This Media Life

Bush Family Values

We’ve been assiduously treating this Iraq war as normal—at least as far as wars go—rather than unique to the Bushes.

The argument is in many ways rather quaintly old-fashioned: hawk versus dove. Hawks argue for the efficiency of war (the Times, notably, often seems to accept this argument), and doves argue about its vast and grievous hurtfulness.

Even the millions of protesters seem to regard the prospect of war as a basic moral or strategic disagreement—MR. PRESIDENT, LET THE INSPECTIONS WORK, read a particularly forlorn set of placards. Or some revert to the oil view—which, however mendacious, would still be a straightforward reason to go to war. Even the most extreme and creative lefties seem to have no real language for distinguishing the Bush motivation from any other kind of aggression.

And yet the question lurks. Sometimes it’s phrased as “Why now?” But that’s still strategic and moral, when perhaps it should be larger, more theatrical: “What’s the character motivation? What’s the emotional payoff?”

There is, weirdly, the grandness of it all. The operatic quality. The zeal. The demonizing. The ever-greater building of the tension. The duct tape.

Surely, too, it’s out of balance to have staked everything on Iraq—the economy, the world order, the favorability rating of the president himself.

Then to have made it so entirely us against almost everybody else—to have, at almost every point, emphasized our dead-set determination in contrast to all the more moderate voices (in diplomacy, you always try to align with the moderate voices)—is hardly textbook politics.

And to have let it go on for so long is, in any conventional political-operations manual, crazy.

It is all so counterintuitive that it can only mean there is another really big idea here. It isn’t just happenstance or a mistake. Rather, this is being craftily managed. Stage-managed, if you will.

Everybody may just be too polite or cowed or impressed with the whole operation (or afraid of it) to bring up with any insistence the history-repeating-itself-as-farce thing.

In some sense, there may even be a tendency to think that history will repeat itself verbatim. Even improve upon the first time around.

There was, after all, negative opinion then—but it reversed itself almost immediately. Fascination just took over. It was great television. (In the initial hours, it was most of all CNN that was being rooted for.) It was irresistible.

As U.S. forces and a potpourri of allied friends began to move across the desert—unstopped, unstoppable—the enthusiasm got even greater. There was the sudden, unexpected supremacy of the American fighting man over the desert (the first time we had seen the American fighting man decked out in new military techno-garb—in fact, the first time we’d seen the American fighting man in action mode since Vietnam). And then there was this joke army fighting us—and the burnt-out carcasses of the machinery it left behind. (This was the moment: Everywhere in the world, from Berlin to Moscow to Prague to Bucharest to Kuwait, when you pushed back against the bully, he fell.)

The president was swept up—however fleetingly—in as much popularity and good feeling as, arguably, an American president has ever known. The man was really reinvented. All that inarticulateness and Wasp awkwardness, and those poor media skills, were suddenly transformed into authenticity and decisiveness and pluck. For a minute there, he must have felt that he was who he believed he was. The man in the mirror matched the man on television. I know that I certainly thought, What a guy!

But then, of course, it all got messed up. They didn’t play it through (didn’t get Saddam). Didn’t hold onto it.

But here we are again.

And if it’s too much—certainly it’s hokey, not to mention dangerous—that the same guys are trying to do the same thing once more, I think the smart money believes they’re going to pull it off.

That, shortly, a screaming will come across the sky with a destructive virtuosity heretofore unimagined. Never before in the history of warfare, the smart money assumes, will there have been an attack so choreographed and one-sided.

So it’s not going to really matter that the whole deal was something of a put-up job—a forced construct—because when it works even better than it worked twelve years ago (after all, we’ve really improved all this stuff), when we roll in like nobody’s business, when the Iraqi Army runs for its life, this victory, like all victories, is going to be irresistible, too (the White House and Pentagon are so confident of this that, for the first time in a generation, they’re getting ready to bring reporters to the front). The American media will swoon—and the American people will be glued to their sets, cheering the winner, who is us.

And, of course, the French and the Germans will, in a New York minute, be on the side of the victors, too. You’ll never find a frog or Kraut who doubted the president. Everyone—Iraqis, lefties, Euros—will acquiesce (and fawn), and George Bush will be acclaimed some really marvelous man of the moment. Strong, steadfast, determined, invincible—ready to stand up to all manner of tyrants and yellow-bellied world opinion.

And this time the Bushies no doubt believe they won’t blow it.