What Worries Me About You is Your Optimism

Nearly a month before the war in Iraq began, while the Bush Administration was publicly saying it would wait for on-the-ground WMD inspections to be concluded, the President hosted Spanish Prime Minister José Marìa Aznar at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, and told him that the war was coming. We all know now, of course, that the Administration was hell-bent on taking out Saddam regardless of what inspections found, but this article by Mark Danner in The New York Review of Books provides another interesting look at Bush's state of mind and the response it elicited from a world leader who wanted to support the President but who was wary of rushing to war. Bush, of course has no doubts:

Aznar: The only thing that worries me about you is your optimism.

Bush: I am an optimist, because I believe that I'm right. I'm at peace with myself. It's up to us to face a serious threat to peace.

Says Danner:

It is worrying, as Aznar remarks, to rely on optimism grounded only in belief. The Spaniard knows that gaining that second Security Council resolution, and thus the critical international legitimacy for the war, will be very hard; in many nations, launching a war against Iraq, particularly before the UN inspectors have finished their work, is deeply unpopular. Faith cannot replace facts, nor can a historic sense of mission. Both may be personally comforting—they plainly are to George W. Bush—but they don't obviate the need to know things.

Bush came to office a man who knew little of the world, who had hardly traveled outside the country, who knew nothing of the practice of foreign policy and diplomacy. Two years later, after the attacks of September 11 and his emergence as a self-described "war president," he has come to know only that this lack of knowledge is not a handicap but perhaps even a strength: that he doesn't need to know things in order to believe that he's right and to be at peace with himself. He has redefined his weakness—his lack of knowledge and experience—as his singular strength. He believes he's right. It is a matter of generations and destiny and freedom: it is "up to us to face a serious threat to peace." For Bush, faith, conviction, and a felt sense of destiny —not facts or knowledge—are the real necessities of leadership.

And the whole world has paid the price.