Bush and History

David Halberstam's final piece for Vanity Fair picks up the fascinating and frustrating examination of Bush's belief that he is somehow an historical figure along the lines of Harry Truman. Even more, it looks at the history of post WW2 America and casts a cold eye on the triumphalism of Cheney, Rumsfeld and the entire Bush administration. Bush clearly sees himself as a student of history, a designation of which Halberstam is rightly suspect. I recently mentioned Bush's bizarre question to the visiting historian Andrew Roberts, when he asked "what can I learn from history"? And to Halberstam, the question is actually, "how can I cherry pick elementary historical interpretations to fit my black and white worldview"?

For example, Bush cites Yalta as a great sellout by FDR, just as the far right did in the 50s to bludgeon the left as commie symps, and Halberstam calls bullshit on their facts:

President Bush lives in a world where in effect it is always the summer of 1945, the Allies have just defeated the Axis, and a world filled with darkness for some six years has been rescued by a new and optimistic democracy, on its way to becoming a superpower. His is a world where other nations admire America or damned well ought to, and America is always right, always on the side of good, in a world of evil, and it's just a matter of getting the rest of the world to understand this. One of Bush's favorite conceits, used repeatedly in his speeches, is that democracies are peaceful and don't go to war against one another. Most citizens of the West tend to accept this view without question, but that is not how most of Africa, Asia, South America, and the Middle East, having felt the burden of the white man's colonial rule for much of the past two centuries, see it. The non-Western world does not think of the West as a citadel of pacifism and generosity, and many people in the U.S. State Department and the different intelligence agencies (and even the military) understand the resentments and suspicions of our intentions that exist in those regions. We are, you might say, fighting the forces of history in Iraq—religious, cultural, social, and inevitably political—created over centuries of conflict and oppressive rule.

The entire piece is worth reading, because it brings into clear focus the fact that Bush's anti-intellectual persona is worrisome enough, but when he strays into actual historical analogy, his simplistic interpretation of historical events shows that he is only using history to support decisions that were made with no regard at all to actual events. As Halberstam cautions:

Those who know history best tend to be tempered by it. They rarely refer to it so sweepingly and with such complete confidence. They know that it is the most mischievous of mistresses and that it touts sure things about as regularly as the tip sheets at the local track. Its most important lessons sometimes come cloaked in bitter irony. By no means does it march in a straight line toward the desired result, and the good guys do not always win. Occasionally it is like a sport with upsets, in which the weak and small defeat the great and mighty—take, for instance, the American revolutionaries vanquishing the British Army, or the Vietnamese Communists, with their limited hardware, stalemating the mighty American Army.