Fishing for a Way to Change the World

At a temperamental level, the president has almost no ability to accept blame or learn from mistakes. Disagreement, whether from critics or allies, sounds like his mother's nagging and his father's disappointment. Thus criticism has the opposite of its intended effect on him. Disapproval hardens Bush's conviction that he must be right and reinforces his refusal to surrender. Believing he earned his position in life through willpower, he feels he shouldn't have to ask anyone for permission. This obstinacy has been evident in his personnel practices as well as policy choices. The more the media demanded Bush yield up a head—CIA Director George Tenet, Rumsfeld, Karl Rove, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales—the longer that person was likely to be staying around.

Bush's inflexibility is rooted in the old family drama. It reflects not just a personality forged in opposition to his father, but an idea of leadership developed in conscious contrast to him. Where George H. W. Bush weighed options, W. sizes you up and decides. Where 41 saw shades of gray, 43 finds moral clarity. "The son prides himself on being the guy who cuts through it all, who is decisive, not wishy-washy," Brent Scowcroft told me in November 2007. "The subtleties, partly because of his inexperience, don't seem to matter as much. His father, with the background he has, knows that at best you're operating forty-nine/fifty-one—and you'd better be sure that the fifty-one is on your side and not the forty-nine."

Bush makes a point of saying, whenever it comes up, that he doesn't get advice from his father about the conduct of the war. Judging from his father's roundabout efforts to influence him, this seems likely to be true. In his book, "Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy," Andrew Cockburn reports a visit 43 paid to Kennebunkport during the summer of 2004. His father gave him a memo that Scowcroft had asked him to pass along about Iraq. The president glanced at it before throwing it aside, telling his dad, "I'm sick and tired of getting papers from Brent Scowcroft telling me what to do, and I never want to see another one again." With that, 43 stalked out of the room and slammed the door behind him.

The collapse of his preemption justification for the war (terrorism + WMD = intolerable threat) sent Bush not into any reexamination of his decision, but toward grander and grander justification. Shortly before the election in 2004, Bush's friend and former Texas Rangers partner Tom Bernstein gave him the galley proofs of "The Case for Democracy" by the former Soviet refusenik and right-wing Israeli politician Natan Sharansky. Sharansky's book portrays Bush in a heroic light, comparing the war against terrorism to the struggle against the Nazis and the Soviets. Sharansky draws a contrast to Bush's father's "notorious" Chicken Kiev speech in 1991 telling the Ukrainians to avoid "suicidal nationalism," which he calls "an unmitigated disaster."

Sharanskyism, the exfoliated version of the Freedom Agenda, became Bush Doctrine 5.0, Freedom Everywhere (1/20/05– 11/7/06). Bush unveiled his newest foreign policy in his second inaugural address, which announced the goal of abolishing oppression on planet Earth: "It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world." Democracy is God's gift to humanity, Bush declared, and the United States would help extend its blessings.

It is hard to believe that anyone other than Bush and his speechwriters, who seemed increasingly to be making his foreign policy, thought about the issue of democracy promotion in such shallow, utopian terms. Though his inaugural address sounded religious, there is no theological basis for democracy as God's chosen system of government. The Old Testament favors monarchy, the New Testament, a kind of socialism. It was as if Bush now simply identified his democratic crusade with the will of God.