THE DEAN GETS A TARDY:

Step by Step to War (David S. Broder, March 18, 2003, Washington Post)

It has been a long road to this moment of decision on Iraq, but the inevitability of the destination has been clear. When historians have access to the memos and the diaries of the Bush administration's insiders, it's likely they will find that President Bush set his sights on removing Saddam Hussein from power soon after the 9/11 terrorist attacks -- if not before.

Everything the president has said publicly -- everything that Vice President Cheney reiterated in his Sunday television interviews -- confirms that the impact of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks was to steel Bush's determination to disarm any ruler who plausibly might collaborate in a similar or worse assault. And to him, disarming clearly meant dislodging that potential assailant from power.

Skeptics may argue that the United States has yet to produce convincing evidence of a link between the Baghdad regime and the al Qaeda terrorists. But the link exists in the mind of the commander in chief, and he is prepared to act on that conviction.

It's no wonder Saddam and the French and the rest of the intransigents never took George W. Bush's resolve seriously when it too David Broder, the dean of the Washington press corps, 17 months to figure out that regime change was the President's bottom line. It's strange how Mr. Bush's critics demand that he play the diplomatic game, which they recognize he has nothing but contempt for, then convince themselves and others that he'll be bound by the "rules" of what he's made clear is naught but a charade.

It should have been clear from how he governed Texas what his modus operandi was, but there's no excuse, especially after the way the No Child Left Behind Act played out, for any serious observer--like Mr. Broder--to still not get it. If you''ll recall, the Democrats crowed and the far Right cringed as Ted Kennedy added money and gewgaws to the bill, but Mr. Bush continually said that so long as the bill included testing, accountability, and consequences he'd sign it. And so the final bill, regardless of the rest of the clutter, imposes a testing regime that will declare as many as 80% of America's public schools to be providing an inadequate education and will allow students in those schools to transfer. Without even comprehending what they were doing, the Left helped George W. Bush begin the process of voucherizing education.

Similarly, when it came to the removal of Saddam, Mr. Bush allowed himself to be coaxed into going to Congress for authorization (which he'd planned to do all along, as the Constitution requires) and to the UN, while the troops in the region were built up, made all the calls anyone could ask for to try and pass a final resolution, offered allies money and other emoluments to join the coalition, etc., etc., etc.... But he never took his eyes off the prize: regime change. This weekend, Daniel Schor was on NPR expressing bewilderment at how the President could demand a vote on an 18th resolution on Monday and by Friday be telling Tony Blair it was fine by him if it was just withdrawn. Mr. Schor said he'd never seen an administration that could reverse course so easily and make so little of it. It seemed as though it had never occurred to Mr. Schor that the President could do so because he genuinely didn't care one way or another about the UN--having them along, at least rhetorically, would have silenced some peoples' concerns, but the UN has no role to play in the actual waging of the war and is too debased an institution to offer a meaningful moral imprimatur. The important thing, from Mr. Bush's perspective, is and has been to remove Saddam. No amount of background noise was ever going to deflect him from that aim.

And, at the end of the day, once again, he's achieving his goals. Mr. Broder, though he may be alone, appears to have figured this out. Whether he's correct that Mr. Bush did not anticipate all the side effects--like the delegitimization of the EU and the UN--we'll only know for sure in a few years. But, considering that the President stocked his administration with advisors who are hostile to such transnational institutions and considering that they now done them significant damage, it seems like Mr. Broder might want to consider that this too was a goal that was within the President's sights.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 18, 2003 10:40 AM