The Regents and the Dauphin
The most confounding aspect of this Iraq debate is the question of motivation. Why in the world are we really doing this? Clearly, the official explanations don't make sense, the "case" has been presented over and over again, but it has never been made. We spend hours and days researching the past writings of the advisors, reading 5 pound tomes about the history of the middle east, and desperately scanning the foreign press for hints about what they are really up to. We force ourselves to fight the nausea that listening to the President inevitably brings and make ourselves watch him repeat his bumper stickers mantras over and over again. Oil, Pax Americana, personal revenge, bloodlust, delusions of grandeur, Israel, end-times...it goes on and on.
Oddly, it's a somewhat serious Maureen Dowd who most accurately answers the question of motivations, and illustrates why the "case" has been so shockingly incoherent:
The president wants to avenge his father, and please his base by changing the historical ellipsis on the Persian Gulf war to a period. Donald Rumsfeld wants to exorcise the post-Vietnam focus on American imperfections and limitations. Dick Cheney wants to establish America's primacy as the sole superpower. Richard Perle wants to liberate Iraq and remove a mortal threat to Israel. After Desert Storm, Paul Wolfowitz posited that containment is a relic, and that America must aggressively pre-empt nuclear threats.
And in 1997, Bill Kristol of The Weekly Standard and Fox News, and other conservatives, published a "statement of principles," signed by Jeb Bush and future Bush officials — Mr. Rumsfeld, Mr. Cheney, Mr. Wolfowitz, Scooter Libby and Elliott Abrams. Rejecting 41's realpolitik and shaping what would become 43's pre-emption strategy, they exhorted a "Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity," with America extending its domain by challenging "regimes hostile to our interests and values."
And then there is Karl, whose influence is easily as great as any of the above and who weighs in with the electoral calculation and the motivation that has to be a primary one in Junior's mind --- not to be booted out of office after having attained it on a technicality, an asterisk forever after his name, less successful even than his wimp of a lip reading Poppy. Bush family honor, sis boom bah.
And, there is the scary question of Bush believing he is anointed by God, as Jack Beatty writes about so vividly in the Atlantic:
Why? The surface explanations—Saddam has weapons of mass destruction, has used them on his neighbors, on his own people, and "could" use them against us—fall short, don't balance the heaping price Mr. Bush is prepared to pay. To judge by his rhetoric, the President believes God has chosen him to lead the U.S. in a war against "Evil"; beside that eschatological assignment, NATO, the UN, our allies, Arab opinion, world opinion, the war on terror, the budget, are as nothing.
So, the problem isn't that there is one overarching sinister reason for the insane foreign policy actions we are taking. It's that every member of the administration has his own overarching reason, and they are all competing and conniving and complimenting to the extent that we are now being pushed by events and nobody knows quite how or why we are doing it.
All of this comes around, once again, to the absolute folly of allowing a callow, gladhanding brand name to assume the office on the assurance that he would be "advised" by a committee of cool hands with limitless expertise. Human nature and history shows that this never works. An ignorant, childlike Dauphin is always spoiled, stubborn and convinced of his own infallability while also being easily manipulated by his Regents. They battle amongst themselves, and with him, until the government becomes nothing more than a game board upon which each faction presses his advantage of the moment, only to be outmaneuvered or overtaken by a rival. The boy-king, meanwhile, is always also held close by some who whisper in his ear that he has been ordained by God to maintain the power of his forebears.
Democracy and an open meritocratic society were supposed to insure that the government was never led again by a silly boy and his unaccountable cabal. Yet here we are, once again.