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Benoist_Shanghai
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| Post subject: Faith of George W. Bush |
Faith of George W. Bush
AUTOMATED TRANSLATION
http://www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0@2-3230,36-385757,0.html
LE MONDE | 04.11.04 | 18H10
The American journalist Ron Suskind lengthily inquired into the personality of the president. Its article, we take again extracts here, was published in "new York Times Magazine" of October 17. Bruce Bartlett, to advise for the domestic policy of Ronald Reagan and civil servant of the Treasury for first president Bush, said to me recently: "If Bush carries it on November 3, a civil war will burst within the republican Party". The nature of this conflict, according to the vision of Bartlett? It is primarily the same one as that which made rage in the whole world: a battle between modernistic and fundamentalist, between believing pragmatists and truths, between reason and religion.
"Only during last months, known as Bartlett, I think that a light is extinct for people who lived close to Bush: that this instinct about which it always speaks is this species of odd and Messianic idea of what it believes to him to be said by God."Bartlett, 53 year old chronicler, who describes itself like libertarian republican and who, lately, became the leader of the anxious traditional republicans of the methods of Bush, continued: "It is for that that George W. Bush has a so clear vision of Al-Qaida and the fundamentalist Islamic enemy. He believes that they should all be killed. That they are extremists, pushed by a black vision. He understands them because it is exactly like them... It is for that that he ignores people who oppose awkward facts to him, add Bartlett. He really believes that he achieves a mission for God. An absolute faith as his submerges very required of analysis. Essence for the faith consists in believing in things for which there is no empirical proof."Bartlett is keep silent, then adds: "But one cannot direct the world with the faith."
In March, forty democratic senators were brought together for a lunch with the Senate. I had been invited to speak there. - the democratic senator - Joe Biden told a history on the president: "I was in Bureau Ovale a few months after our entry in Baghdad, and I made share of my many concerns to the president."Bush, Biden remembered, looked at simply, impassive and sure that the United States was on the good way and that all was well. "Finally, I said to him: Mr. President, how can you be so sure for it whereas you know very well that you do not know the facts?"
Bush rose and posed the hand on the shoulder of the senator. "My instinct, it has says. My instinct."Biden keep silent and shook the head, while silence settled in the room. "I said: Mr. President, your instinct is not enough!"
The Biden democrat and the Bartlett republican try to give direction to the same thing: a president who was an extraordinary mixture of determination and impenetrability, of opacity and action.
But, for some time, the words and the acts ended up meeting. The senator Biden heard in fact what one said to the principal collaborators of Bush - since the members of his government like Paul O'Neill, Christine Todd Whitman and Colin Powell to the Generals who fight in Iraq - during years when they asked explanations on the many decisions of the president, policies which often seemed to enter in contradiction with recognized facts. The president answered that it trusted his "tripe" or with his "instinct" to drive the ship of the State and that it "requested for him". As an old pro, Bartlett, a hard worker who reflects and who is based on facts, in the final analysis hears a song that the evangelists gently fredonnent (not to worry the laic ones) since years by brooding?il the president George W. Bush. The group evangelic - the center of the active "base" of Bush - believes that their leader is a messenger of God. And during the first presidential debate, many Americans intended John Kerry to raise for the first time the question of the certainty of Bush - the point being, as well as Kerry formulated, that "on can be certain and to be wrong".
What is there the subjacent one with the certainty of Bush? And can one evaluate them in the temporal field of what is accepted and informed?
All that - the "guts", the "instinct", the certainty and the religiosity - are found in only one word, "faith", and the "faith" affirms even more its influence on the debates in this country and abroad. Everyone knows that a major Christian faith illuminated the personal course of George W. Bush. But the faith also marked its presidency deeply in a nonreligious way. The president required an unconditional faith of his partisans, of his/her collaborators, of its assistants and its similar in the republican Party. When it made a decision - often very quickly, to leave or a position or a moral creed -, it awaits a total faith in its accuracy.
