The Feudal Presidency
I’m sure Bush’s big Iraq speech will be judged a success by the people whose business it is to judge his speeches successful. He was composed. He kept the smirking to a minimum. He didn’t make any obvious gaffes (“nukeyaler” no longer counts, and nobody cares how to pronounce Abu Nidal’s name anyway). He appeared to mean what he said, even if he didn’t always understand what he said. And he felt very, very strongly about the whole thing. All of this, by the low standards of the Bush presidency, constitutes a signal triumph.
While the speech had a certain coherence, anyone looking for logic in the strict “cause-and-effect” sense should have known better by now. Logic requires that assertions be supported by proof. Logic dictates that when propositions contradict each other, one of them must be false. Logic begins with a premise and works its way to a conclusion, not vice versa. “If x, then y” implies the question, “But what if not x?”
Logic defeats and frustrates those who prefer to act on instinct or faith. It raises doubts and nettlesome questions. As an objective standard of the reasonableness of an argument, it gives any and all the power to demand that authority account for itself in a systematic way. In the hands of 17th and 18th century polemicists, it was the intellectual lever by which the prerogatives of feudal monarchies were dismantled and the institutions of democracy – freedom of speech, religion, press, and representative government – were justified. Out of the clash of ideas comes the truth. That’s why democracies are better.
Bush doesn’t like the clash of ideas. It gives him a headache. He’s an MBA, not a lawyer. As the Man of the house, once he has Made Up His Mind, he does not feel he needs to answer to anyone or anything. Bush’s speechwriters can turn the phrases and marshal the arguments, but the President himself is temperamentally unable to make them sound convincing. His efforts at explanation are strained and condescending. He is palpably impatient with facts, uncomfortable handling the tools of reason. His Word should be enough for us.
As a result, the substance of his speeches falls apart like cotton candy upon the slightest scrutiny. One of the central points of Bush’s address last night was his insistence on a connection between Iraq and Al-Quaida. “Two sides of the same evil coin,” he called them. Yes, perhaps. And this proves, what? Ted Kozinski and Timothy McVeigh both perpetrated acts of terror against the United States, motivated by ideological hatred of its policies. Is there any reason to believe that a left-wing eco-terrorist and a right-wing militia nut would join forces with each other, or share weapons of mass destruction if either possessed them? In positing an alliance between Saddam and Osama, that’s basically what Bush is asking us to believe – without a shred of solid evidence.
That’s just one example. Time after time in the speech, Bush raised significant questions – why now? Why divert resources from the war on terror? Why not sanctions? – and answered them with the same vague generalities and unsubstantiated scraps of information we’ve been hearing for weeks. Rational discourse requires facts, not just assertions. Facts like that 1998 IAEE report that said Saddam was six months away from building a nuke… except that there was no IAEE report. Or that story about the guys trying to smuggle uranium from Turkey in a taxi cab… except that that turned out not to be true. Or this meeting between Mohammed Atta and Iraqi security… that may never have taken place.
Facts are unkind to Bush so he, in return, is unkind to them. However, absent the facts, there is no reason – there is only faith. The faithful don’t need convincing, the faithful don’t argue back. Right is right, evil is evil. What else is there to discuss?
The ever-changing reasons for going to war sound so hollow coming from the Administration because the war is not, at base, a reasonable issue for them. It is an article of faith. Facts, logic and the entire arsenal of tools we have developed since the Enlightenment for questioning and evaluating the actions of authorities simply don’t apply. No wonder, then, that our Feudal President seems so annoyed by the formalities of this debate.
7:52:32 AM 
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