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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
January 19, 2003
Question of speed
The question Who is George W. Bush? is one that I have returned to often in my columns and without apology. For he is an important man: the most powerful in the world for the foreseeable future. History is not made by angels or by demons but by men -- even if as a Christian I discern the hand of God in innumerable events from the circumstances of the greatest history-changing battles to the surprise of grace in a small private life. The gods may exact their price and nature itself will punish alike arrogance and cowardice though it does not always reward humility or courage. Yet history works through men and the decisions made by one man in power can change the lives of millions including millions unborn. As I've stressed before it became apparent that Mr. Bush would have power to change history beyond that of a normal U.S. President on the morning of Sept. 11th 2001. It was in that moment I began to take the man very seriously. People who live lives of apparent safety and comfort working towards their pensions have difficulty appreciating how fragile the world is. I am not referring to endangered species or "ecosystems" -- the first thing that will come to a shallow mind. Nature is robust it is our human world the social order which we construct and which sustains us -- that is so fragile. I am always in more danger from my fellow man than from any volcano or hurricane or earthquake; and hardly from his second-hand smoke. The first thing that appealed to me about President Bush even before the "events of 9/11" was his relative freedom from cant from speaking nonsense. In his predecessor I found a low-grade example of what I am myself: an intellectual someone who at his cheapest thinks words and gestures are sufficient unto the day and is pleased with himself when he has settled upon a fine purely verbal construction. The Mr. Bush that emerges from David Frum's new book The Right Man is surely not an intellectual in this sense; he is in fact despised by all the cheaper sorts of intellectuals. He is halting and inarticulate distracted and indecisive when confronted with decisions of which he is unsure. But he can be remarkably articulate and resolute when he is convinced of a necessary course of action; and impossible to deflect once he has decided his course. The very presence of this quality of resolution makes him unlike an intellectual and alien to most who believe in the sheer efficacy of words. It happens to be the quality most needed in a war leader which is why he emerged so impressively after the attacks on New York and Washington. And yet I'm inclined to mildly disagree with my old friend Mr. Frum that it was not apparent earlier. In face of large opposition and armed with only a squeaking mandate he got his proposed long-term tax cuts through Congress in the first months having decided it was the big "right thing to do" at the time. I at least was impressed by this. Mr. Frum is right however that the President's agenda lacked a follow-up ambition and that by September of his first year there were many signs of floundering. Less so in foreign than in domestic policy for it appeared that when President Bush rather than Secretary of State Colin Powell was making decisions the U.S. was disentangling itself from previous mistakes. It was already requiring action not words from Chinese politburo and Palestinian Authority. I wrote last summer speculatively about how Mr. Bush has envisioned what I called the "labour of Hercules" confronting him -- the cleaning of the Augean Stables of "Islamist" political fanaticism. I said then that I believed Mr. Bush had come to a "Lincolnesque" view that democracy must be brought to the Arab world whatever the cost. And it will require the equivalent of Hercules' labour -- the diverting of great rivers of civil democracy to wash out the foetid sludge of many tyrannical and dangerous regimes. I did not say Mr. Bush had a detailed grand strategic plan only a resolution to work consistently to the end of replacing tyrannies with constitutional democracies in the key states. This is just what is being attempted in Afghanistan and what will be attempted in Iraq and later elsewhere. My impression from Mr. Frum's book -- the first true glimpse we have had inside the White House from a very intelligent "outsider" -- is that I needn't take this back. The man Mr. Frum depicts must be in possession of such a clear idea. It keeps him ahead of events and distractions and shows him the order in which he must proceed though working often from information that is invisible to us. The President's fault may not be resolution but the absence of another quality which the Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld seems to have. Mr. Frum reveals the President's short temper and "tartness" in working collegially but Mr. Bush has too much patience when taking the longer view. He is over-methodical and his surrounding himself mostly with over-methodical people is a hint of this. He has a very realistic sense of what can and can't be achieved by government bureaucracies including the military. He is too easily content with pushing consistently in the same right direction -- with "getting his ducks in order". And he is very good at doing that though the world is not inclined to notice. He does everything he can to assuage his allies. His essential decency is often apparent (to anyone who listens). Whereas Mr. Rumsfeld in my example is afflicted with what I would call "the higher impatience". More cheerful up close he is much less methodical in the longer view. He wants things done yesterday and is more inclined to change diplomatic realities than to accommodate them. He has a better appreciation of the element of surprise and thus of the speed at which events can get beyond us. He is like Mr. Bush in a hurry. But things are beginning to get out of hand (example North Korea). The U.S. direction is right and my sense is that Mr. Bush was "the right man" to choose it. I pray he will also prove the right man to select the speed. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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