Small satisfied and scornful smiles that many televiewers were surprised to see at the time of the first televised debate of the countryside, are familiar expressions with those at which it arrived, in the administration or with the Congress, simply to ask the president to explain his positions. Since 11-September, these requests became rare. The intolerance of Bush with regard to those which doubt is amplified and today, few people dare to ask him questions. This decree of infallibility - a principle which underlies the powerful certainty of Bush who has, of many ways, moved mountains - is not intended only for the public: it also guided the life inside the White House.
The Fathers founders of the nation, educated since punitive pieties of the religions of State of Europe, were inflexible on the need for setting up a wall between the organized religion and the political authority. But abruptly, that seems very remote. George W. Bush - at the same time captive and creator of this moment - have obstinately, unrelentingly, changed the function itself. It created the presidency based on the faith.
This "presidency based on the faith" is a model with-we-or-against us which was extremely effective, among other things, to maintain work and the character of the White House of Bush in a state of secrecy. The dome of silence fissured a little during the winter and of last springs, with the revelations of the former owner of the antiterrorism Richard Clarke like those, in my book - the black Novel of the White House, Saint-Simon editions -, former secretary with the Treasury, Paul O'Neill. When I quoted O' Neill saying that Bush was like "a blind man in a part full with deaf persons", that did not make me appreciate at the White House. But my telephone started to sound, and of the democrats and the republicans me told similar impressions and anecdotes on the faith and the certainty of Bush. I rest on some of these sources for this article. Few people agreed to speak publicly.
Certain official, elected officials or not, with which I spoke at the time of meetings in Ovale Bureau, questioned themselves by seeing the president struggling with the requirements of the function. Others stressed its qualities in the interpersonal relations, like compensating for its lack of more important capacities. But of others, like the senator Carl Levin of Michigan, a democrat, worry in connection with something about other that its good direction. "It is completely equal to the task, Levin said, it is its lack of curiosity on the complex questions which disturbs me."But over all, I intended to express fears on the supernatural certainty of the president and the astonishment in connection with his source.
Here a history on this particular certainty of Bush who I am able to reconstitute and to tell publicly.
In the Oval office, in December 2002, the president meets some senators of high row and some members of the White House, republicans and democrats. At that time, it was hoped much that the "passenger waybill" supported by the United States for the Israelis and the Palestinians, that is to say a way towards peace, and, in this day of winter, the discussion related to the countries which could provide forces of peace in the area. The problem, and each one agreed, it was that a certain number of European countries, like France and Germany, armies had to which neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians made confidence. A member of the Congress - Tom Lantos, native of Hungary, a democrat of California and only survivor of the Holocaust to the Congress - announced that the Scandinavian countries were considered in a more positive way. Lantos exposed to the president how the Swedish army could be the ideal candidate to anchor a small force of peace in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip. Sweden has a well involved force of 25 000 men. Several people present remember that the president looked it while seeming to evaluate it.
"I do not know why you speak about the Swedes, Bush said. They are neutral. They do not have an army ".
Lantos was keep silent, a little astonished, and made an answer of gentleman: "Mr. President, you had to think that I spoke about the Swiss ones. It is them which are historically neutral and without army."Then Lantos announced, in aside, that the Swiss ones had a strong national guard to protect the country in the event of invasion.
Bush maintained what he had said: "Not, not, it is Sweden which does not have an army."
Silence was done in the part, until somebody changes subject.
A few weeks later, members of the Congress and their wives found themselves at the White House with persons in charge for the administration and other dignitaries for Christmas. The president saw Lantos and the shoulder seizes to him. "You were right, he of a tone catch says. Sweden has indeed an army."
It is Joe Biden, one of the senators present in the Oval office this day of December, who told me the history. Lantos, a liberal democrat, did not make any comment. In general, people who met Bush do not speak about it.
