WHY NICE GUYS MAKE BAD PRESIDENTS

The back-slapping George Bush is often denigrated as a “frat boy” suggesting that he lacks the intellectual seriousness a president requires.  Compared to the men he defeated in two presidential elections, whose grave demeanors were the only heft they supplied to essentially frivolous political posturing, this criticism fails.  Indeed, Bush demonstrated early on that he understood that the West was at a crossroads in meeting the Islamist threat to civilization, the crisis of the day; a fundamental matter that his detractors who label him as a simpleton still don’t get five years after Islamic jihadists slaughtered thousands on American soil.

However, Bush’s back-slapping style is indicative of a major deficiency in his leadership.  He’s a genuinely friendly and gregarious man who likes people and likes to be liked in return.  While there’s nothing wrong with being a nice guy, it is not a quality that makes a man a good president.  Granted, Bush’s ability to inoffensively cajole the Democratic opposition in the Texas legislature during his six years as governor served him well, but Texas Democrats generally don’t suffer from the ideological derangement of leftist Democrats on the national scene who view common human decency as a character defect in the pursuit of power.  Nothing in his experience as governor of Texas prepared Bush for the vileness of politicians like Patrick Leahy, Barbara Boxer, or Jack Murtha.

Fair enough, but how long should it have taken Bush to figure out leftist Democrats, especially when they have been persistently obstructing the war against the jihadists to the point of brooking our defeat?  What other than Bush’s indefatigable desire for collegiality has stopped him from making these obstructionists pay a heavy political price for undermining the pre-emptive defense of our country against an enemy who has the will to attack the “Great Satan” with atomic weapons once they have the means to do so?  Who other than a nice guy pulls his punches to embrace dangerously disloyal politicians as “patriotic Americans”?  This disloyalty runs deeper than the recent passage of a resolution and an emergency appropriation cravenly calculated to frustrate the war against the jihadists without taking accountability for the defeat these bills would countenance.  It is likely that congressional staffers for obstructionist Democrats leaked to the national media information about the Bush Administration’s covert operations against the finances and communications of the Islamic jihadists and jeopardized those effective efforts against the enemy.

Even worse is that Bush the nice guy has not kept his own administration in line when it comes to the serious business of war.  In the wake of the devastation of 9/11, no heads rolled.  Bush held no one accountable for the breakdown in national defense.  With no one brought to heel, the bureaucrats got the message:  Failure is an option, even when it comes to war.  So, for example, the State Department remained wedded to the misbegotten policy of Mideast stability which had perversely fostered Islamic jihadism.  Bush’s secretary of state at the time, Colin Powell, should have put an end to this institutional inertia.  However, Powell had provided the critical counsel a decade earlier in the Gulf War to not topple Saddam Hussein in the name of Mideast stability; bad advice which led to the present Iraq War.  Unwilling to acknowledge his error, Powell never mustered the State Department to gain the cooperation of critical but fair-weather allies, such as Turkey on the eve of the invasion of Iraq.

Similarly the Central Intelligence Agency had a history of poor performance in the Mideast to polish up and so undercut our intelligence efforts to assess the jihadist threat.  The most notorious incident was when the CIA sabotaged the Bush Administration’s request for confirmation that Iraq was shopping for uranium in Western Africa by sending an ex-ambassador on an amateur spying mission.  When this “agent” later revealed his mission to the media and lied about what he had learned in an attempt to blacken Bush in the run-up to the 2004 presidential election, the full weight of the Justice Department didn’t fall on his head but rather a Bush Administration official who tried to discredit the agent with reporters.  An Alice-in-Wonderland outcome that would make for great satire if not for the fact that our premier intelligence agency made bureaucratic infighting a priority over collecting intelligence on the nuclear weapons program of a dangerous regime.

Bush the nice guy seems constitutionally incapable of bringing down the hammer of those who out of venality, perversity, or incompetence obstruct his policy of eliminating the jihadist threat.  As a consequence he has invited unconstitutional intrusions upon the president’s authority as commander-in-chief.  For example, in last year’s Hamdi decision the U.S. Supreme Court claimed the jurisdiction, relying upon international law of all things, to review military tribunals of unlawful combatants waging war against the United States.  Instead of declaring the high court’s decision a dead letter, as his duty to the Constitution required, Bush meekly acceded to its unconstitutional demands and asked Congress for the authority to convene military tribunals of Gitmo detainees.

Likewise, in his current request for an emergency appropriation to fund the “surge” campaign to pacify Baghdad, Bush has tussled with congressional Democrats over additional provisions that would restrict his command of military operations in Iraq as though Congress had the authority to do so.  All Bush would have to do is let the Democrats pass the appropriation laden with those restrictions, sign the bill into law, take the money, and then announce that he is ignoring the restrictions as an unconstitutional encroachment upon his power as commander-in-chief.  No president is obliged to enforce or comply with unconstitutional legislation.  And if Congress finds such defiance outrageous, they have the constitutional prerogative of impeaching the president for his political offenses.  In turn, they can face the voters for doing so.  Instead, Bush helps his congressional opponents, acting in bad faith, maintain the pretense that a legitimate battle over legislation is going on.

Maybe none of this would be so dire if the subversive efforts of congressional Democrats, the State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Supreme Court, and others had no material affect upon Bush’s war-making against the Islamic jihadists.  However, it is now clear that between a brilliant conquest of Iraq and now only in extremis the current offensive against the jihadists there, Bush stayed his hand for four years hoping that patrols by U.S. forces, as opposed to an active campaign of hunt-and-destroy, would vanquish the enemy.  To avoid offending the obstructionist bureaucrats and politicians at home, the Iraqi factions stumbling towards some semblance of self-governance, and even the Iranians and Syrians arming the jihadists, Bush put our servicemen in harm’s way as cops reactively keeping the peace instead of as soldiers actively pursuing and killing the enemy.  Because Bush wanted to be a nice guy between the conquest four years ago and today's surge, more than two thousand of our servicemen lost their lives in Iraq and several thousand more severely wounded.

As I wrote at the outset, Bush, unlike those who disparage him as a “frat boy”, understands that we are in the midst of an epochal crisis.  He understands that we must meet a threat to our civilization that will not be easily or quickly eliminated.  However, that is not the same thing as having the will to do what is necessary to end that threat.  What is necessary is war.  That much Bush has understood and has had the will to undertake.  However, war, justly and effectively conducted, does not offer the luxury of being conducted inoffensively.  The lines between allies and enemies, loyal and disloyal opposition, dissenters and traitors cannot be blurred to make nice with everyone.  Doing so confuses the rationale for war, allows the just causes for it to be called into disrepute, undermines the popular mandate to carry it out, weakens the will of war leaders to make the hard decisions, escalates the cost in blood and treasure, and delays victory or even brings about defeat.

Let us hope that the “surge” campaign is evidence that Bush has found a new will to finally destroy the jihadists in Iraq, end the fomenting of violence in that country by Iran and Syria, and so make it a haven for peace and prosperity in the Mideast.  If not, then we face defeat in Iraq by prematurely withdrawing our forces and inviting new jihadist assaults upon us.  Should that come to pass, it will be proof that nice guys make bad presidents.