Fishing for a Way to Change the World

Bush Doctrine 5.0 flopped in practice faster than any of its predecessors. Within a year, no one in the administration other than Rice wanted to talk about the Freedom Agenda. This idea did the impossible: it caused Dick Cheney and the State Department bureaucracy to agree about something, namely that the president's policy was a pipe dream. The dissonance between Bush's message and his cavalier attitude toward civil liberties discredited him as a moral messenger. While pressing for divinely ordained liberty in the Middle East, Bush was still taking Dick Cheney's advice on keeping Guantánamo open, allowing torture, and listening in on phone conversations by American citizens. Thus did Bush's universal call for democracy not only become an exercise in futility but in many places actually proved counterproductive. From Russia to Venezuela, associating democratic opponents with Bush's foreign policy became a pretext for taking rights away. In Iran, the Nobel Peace Prize–winning human-rights lawyer Shirin Ebadi complained that Bush's advocacy was setting her cause back. Thus did the fifth Bush Doctrine recede into what the president called, in a phrase from his second inaugural, the "work of generations."

Bush's final foreign policy (11/8/06 to date) was the absence of any functioning doctrine at all. After the Republican loss of both houses of Congress, his administration cobbled together an enfeebled hybrid based on the collapse of the previous five: a retreat from unipolarity, a moratorium on the application of preemption (though bombing Iran remained under discussion), and a tacit consensus to regard the Freedom Agenda as presidential hot air. Bush and his speechwriters have not acknowledged his final doctrine's demise. He has said that he will make democracy promotion his major post-presidential project, and that he intends to set up a freedom institute as part of the presidential library to be built at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

The final irony of Bush's foreign-policy crackup was the way it vindicated his father's choices. Not "finishing the job" and taking ownership of Iraq in 1991 now looked like an act of wisdom. Not making a triumphal speech when the Berlin Wall came down appeared as shrewd management of a dicey situation, which advanced the practical cause of freedom more than a provocative speech would have. Appreciating the value of stability sounded like maturity. Avoiding needlessly bellicose rhetoric seemed like common sense. As the historian Timothy Naftali writes in his generally admiring 2007 biography of George H. W. Bush, "As the younger Bush's own presidency limped to an end, many missed the elder Bush's realism, his diplomacy, his political modesty, and, yes, even his prudence." The more the son's faults glared, the more his father's reputation grew.

From The Bush Tragedy by Jacob Weisberg. Published by Random House Publishing Group. © 2008 by Jacob Weisberg.

© 2008