The Perils of a Righteous President: Faith without doubt leads to moral arrogance
Liberate Iraq? Rubbish. You occupy Iraq for the strategic and economic benefits. You are building the largest embassy in the world in Baghdad. Halliburton and Bechtel are running everything, at enormous profits. And then I watch Bush on Al-Arabiya and all I see is his sense of moral superiority. He brings democracy and freedom to the barbarians. But who are the barbarians? Even before the Abu Ghraib pictures, we saw male soldiers searching Iraqi women and humiliating Iraqi men by forcing their heads to the ground.
- a prominent Jordanian businessman
One of the things I find most disturbing about Our Sainted President is watching him wrap himself in the mantle of his faith, as if he has some sort of divine mandate to bring democracy to the heathens. It's a ready-made recipe for demagoguery, and Bush leads as if he was to the manor born. From where I sit, it's a truly disturbing display of arrogance and self-righteousness- and it's a large part of the reason this country is now in the mess we find ourselves in.
After his grudging public apology for the behavior of U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison, George W. Bush attended a ceremony commemorating the National Day of Prayer. His remarks there were, as we have come to expect from this President, a stirring mix of humility and certainty. "God is not on the side of any nation, yet we know He is on the side of justice," Bush said. "Our finest moments [as a nation] have come when we have faithfully served the cause of justice for our own citizens, and for the people of other lands."
The words are wonderful, but such sentiments are easily corrupted. Faith without doubt leads to moral arrogance, the eternal pratfall of the religiously convinced. We are humble before the Lord, Bush insists. We cannot possibly know His will. And yet, we "know" He's on the side of justice—and we define what justice is. Indeed, we can toss around words like justice and evil with impunity, send off mighty armies to "serve the cause of justice" in other lands and be so sure of our righteousness that the merest act of penitence—an apology for an atrocity—becomes a presidential crisis. "This is not the America I know," Bush said of the torturers, as if U.S. soldiers were exempt from the temptations of absolute power that have plagued occupying armies from the beginning of time.
America may be blessed to be the strongest military and economic power the world knows today, but that power hardly comes with a divine mandate to conquer and rule. Americans are no more or less prone to the temptations and excesses that have beset armies of occupation since the dawn of organized warfare. We are no better, nor are we any worse than any other country- we simply have more weight to throw around. Certainly, we are blessed with a functional social, legal, and economic system- not something many countries can say. That fact should hardly be taken as connoting any sort of notion that Americans are somehow anointed. We are fortunate, certainly, but hardly anointed.
A distressing, uninflected righteousness has defined this Administration from the start, and it hasn't been limited to the President. Bush's overheated sense of good vs. evil has been reinforced by the intellectual fantasies of neoconservatives like I. Lewis Libby and Paul Wolfowitz, who serve Bush's two most powerful advisers, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. It was neoconservatives who provided the philosophical rationale for the President's gut response to the evildoers of Sept. 11: a grand crusade—yes, a crusade—to establish democracy in Iraq and then, via a benign tumbling of local dominoes, throughout the Middle East. Those who opposed the crusade opposed democracy. Those who opposed the President coddled terrorists (according to recent G.O.P. TV ads).
The fact that our post-9.11 world as defined by Bush and his circle of neocons is heavily weighted in terms of "good" and "evil" is not a promising trend. Viewing the world in such stark terms means missing the nuances, the grey areas that can change the course of human events. Whenever someone assumes the mantle of the "good", that invariably means that someone is saddled with the counterbalancing characterization of "evil". Since both "good" and "evil" are highly subjective concepts, conducting a foreign policy in this manner makes for a hell of a way to run a railroad.
Abu Ghraib has certainly made it easier to view Bush's motives in a very suspect light. This is not the first time his crusade has come back to bite him in the ass, though. Anyone remember the search for WMDs?? They're still out there, right??
I cannot state strongly enough my opposition to George Bush and the lies and deceptions that have brought us to this point. There is nothing "good" or "righteous" about the manner in which this country has been dragged into a war that didn't need to be fought. Almost eight hundered of our sons and daughters have been killed- and for what? Sometimes, demagoguery is the last refuges of a scoundrel. This is one of those times. We deserve better.
