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Bush's problem with history

Sidney Blumenthal

ONE YEAR ago, after his re-election, President Bush brashly asserted: "I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it. It is my style." Twelve months later, Republicans were thrashed in elections for the Governorships of Virginia and New Jersey. Then the Republicans in the Congress split and failed to pass Mr. Bush's budget. That was followed by the Senate's rejection of Mr. Bush's torture and detainee policy by a 98-to-0 vote and by the overwhelming passage of a resolution stipulating that the President must submit a strategy on the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq.

The turn against him in public opinion has been slowly considered and is therefore also firm. A majority believes his administration manipulated pre-war intelligence to lead the country into the Iraq war, and two-thirds disapprove of his policy on the war.

In the immediate aftermath of the Iraq war, Mr. Bush was the man of action who never looked back, openly dismissive of history. "History. We don't know. We'll all be dead." But his obsessive interest in the subject is not posthumous. The Senate's decision to launch an investigation into pre-war disinformation has provoked a furious reaction.

On Veterans' Day (November 11), Mr. Bush addressed troops at an army base: "It is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began." He accused "some Democrats and anti-war critics" of lying in stating that "we manipulated the intelligence."

Later, Mr. Bush spoke before troops at an air force base, where he stated that the Democrats "now rewriting the past" are "sending mixed signals to our troops and the enemy."

The former Republican Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, always notable for his visions, has compared Mr. Bush in his travails to Abraham Lincoln before Gettysburg. Mr. Gingrich, who has recently written a series of counterfactual novels depicting a southern triumph in the civil war, communicated his latest flight of fancy to a long-time former diplomat. "We are at war," insisted Gingrich. "With whom?" he was asked. "The Democrats," he apparently replied without hesitation. For Me. Gingrich, ever the Republican guru, history is a plaything of the partisan present.

Mr. Bush's understanding of history also clashes with the conservative tradition that acknowledges human fallibility and respects the past. Mr. Bush's presidency is an effort to defy history, not only in America, writing on the world as a blank slate. Now he wants to erase memory of his actual record, substituting a counterfactual history. "Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history," said Lincoln. Never mind.

(Sidney Blumenthal, a former senior adviser to President Clinton, is the author of The Clinton Wars.)

— © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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