There is characteristic of this presidency based on the faith: the opened dialogue, based on facts, is not regarded as something which has an inherent value. That can, in fact, to create the doubt, who saps the faith. That can lead to a lack of confidence in that which makes the decision and, what is even more important, at that which makes the decision. Nothing can be vital any more, that it acts of a message to the voters, with the terrorists or a member of the Congress of California in a meeting on one of the most worrying problems of the world. As Bush itself a very great number of times said during the countryside, "it is while remaining solved, firm and strong, that this world will find peace ".
It does not speak always thus. An invaluable glance on Bush whereas it was on the point of taking the chair, is that of Jim Wallis, a man who has the additional advantage to have a great acuity on the fight between the facts and the faith. Wallis, Pasteur evangelic who for thirty years has directed Sojourners – an organization progressist of lawyers for social justice - was solicited during the transition to gather various groups of members of the clergy in order to speak about the faith and poverty with the new elected president.
In December 2000, in a classroom of the church Baptist of Austin, Texas, Bush who was in company of thirty members of the clergy asked: "How do I have to speak with the heart about the nation?"It listened to each member to express his vision of what it was advisable to do. The afternoon passed. Nobody wanted from to go away. People left their chairs and brightened themselves in the part, while meeting by small groups to speak with passion. In one of them, Bush and Wallis spoke about their voyages.
Wallis remembers that Bush said: "I never lived close to poor people. I do not know what they think. I really do not know it. I am a white republican who includes/understands nothing there. How to include/understand?"
Wallis remembers to have answered: "You must listen to the poor and those which live and work with the poor."
Bush called Michael Gerson, the man charged to write his speeches to him, and said to him: "I want that you listen to that.» One month later, an almost identical sentence - "much in our country do not know the pain of poverty, but we can listen to those which know it "- finished its inaugural speech.
It was the Bush of front, somebody moreover opened and more with the current, who combined at his impulsive side a dynamic attitude and an engagement apparently without fear with various groups. The president has a whole set of gifts for the personal relations which agree well with its intrepid side - a go-ahead type without mixture, at ease among various kinds of people, always with research of what will become principles.
However, this strong quality, this gift for the improvisation, for a long time in conflict with its "left lobe" - a thirty years fight with qualities of criticism and analysis was if appraisals among the professionals in America. In terms of intellectual faculties, that was a long combat for this talented man, visible during the not very brilliant years of Yale and the five years lost between twenty and thirty years - one time during which its pars were occupied to create references in the fields of the right, businesses or medicine.
Biden, who was quickly disappointed by the way in which Bush tackled the problems of foreign politics and account among the closest friends of John Kerry to the Senate, passed much from time to measure the president. "the majority of people who succeed are able to very early identify their forces and their weaknesses, and to know themselves, it has says me it does not have there a long time. For the majority among we who are in the average, that meant that we must be based on our forces but which we must cure our weaknesses - to raise on the level of certain competences - if not they could make us fall. I do not think that the president really had to do as much of it, because there was always somebody - his family or of the friends – to help it to leave itself there. I do not believe, n the other hand, that that A been useful much for its current situation as a president. It does not seem to have tried to cure its weaknesses."
Bush was called president PDG, but it is not that a slogan hooker - it never directed something of important in the private sector. President MBA would have been just: after all, it is graduate of Harvard Business School (HBS). And some which worked under its orders at the White House and which know management, noticed a strange shift. It is as if a graduate of HBS of 1975 - somebody who had few chances to confront the theory and the practice during last decades of transformation of the American companies - was quite simply parachuted in the most difficult station of the direction of the world.
One of the aspects of the method of HBS, with the importance attached to the current companies, puts it cracker is sometimes called. The case studies are static, in general instantaneous of a company which poses problems, solidified in time; the various solutions put forward by the students and then defended classifies some against difficult questions, tend to have very short lives. They propose rigidity, inappropriate safety. It is something which graduates of HBS, whose majority land in important or average companies, learn during their very first businesss year. They discover, often with their greater surprise, that the world is dynamic, that it runs and changes, often without good reason. The key is flexibility, rather than to cling to its weapons in a debate, and a constant re-examination of realities changeantes. In short, one second considered evaluation.
