Bush the messiah lacking in insights

By JON JOHANSSON*

Another American President, during the most severe internal crisis any leader can face - a civil war - began the last paragraph of his second inaugural address with the words, "With malice towards none; with charity for all ... "

Abraham Lincoln was the President and his words resonated with neither vindication nor triumphalism. Rather, Lincoln embodied the humility and fraternity that he fervently hoped would guide future relations between the North and South during reconstruction.

Lincoln made an additional plea to the victors to care for the vanquished, ending his address with a hope that a just and lasting peace could be achieved between themselves and also, importantly, "with all nations".

With all nations. These last three words of Lincoln's still speak to us today, for a different Republican President, reacting to a shocking external crisis triggered by the September 11 attacks, would do well to reflect on the lessons of his inspirational leadership. For one key strategic dilemma facing George W. Bush is whether the attack on Iraq does not risk making an unstable situation even more volatile.

The victims of this war, like all wars, are the innocent civilians who have experienced in one painful lifespan the crushing oppression of domestic tyranny, two earlier blood-soaked wars and now the traumatising effects of this United States-directed "liberation" effort.

Here the means that Mr Bush employs to discharge the war risk undermining the very ends he is trying to achieve. Graphic images of an ever-increasing number of civilian casualties, siege conditions and a devastated landscape are not likely to see the Iraqi people embracing their conquerors with other than a mix of fear, contempt or outright hatred. A volatile region will be rendered less, not more, stable.

In these circumstances Mr Bush may well provoke an even greater security threat to his country than that which exists. A new unalterable state of affairs can be glimpsed amid the burning oil-filled skies of Baghdad. American power, when driven with such messianic fervour, is corrupting the ideals envisaged by the country's founders.

Why has this come to pass? Mr Bush's inner-circle, including notable figures such as Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, embody to many the arch-messianic strand of American culture.

One certainly senses from Mr Bush's rhetoric that he sees his mission in these absolute terms. Generally speaking, Americans perceive their nation and way of life as either an ongoing experiment in republican government or as the result of divine providence.

The American historian Arthur Schlesinger described this dichotomy as "the warfare between realism and messianism". Realism implied a sense of renewal from one generation to the next, a continuing commitment to the ideals of the founding fathers. Messianism implied a purity of motive that was preordained; America's divine destiny. An American experiment embraced doubt; messianism denied it.

So, too, with Mr Bush and this Republican Administration, pre-emption has replaced patience, ugly and sanctimonious rhetoric has replaced sincere attempts at understanding, and the unleashing of truly destructive forces has subsumed diplomacy.

Mr Bush may possess no doubt that he is waging a war against evil. But if pre-emption ultimately takes us all down a new frightening spiral, one in which the pursuit of self-interest and a fear-driven response to perceived threats dominate relations between nations, the path of history that will unfold will be dangerously unstable for human advancement in the face of other pervasive global threats.

The war against Iraq cannot, therefore, be considered adaptive politics being carried out by the US Government. Rather, it is maladaptive in a fundamental sense because try as he might, Mr Bush and Britain's Tony Blair have not been able to persuade the Iraqi people, let alone the wider Arab and Muslim worlds, that they understand their motivations, hopes or aspirations.

Abraham Lincoln's address also encompassed God's will, but Lincoln, in contrast to Mr Bush, had reflected deeply on what purposes were driving America's brutal civil war.

Lincoln's address was also, of course, about race, and Bill Clinton, during that period of his life at Oxford when he defended his country during the tumult of Vietnam, used to cite the long cause of civil rights as an example of the US eventually getting things right, even if it took that great country far too long to finally remove the stain of slavery from its past.

Can we say the same about American foreign policy today - that it might eventually get things right, that the country's leadership will put more adaptive long-term strategies in place that reduce global tensions and increase our fraternal bonds; strategies that reveal an authentic American humility and tolerance of difference?

Lincoln reached high to understand the cause of so much bloodshed among his own countrymen. Such insight might be beyond Mr Bush, for he has never appealed as a particularly reflective individual. The leadership gap spanning these two Republican Presidents is a yawning one.

Accordingly, a nagging thought persists that Mr Bush is far too much of a moral absolutist to find his way beyond the place where he now finds himself.

We must, therefore, hope that this phase of American messianism is but a passing one, for rotten things are happening in this rotten war.

* Jon Johansson lectures in political leadership and American politics at Victoria University, Wellington

Herald Feature: Iraq war