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Why Bush deserves four more years

by Jack Neely

Back in March 2003, when the invasion of Iraq appeared to be going swimmingly, and the television news was full of flag-waving and Iraqis hitting statues of Saddam with their shoes, I did something that some folks thought I shouldn’t have.

I wrote a couple of cynical columns. You come to expect cynicism from journalists, of course. We’re just mean that way.

In one column, I speculated about whether, in spite of early appearances of a swift military victory and happy, statue-toppling crowds, the aftermath of the invasion might turn out to be much more complicated. I noted that aftermaths of wars are almost always unpredictable, and most often the unintended consequences are much bigger than the intended one. In a second column I wondered whether the Iraq invasion might, in fact, turn out to be as troublesome as the aftermath of another moral conquest waged by the United States, ultimately to democratize another troubled region: the American South. “Reconstruction,” as they called it, spawned a wave of terrorism unseen in this nation before or since. People who’d never had any particular interest in slavery were angry at just having been invaded. People are like that. People began hating whole groups of people they’d never even thought about much before. People who’d never thought of themselves as killers were hanging other people from trees.

Southerners weren’t the only problem. War has perverse influences on nearly everybody it touches. Northern occupiers made mistakes, hurt some innocent people, insulted others, and unwittingly spawned insurgencies. The postwar violence lasted for about a century. I know people who still aren’t over it.

Some readers found those columns inappropriate. The invasion of Iraq was going well, after all. The Iraqi people seemed duly shocked and awed. My suggesting that the invasion of Iraq might spawn decades of guerilla warfare, terrorism, revenge killings, or anything as troublesome as the postwar South—well, that was just being negative.

I’m just a guy who researches local history, anyway. What do I know about Iraq today? I figured somebody in Washington knew something more about Iraq’s potential for long-term violence than I did. They’d been there, after all, they’d debriefed the defectors, interviewed Islamic scholars, studied maps, monitored electronic communications for years. They’d have a better picture of the aftermath than one obscure history columnist’s guesses, based on regional history 140 years ago.

Chastened, I’ve shut up since then, mostly, and hoped for the best. After all, I’ve got friends over there. And a son who is registered for the draft.

I supported President Bush’s reprisals against the Taliban, who were sheltering al-Qaeda, the organization that attacked us. Though I held my breath when we invaded Afghanistan, I was relieved it went much better than the Soviet precedent some expected.

In those post-traumatic days, there was hardly any resistance on the home front. I witnessed only one antiwar demonstration in 2002, a small group of Christians on UT’s campus. However, I have friends in other parts of the world, in England, in Malaysia, who thought the invasion was a horrible crime, and that we didn’t know what we were doing. I argued that, finally, we did.

I supported Bush a few months later, when he was discussing invading another country that pretty obviously had nothing to do with al-Qaeda. I believed that Bush had a plan. He was a wilier guy than we gave him credit for. I told my skeptical wife and guys at the pub that he was like a Texas card sharp, using his credible bluff of invasion to get Saddam to back down. And he was winning, getting much farther with the arms-control negotiations than Clinton ever did.

But then we invaded.

Today, 19 months later, my honest suspicion is that the gratuitous invasion of Iraq—and the subsequent stubbornness about cooperating with the U.N. in administering it—will go down as a catastrophic blunder.

I’m equally convinced that the fact that the decision to invade Iraq was a blunder doesn’t matter much now. History doesn’t give us many examples of how to handle anything as unwieldy as Iraq, and it doesn’t offer us many options now. We can only hope we’ll leave the place someday, and leave it in better shape than we found it.

Bush’s invasion has also helped result in the biggest budget deficit in the history of the United States—and a degree of suspicion and hatred around the globe, from the third-world pan-Islamic world to industrialized democracies, which I believe is unprecedented.

It will be more difficult for the same group who made the original mistake to fix it than it would be for a new group, which can make new alliances, new deals, without the burden of blame that most of the world seems to hold for George W. Bush.

But is it fair, really, to leave this mess with another president? George W. Bush would go traipsing off to a comfortable retirement of golf and smirky lectures to adoring crowds. He can always insist things woulda turned out great.

Meanwhile, whoever’s elected Nov. 2 stands a strong chance of being, by 2008, the most hated man in America.

He’ll likely have to raise taxes to counter a nearly unmanageable deficit. He’ll have to at least consider reviving the draft. He’ll have to deal with the most dangerous foreign-policy mess since the days of Khrushchev.

When people think of Vietnam, they most often blame the guy who recognized it as a mistake. They blame Nixon, the guy who got us out of Vietnam, more than they blame Johnson, the guy who got us in. You almost want Bush to be stuck with this one.

If home-style justice were how we picked presidents, our motto would be, President Bush has made his bed, now he has to lie in it. Four more years!

Bush may well deserve four more years. But maybe punishing one man with four more years in an office for which he’s so poorly suited should not be our main priority.

October 21, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 43 © 2004 Metro Pulse