Cuban missile crisis is the importance of placing ourselves in the other countries shoes. During the crisis, President Kennedy spent more time trying to determine the effect of a particular course of action on Khrushchev or the Russians than on any other phase of what he was doing. Miscalculation, misunderstanding and escalation on one side bring a response. No action against an adversary is taken in a vacuum. A government will fail to understand that only at their great peril. He dedicated himself to making it clear that the US had limited objectives…After it was finished, he made no statement attempting to take credit for himself or for the Administration for what had occurred. He instructed all members of the government that no statement be made which would claim any kind of victory.

Just as no action against an adversary occurs in a vacuum, neither does any review of historical events. The purpose of history is to teach us, or to shame us when its lessons are ignored, leading to disaster. Luckily, we have the tools to do this comparison, in the form of the intimate inside account of the Bush team’s path to war provided by Bob Woodward in his all-access best-seller, “Plan of Attack”. So it becomes critical to compare and contrast the successful decisions made by the Kennedy brothers and their ExCom with those made by our current Commander in Chief. The comparison is not flattering to the Bush team.

Through Woodward’s book, it’s common knowledge that Bush, rather than following a deliberative process, held informal one-off conversations with numerous advisors, often huddling privately with Rice or Cheney, and excluding Powell and Armitage because they were known to disagree. Rather than consulting with the elder statesmen of their party, Bush mocked them, famously called the elder Bush “the wrong father” for advice and counsel, and referring to Brent Scowcroft, who wrote in a famous OpEd of the dangers of occupation, as “a pain in the ass in his old age.” Bush once told Woodward:

I have no outside advice. Anybody who says they’re an outside adviser of this Administration on this particular matter is not telling the truth. First of all, in the initial phase of this war, I never left the compound. Nor did anybody come in the compound. I was, you talk about one guy in a bubble. The only true advice I receive is from our war council. I didn’t call around, asking, ‘What the heck do you think we ought to do?'
Contrasted with JFK’s deep and penetrating analysis of the contingencies, Bush deliberately ignored or disregarded the planning efforts of his own agencies when they disagreed with his team's ideological conclusions. In fact, Woodward implies that the final decision to proceed against Saddam came almost by default, when Cheney announced to the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Nashville that "There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction [and] there is no doubt that he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies and against us." Woodward reports that, once Cheney had made these public accusations, the administration felt boxed in and feared that inaction would appear as weakness both politically and militarily. Cheney delivered a pre-emptive strike, with the desired effect.

And what of the policy itself? With the history well documented and the outcome unfolding in front of us every day, the notion that military power is the only way, or even the ‘cleanest’ way, to resolve mortal threats is disproved again, for those so ignorant of history that they need further evidence of that fact. While the tough-guys of the right mock the idea of sensitivity towards other nations, diplomacy with our historic allies, and even the very idea of debate and deliberation, the specter of 120 million potential victims, one blink away from annihilation in our first real brush with Weapons of Mass Destruction, calls out to us to remember the lessons of that week in October 42 years ago. In a moment of clarity before they got tangled in the thickets of Vietnam, the Kennedy brothers and their advisors realized that, even when struggling with grievance and threat, the human virtues of patience, empathy, and reflection can be more effective than retribution, and can help nations as well as men avoid the outcome hinted at in the Chinese proverb that advises “he who seeks revenge should first dig two graves.” The comparison between the Kennedy brothers, especially the “moral clarity” of Bobby as he argued for the salvation of the moral values that define our nation, and the callow, simple-minded, and ultimately self-destructive posturing of Bush and his right-wing armchair warriors illustrates again what we’ve lost.

I realize that's quite a long cut--and, believe it or not, it IS edited. However, I believe it's important to look at the Bush record--and it's just as important to praise Freedman for recognizing the parallels and writing the post.

Tomorrow is Round Three of the debates--Bush has a very difficult job ahead, as he'll have to simultaneously be less intense but also more focused. That's a difficult tightrope to walk for even an excellent public speaker, which he plainly no longer is. It's gonna be interesting to see which George W. Bush shows up...