THE BUSHOCENTRIC UNIVERSE::

Why Bush Won't Wait: President Bush says he has not yet decided whether to go to war with Iraq, but this week the signs were that he had all but given up on peace. (BILL KELLER, 1/25/03, NY Times)

So far in its showdown with Iraq, the Bush administration has mostly done the right things, though often with a disheartening lack of finesse. Mr. Bush was right to identify Saddam Hussein as a menace, right to mobilize our might to prove we mean business, right to seek the blessing of Congress and the Security Council. A credible demonstration of will has produced tangible results. The inspectors are at work. Arab neighbors are looking for ways the Iraqis can solve their Saddam problem short of an invasion. (The prospect of a coup or an asylum deal for Saddam may be remote, but give them credit for creative thinking.) Saudi Arabia was moved, first, to propose a peace plan for Israel and Palestine, and second, to suggest a charter for political and economic reform in the Arab world.

There are compelling reasons for war with Iraq. Mr. Bush has been wise to emphasize the danger Saddam poses because of his unrelenting campaign to acquire weapons of horrible power. His mere possession of such weapons would give him daunting power in a vital region.

Many Americans and some of our allies have mistaken inspection for an answer to this problem. In fact, inspections have always been a way to buy some time, during which the regime might crumble, or Iraq might shock us all by really surrendering its weapons, or Iraqi non-compliance would exhaust the patience of even the French. Eventually, though, the inspectors go away, and if Saddam is still in place his quest for the nuclear grail resumes, presumably with fiercer motivation than before. [...]

What Mr. Bush has failed to do over these months of agitation is to explain his urgency to the American public or our allies. In the year since the "axis of evil" speech, popular support for war has declined by at least 10 points. It's not that people doubt Saddam is a danger. They just think Mr. Bush is in too much of a rush. They want to see the evidence the president claims to have. They would like to know what costs and dangers we're in for. Most of all, they want the world, as much as possible, with us.

Presidents should not make decisions of war and peace based on polls. (Mr. Bush's father launched the last war against Iraq with less support than the current president has.) Nor should our national interests be decided by the faintest hearts among our allies. But the dwindling of support here and resentment abroad represent a failure to persuade, and persuading is worth taking some time.

Mr. Keller's long work on the comparison of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush below seems to have given him the best insight into the current president that anyone at the Times has had since Frank Bruni. But even Mr. Bruni didn't figure things out until after the 2000 campaign and Mr. Keller still has a ways to go too and here he also overestimates both the attention span and the seriousness of the American people.

The current poll numbers, for both the president and his Iraq policy, are nearly identical to what they were in early September, at the end of another long period of presidential silence on the matter. But, if you'll recall, all it required was one presidential address to the U.N. and the polls and the international community's position changed dramatically. There's no reason to believe that a simple reminder from the President about why we're going to war won't move the numbers and opinion again.

Meanwhile, what Mr. Keller appears to have missed in his study of the President is that Mr. Bush and Karl Rove were serious in 2000, when they talked about increasing presidential leverage by shutting up. If Bill Clinton were president now, we'd see him on tv every day making pronouncements on all kinds of issues but keeping Iraq on the front burner. The problem with that kind of omnipresence is that eventually Iraq becomes indistinguishable from school uniforms or midnight basketball programs and, because the president is yammering every day, there's no such thing as an important speech, it's just one more speech in a cascade of hundreds. On the other hand, by limiting President Bush's press availability and his set piece addresses, each takes on an enhanced importance. Because Mr. Bush isn't in our faces every night, telling us that whatever's on his mind at the moment is central to the life of the nation, when he does actually come before the nation and tell us something is important it really stands out.

Imagine for a moment that Bill Clinton had been confronted with the stem-cell research decision: he'd have spent weeks mulling it over in public, telling us that on the one hand this and the other that. Contrast that with President Bush, who made one speech about it and the policy, whether wise or not, was set. Mr. Bush and Mr. Rove comprehend that presidential capital with the public is most valuable when it is spent rarely. Mr. Bush is as parsimonious with his presence at the bully pulpit as Mr. Clinton was profligate.

That may well be because the key to this sort of use of silence is a centeredness and a supreme self-confidence that, as Mr. Keller writes in his other piece, Mr. Bush shares with Mr. Reagan, but of which rather few other recent presidents have partaken. This is so because you need to know what you think, unlike Mr. Clinton who tended to turn every issue into a psychodrama that he'd then enact before us, being on one side of an issue one day and on the other the next. Equally important, you need to be able to stand aloof from the criticism of the press and political opponents and able to not worry too much about bureaucratic infighting in your own administration. Folks who haven't figured this out look at the (supposed) disagreements between Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld and say that the President hasn't made up his mind. In reality, it is precisely because he knows his own mind and what he plans to do with regard to Iraq--and has planned to do in all likelihood since before he became president--that Mr. Bush need pay little attention to such mere squabbles. Moreover, the seeming indecision below serves his own purposes. Democrats, Europeans, and the Times have staked their opposition to the war on Mr. Powell, and have therefore built him up into the sole voice of reason among the hawks. So where do they go when Mr. Powell, this paragon of world leadership, announces that there's no longer any rational alternative but war, which he's close to saying right now?

On Tuesday, President Bush will give the State of the Union speech, and for the first time since his September address at the UN he'll lay out the case for war in a comprehensive way. Comparing the two speeches it will be evident that over those five months the President has not wavered in the slightest, merely given the rest of the world an opportunity to enter into an often wobbly orbit around his position, that of regime change. In this sense, when we speak of a Ronald Reagan or a George W. Bush as men of gravity, it is nearly literal. Such men remain at the center and exert an attracting force on all that surround them. They affect events far more than they are affected by them.

In the following days (by the end of February) the administration will release intelligence that proves Saddam to have been thwarting inspections and Colin Powell will make his official pronouncement that Saddam's hour of reckoning has come. The polls and public opinion will, at that point, take care of themselves. Only someone who's too shallow to lead a great nation would be worried about his approval numbers at this point in the game.

MORE:
Bush to Gird U.S. for Prospect of War in Speech (Steve Holland, Jan. 24, 2003, Reuters)
Bush Creates Office in Post-Saddam Plan: Bush Creates New Pentagon-Based Office As Part of Post-Saddam Planning (The Associated Press, Jan. 22, 2003)
An anxious America keeps on smiling (James Harding, January 25 2003, Financial Times)

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 25, 2003 10:10 AM