The Great Conflater

Say what you want about his policies, George W. Bush can be a gracious man. U.S. presidents traveling the world—especially this very dangerous part of the world—tend to have an effect on locals that is reminiscent of Godzilla tromping through Tokyo. In order to secure the president the Secret Service will order entire neighborhoods evacuated, main thoroughfares closed off, and businesses shuttered—disrupting thousands of lives and generating fear and loathing as well as headlines. So it went as Bush made a historic visit Thursday—the "first political visit by a U.S. president," his secretary of state, Condi Rice, proudly told me—to the Palestinian protostate and its key cities of Ramallah and Bethlehem. (Bill Clinton did a brief Christmas stopover at the latter in 1998.)

First there was Bush's 45-car motorcade to Ramallah, where he held hands with a beaming Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas at his headquarters but didn't leave many other smiling faces in his wake. That was followed by an "aircade" of Marine choppers into Bethlehem, where townspeople were frozen in place by their own Palestinian police, who raised guns at them in alleyways, while Bush took his time touring the grotto where Jesus was allegedly born. Bottom line, the president didn't win many friends in Palestine (and he didn't have many to start with). But to his credit, Bush seemed acutely aware of the distress he was causing. "I want to thank the people of Bethlehem for enduring a presidential visit," Bush said. He also noted that while his vast motorcade didn't have to go through any Israeli checkpoints, Ramallahans still did every day, and he knew they experienced "massive frustration." Those were nice touches. I don't remember Clinton ever saying things like that.

Nice touches, however, don't get remembered long. Graciousness does not a legacy make. And legacy-building is what this trip is mainly about. With many of the regular White House correspondents back in the states covering the primaries, as eager as Tibetan monks to find the next Anointed One, Bush knows that each passing month means he'll get less and less attention—and command less and less leverage. And so he seems keen to clarify what he thinks his legacy might be while the world's still listening.

Instead of clarity, though, we are all just getting more confused. We've often heard him say he believes in freedom. And in democracy. And peace. And in Christ as his Savior. Now the references are coming fast and furious, in mix-and-match rhetoric that seems to use these terms and ideas almost interchangeably. On Thursday Bush blended all of them together, in a kind of legacy stew. Freedom and democracy, he told Palestinians, would help them achieve an agreement with the Israelis. "Free societies yield peace," Bush said, though he didn't say how freedom or democracy would make it any easier for them to give up West Bank land they believe is theirs. And the presence of Christ's birthplace in their land would somehow help things along too, Bush suggested. "Some day I hope that as a result of a formation of a Palestinian state there won't be walls and checkpoints, that people will be able to move freely in a democratic state," the president said after his visit to the Church of the Nativity, built in A.D. 529 over the cave that many Christians believe was Jesus's birthplace. "That's the vision, greatly inspired by my belief that there is an Almighty," he said. "And a gift of that Almighty to each man, woman and child on the face of the earth is freedom. And I felt it strongly here today."

Enough already. We've had a president who was the Great Emancipator. And another who was the Great Communicator. Bush is the Great Conflater. In his first term he conflated the threat from Al Qaeda with the threat from Saddam ("You can't distinguish between Al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror," Bush said in September 2002), and then tossed groups like Hizbullah and Hamas into the mix (though their goals were markedly different from Al Qaeda's). Now Bush is suggesting that all the problems he lumped in together can be solved by an equally lumpy panacea of freedom and democracy.

Bush is hardly the first president to evangelize about freedom and democracy, with a healthy helping of Jesus added in. (If you doubt this, go reread the speeches of Woodrow Wilson, a pastor's son.) And, like Bush, many presidents have been ridiculed overseas by foreign counterparts who pooh-pooh this kind of rhetoric, even while the world has been gradually remade in America's freedom-loving image. (Indeed, the leitmotif of the Bush administration has been its insistence that the Mideast undergo the same transformation almost every other region has.)