MIDDLE ISRAEL: GEORGE BUSH AS A TRAGIC FIGURE
By Amotz Asa-El
Jerusalem Post
Oct 24, 2008 7:42
Israel
Nothing in his upscale upbringing, cushioned career, narrow horizons
and pedestrian character could prepare him for the crusading zealots,
billowing battlefields, collapsing skyscrapers, rising superpowers,
gushing markets and soaring ocean waves that awaited him as leader
of the free world
Bush met historic forces he had no chance of confronting.
Photo: AP
‘A perfect tragedy is the noblest production of human nature," wrote
English essayist and dramatist Joseph Addison.
Ordinarily, to fully appreciate this observation one would need to
probe complex literary images like Samson, Oedipus, Agamemnon or
Hamlet. But ours are no ordinary times, and we need look no further
than the White House and consider the years its current tenant has
spent there.
To literary purists, the term "tragedy" is often misused, as it is
routinely attached to pretty much anything bad that happens to anyone
good under whatever circumstances, from the disappearance of a house
in an earthquake to the loss of a friend on a battlefield. Yet the
perfect tragedy is more than that, as it involves people larger than
most others and calamities that are their own doing. At the same time,
tragic heroes’ flaws are universal and their downfalls unavoidable.
Now, as speculation mounts concerning the next US president’s identity,
plans and ability to extract America from the black hole where it
has arrived, the outgoing presidency’s balance sheet can already be
written. Sadly, no matter which accountants, historians or dramatists
ultimately compose it, its bottom line will always be painted in one
color: red.
IN A SENSE, the Bush years are even more tragic than the American
presidencies that ended in assassination.
Bush has been anything but a James Garfield, whose several months in
the White House were too brief to matter, nor was he a John Kennedy
or a William McKinley, whose departures left millions feeling bereaved
and their presidencies recalled fondly. And he certainly was no Abraham
Lincoln, whose rise to the occasion was among history’s most memorable,
nor was he even a Richard Nixon, whose legal record was ultimately
overshadowed by his geopolitical success.
Bush’s drawbacks were slow to surface and, as tragedies go, their
full scope emerged only once the size of the challenges he faced,
which no one had fully foreseen, became apparent.
The sages said that some win and some lose entire worlds in one
moment. Bush lost his in four: 9/11, the Iraq War, Hurricane Katrina,
and the ’08 crash. In all these he demonstrated profound deficits
of knowledge and intuition, without which even the most resolute and
charismatic leader cannot deliver the goods.
The 9/11 challenge caught Bush so badly off guard that it took him
precious time to just define the enemy, and even that he did in a
way that largely defeated the purpose. The enemy was, and remains,
Islamism, but Bush defined the enemy as terror. Telling the American
people that the enemy was terror was as if Churchill would have told
the British that the enemy is the Luftwaffe, not Nazism, and FDR
would have told the Americans that their enemy is the Kamikaze pilots,
not Japan.
This was not semantics. Beyond it lurked a failure to understand
history and read the world that an American president is demanded
to lead. All this should not have come as a surprise considering the
geopolitical ignorance Bush had already displayed as a candidate. His
aides at the time, still deep in the Cold War victors’ hangover,
thought it was all anecdotal and even funny. In fact, it was about
as funny, and fateful, as Jimmy Carter’s failure in his time to
understand the world in general, and the Islamist threat it produced
in particular.
Had Nixon, Churchill or Roosevelt populated the Oval Office at the
time, the response to 9/11 would have been different, one that would
enlist the people and instill a sense of volunteerism and sacrifice,
whether militarily or financially. But Bush was a tragic figure, one
who reflected an entire civilization’s post-Cold War denial that it
still had to fight expensive wars.
THE KATRINA challenge was different, as it had nothing to do with
understanding the world. This one was about detecting in advance
cracks in America’s civil bedrock, and mending them before rather than
after catastrophe struck. But Bush was a tragic figure, and as such
was almost predestined to preside over an astonishing administrative
helplessness that was reminiscent of the dying USSR’s impotence in
the face of the Armenian earthquake in 1988.
Meanwhile, the soldiers Bush sent to war were facing an enemy Bush had
failed to expect. In a speech delivered aboard the – of all names –
USS Abraham Lincoln a mere several weeks after the invasion of Iraq,
he declared major combat operations there over. As if assembled into
one stage by its cruel playwright, the Bush tragedy’s hero spoke in
front of cameras, to the entire world, from under a glaring sign
that proudly, innocently and so utterly ignorantly read "mission
accomplished." It took hardly a year for the world to understand
that the mission remained hopelessly unaccomplished, that Iraq was
no Falklands and that Bush was no Margaret Thatcher.
Now, to top it all, came the market collapse that has altogether
undone the thinking with which America elected Bush and Bush led
America, an interpretation of the tempers of the time that insisted
all was already well in the kingdom and could only get better in the
future. In fact, America got caught so unprepared for the market mayhem
that its president, who had once been compared with Ronald Reagan, was
now being compared with Herbert Hoover, and seeing the British prime
minister unwittingly fill the leadership vacuum created by the confused
American leader, the same who had once purported to reshape the world.
AS IT draws to a close, the Bush presidency looms ominously as a Greek
tragedy, where innocent heroes like Oedipus or Antigone are maneuvered
by their ignorance and obligations into crises that invariably end
badly; or like a Shakespearean tragedy, where the trials of prominent
but imperfect characters like Hamlet or Caesar unwittingly call into
question an entire social order.
More broadly, literary tragedies call into question the role of chance,
error, fate and destiny in human life, as they pit man against forces
hopelessly stronger than him. The forces George Bush met, and stood no
chance of confronting, were of historic, even biblical dimensions, from
crusading zealots, billowing battlefields and collapsing skyscrapers to
rising superpowers, gushing markets and soaring ocean waves. There was
nothing in his upscale upbringing, cushioned career, narrow horizons
and pedestrian character that could prepare him for any of this.
Bush’s original sin, therefore, did not lie in anything he did or
didn’t do as leader of the free world; it was in his very decision
to apply for the job.