I knew from the outset that Bush was not serious about “democracy” in Iraq because of his shifting reasons for US involvement there, his tragic inattention to illegal immigration here, his callous betrayal of his own judicial appointees, his inability to understand freedom and Islamic culture, his glib willingness to usurp the Constitution, and his attack on the freedoms of law-abiding Americans (whom he doesn’t seem to know are NOT the problem). If Bush doesn’t care about the security, freedom, or future of Americans—all rhetoric aside—why would he care about the Iraqis? Mr. Auster asks, “What, after all, is Bush’s policy?” Could it be, getting re-elected?

While I share many of Mr. Raymond’s criticisms of Bush, I find it impossible to accept the idea that his only policy is getting re-elected. He invested his presidency in the enormously risky policy of invading and conquering Iraq, something that could have ended in disaster and wrecked his presidency—which may still happen. The charge that he committed himself and the country to this vast and dangerous enterprise with no thought in mind but advancing his political fortunes is dismissible on its face. I think he decided to invade Iraq for the same reason he has said all along—that Iraq posed an unacceptable danger to us that would only become more dangerous and harder to deal with if it were not dealt with now.

The problem is that Bush does not perceive all the dangers that we traditionalists would like him to perceive. Bush is a liberal, advancing liberalism through U.S. military might. He is not a traditionalist, trying to preserve a recognizable American nation and culture. He grasps physical and military dangers coming from abroad. He doesn’t grasp—or care about—demographic and cultural dangers coming over the border. That doesn’t necessarily mean he’s acting in bad faith. It means he defines the enemy and the war differently than we do. He doesn’t want to think of “Islam,” or even of “militant Islam” as the enemy. He’s a liberal, a liberal Protestant with everything that implies. To think of Moslems as the enemy is alien to him. For similar reasons he doesn’t think it’s a contradiction or outrage to make little old ladies undergo random baggage checks in airports in the name of not discriminating against Moslems. He thinks we can fight “terrorists,” while still having a multicultural, groups-rights, inclusive-of-Moslems society. He sees the world differently than we do—disastrously so, in my opinion, but that doesn’t mean he’s acting in bad faith in everything he’s doing, though clearly the man is capable of enormous subterfuge or at least self-contradiction. However, on one issue, the war on Iraq, I’ve always thought his arguments were cogent, consistent, and honest.

I’m going to have to give Mr. Bush the benefit of the doubt here. As anyone who reads this blog knows, my opinion of George W. Bush is not very high. Still, the argument that the only thing he cares about is his own re-election doesn’t wash in light of the huge political risk he has taken with this war, which could still blow up in his face politically. It would have been much more expedient to conduct an endless series of airstrikes - from above 10,000 ft. - where the risk of casulaties was nill - which would allow him to boast how he was fighting the terrorists.

Maybe there is some other reason we aren’t aware of and he’s pulling the wool over our eyes. On the other hand, Bush could very well be a Republican version of Jimmy Carter, a clueless liberal who was just shocked that the Soviet Empire would actually invade another country. His behavior towards North Korea and China - two significantly more serious threats to US security than Saddam’s Iraq - would appear to bear this out.

The political risk to Mr. Bush of doing nothing was higher than the risk of Mr. Bush doing his job as commander in chief. He would have lost a decisive amount of his political base if he had taken some ineffective action. The fact is, I don’t think anyone knows the motiviations of a politician seeking such high office.

If we accept Mr. Auster’s analysis of President Bush in the second paragraph of his comment above, which strikes me as reasonable, then one has to conclude that Mr. Bush is a man well out of his intellectual depth in his current job, as well as utterly bereft of prudential judgment (I know Mr. Auster thinks Bush’s judgment was sound about Iraq; I disagree). He is, effectively and in his current post, an imbecile.

There probably are things for which GW Bush is well-suited, but that doesn’t really matter to us. Our problem is that we are stuck with him as president and he seems incapable of ordering his priorities effectively to address the real threats, social more than military, that the United States faces. If that is true, and I fear it may be, then his motivations for specific actions are not all that important. What is important is that he is not up to the job, and needs to be relieved of duty for incompetence by American voters. HRS

Re Mr. Sutherland’s observation, I have often thought that a lack of intelligence might explain some of Bush’s actions and contradictions. For example, his appearance on the White House lawn in spring 2002 when he said in the same breath: “Israel has the right to defend herself”; and “Israel must end its incursion into the West Bank.” Never had a president made such gross and obvious contradiction. Could stupidity be part of it?

