Presidents Remade by War

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Anyone who has listened to President Bush's recent speeches about the need to promote democracy in the Arab-Muslim world can't but walk away both impressed and dubious — impressed because promoting democracy in the Arab world is something no president before has advocated with Mr. Bush's vigor, and dubious because this sort of nation-building is precisely what Mr. Bush spurned throughout his campaign. Where did Mr. Bush's passion for making the Arab world safe for democracy come from?

Though the president mentioned this theme before the war, it was not something he stressed with the public, Congress or the U.N. in justifying an Iraq invasion. Rather, he relied primarily on the urgent need to pre-emptively strip Iraq of weapons of mass destruction.

A cynic might say that Mr. Bush was always interested only in stripping Iraq of its W.M.D. But with no W.M.D. having been unearthed thus far in Iraq, and with the costs of the war in lives and dollars soaring, the president felt he needed a new rationale. And so he focused on the democratization argument.

But there is another explanation, one that is not incompatible with the first but is less overtly cynical. It is a story about war and events and how they can transform a president.

"It often happens," argues Michael Sandel, the Harvard political theorist, "that presidents, under the pressure of events, especially during war, find themselves needing to articulate new and more persuasive rationales for their policies — especially when great sacrifices are involved.

The only sacrifices currently being made in Iraq and, lest we forget, Afghanistan, are the lives of US troops and innocent civilians. Here in the States, we get testy if we have to pay more than $1.75 for a gallon of gas. And the Adminstration urges us to go shopping in support of the war on terrorism...so much for biting the bullet in support of the war effort.

In securing the Homeland, some 6,000 airport baggages screeners were cut from the federal payroll to save money, yet $87 billion could be found to pay for the tax-cuts to Howdy's campaign contributors. Chemical factories, ready made WMD's near and in major US metropolitan areas continue to go unprotected, and legislation to force them to bring their security measures up to the threat has been killed in Congress...at the behest of the petro-chem industry.

Sorry, I got off track there...Bush's shift to justifying the war on Iraq as part of spreading democracy rings hollow in the face of all that has gone before it. It has the sound of the death row conversion of a convicted mass murderer...or a whore preaching about the virtues of chastity in Sunday school.