And why didn’t he say to his father, “Don’t give that award to Kennedy. The man called me a liar, virtually a traitor. He said my whole argument for the war was a ‘fraud cooked up in Texas.’” Surely he could have dissuaded his father from giving that award. What’s going on with the Bush’s if not low IQ, is a kind of genetic insensibility.

I’ve mentioned here before that I lay the problem at Bush’s business school education and mindset. He sees his role as a manager and thinks he can do a little bit of what his “democratizing” advisors think and a little bit of what his “realist” advisors think and a little bit of what his “surrender” advisors at the State department think. Thus the problem is not so much lack of intelligence (not that he comes across as very smart) but lack of vision.

I wouldn’t support an policy of all-out democratization but I would understand it if he thought it was the only or the best option and who knows, maybe it would work. But instead he gives democratization speeches which are sure to be used against him even if he succeeds in the monumental task of creating some sort of vaguely constitutional and stable system in Iraq which would serve U.S. national interests. Clearly this is not the policy of a win-the-election-at-any-cost type.

I agree with Agricola. Bush so _overstates_ what can be done that he sets up goals that can’t possibly be achieved. Instead of using more modest language, such as that we seek “law abiding societies with representative governments and a greater measure of personal and political freedom,” he makes these millenial pronouncements about American-style DEMOCRACY AND FREEDOM transforming the whole world. It’s that same liberal Protestant, America-as-global-savior thing that motivated Woodrow Wilson. But whatever it is, I agree that it can’t be dismissed as simple political maneuvering.

Bush really does seem incompetent—from his black and white beliefs about American style “democracy and freedom” in the Middle East, to his views on Israel, to “NO Child Left Behind,” to radically increasing domestic spending as he raises military spending and cuts taxes (not that tax cuts in themselves are a bad idea), to supporting affirmative action, to supporting not only a wide open immigration policy, but amnesty for illegal aliens.

Bush’s insane combination of policies (especially coming from from a nominal conservative) only seems possible from someone who truly has a poor understanding of public policy.

On the IQ angle, I’ve read that Bush scored a 1206 on his SATs, which would work out to I believe about 1250-1300 under today’s scoring system. That doesn’t seem too bad. Maybe Bush’s drinking problem and drug use had an effect on his intelligence, or maybe Bush is just highly uninterested in public policy. I believe Steve Sailer commented on Bush/IQ sometime, but I don’t have the link.

Here is the Sailer link:
http://www.isteve.com/Web%20Exclusives%20Archive-Jun2003.htm

Sailer’s comment on Bush/IQ is about halfway down the page, under “The problem with Bush is character, not IQ.” Using CTRL+F and entering the title could help you find the comment more quickly.

I think when the inside histories of this administration are written, it will emerge that intellectual incompetence on Bush’s part played a definite role. I’m not saying he’s intellectually incompetent, period; obviously the man has lots of shrewd moves and political smarts. But I think it will come out that even his own people were stunned at times by his failure to grasp things, and that that failure played a definite role in the course of the administration.

Here’s the key passage in the Sailer article linked by Matt W. I think Sailer’s on to something. Bush, says Sailer, has a reasonably high IQ for a president. The problem is rather that

” … Bush suffers a severe character flaw: he’s mentally lazy. He doesn’t know three quarters of the the facts that a man of his intelligence who wants to be President of the United States ought to know. He appears to have been completely ignorant of the obvious difficulties of running Iraq after we conquered it.”

Do you think Mr. Bush’s love for open borders and amnesty for illegal aliens who will vote against his party a sign of low intelligence and/or ignorance of public policy? Or is it part of his liberal protestant worldview which he really believes in?

David’s question takes us into the heart of the mystery—not just the mystery of Bush, or of any high-level politician, but of white Western suicide itself. I don’t know that we will ever be able to answer it.

Mr. Auster,
Yes, I started to give an answer to my own question, but I found that I couldn’t. Woodrow Wilson thought he could save the world. GWB shows some of the same tendencies. However, virtually every major Western political leader accepts Western suicide as we have called it on this forum.

Mr. Sailer may be right about GWB lack of intellectual curiosity. Mr. Bush seems never to have read or studied subjects a President needs to know. This trait helps make him even more vulnerable to the liberal worldview than he already is.