George W. Bush, who left Texas to become speculator on oil, never had the occasion to study these lessons on the capacity of the moderate analysis based on facts. The small oil companies that it directed lost of the money; the essence of their value were tax loopholes. (the investors were often friends of his father.) later, with the team of baseball of Texas Rangers, it behaved like an able presenter never like a true owner.
During these agitated years, instead of learning the limits from its formation with Havard, George W. Bush received lessons on the faith and her particular effectiveness. It is in 1985, at the time of sound 39e birthday, known as George W. Bush, that its life took a turn towards safety. This moment it drank, its marriage beat wing, its career was apathetic. Several accounts of people close to Bush make state this year of a kind of "intervention" of the faith in the family property of Kennebunkport. The details vary but here the essence of what, according to me, arrived. George W. Bush who had saoulé himself in one evening, seriously a friend of its mother insulted. George, the father, and Barbara put herself in anger. It was said that something had to be done. George, the father, then vice-president, telephoned to his/her friend Billy Graham - preacher evangelic -, who came to the property and spent several days with George W. There were major exchanges at the time of walks on the beach. George W. a rebirth lived. It stopped drinking, it attended classes of study of the Bible and took with arm-the-body questions of enthusiastic faith. A man who was lost was saved. (...)
During the first meeting of the first national council of safety of the Bush administration, the president asked whether somebody had already met Ariel Sharon. Some wondered whether it acted of a joke. That was not it. Bush launched out in a digression on her short meeting with Sharon two years earlier, by saying that it would not stop "with the reputations passed when it acts of Sharon... I will take it literally ", and that the United States was to withdraw conflict arabo-Israeli because "I do not see well what we can do over there in this moment". Colin Powell for example remained amazed. It was a thirty years inversion of policy - since the Nixon administration - of American engagement. Powell retorted that that would amount leaving the free hands with Sharon and tearing delicate fabric of the Middle East in a way which could appear irrevocable. Bush swept concerns of Powell of a reverse of hand. "Sometimes a show of force by one of the parts can clarify the things."such challenges - coming is of Powell, maybe of its opposite the high person in charge for the domestic policy, Paul O'Neill - were tests that Bush had less and less patience to support as the months passed. Bush made it include/understand clearly with her lieutenants. Gradually, Bush lost what Richard Perle, (which later would direct a largely private group under Bush, called Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee), had described like its open attitude during work of foreign politics before the countryside of 2000. ("It had sufficiently confidence to raise questions which revealed that it did not know large-thing", known as Beads.) In the middle of 2001, a rate/rhythm of work was established. Meetings, large and small, started to become written in advance. Even like that, the circle around Bush was reduced. One often said to the high persons in charge, since the members of the government, when they spoke in the presence of Bush, how long they was to do it and which subjects they were to approach. The president listened without letting appear the least reaction. Sometimes there were discussions - Powell and Rumsfeld, for example, who got rid quickly of a problem - but the president seldom pushed somebody with informed questions.
A whole of particularly clear characteristics formed the White House of George W. Bush at the summer 2001: a contempt of the meditation or deliberation, a preference for the categorical decision, a distance of empiricism, sometimes a brutal impatience with people who doubt and even sometimes with those which raise friendly questions. Bush said already: "Rely in me and my decisions, and you will be rewarded."In all the White House, people channeled the owner. It did not raise any question about itself; why would it have done it?
If one considers the tests which were going soon to fall down, it is easy to see with which point that had to be difficult for George W. Bush. During nearly thirty years, it had sat down in classrooms, then in front of tables in mahogany tree in the offices of various companies, with step large-thing to be made. Then, as a governor of Texas, it had profited from a bipartite legislative body very malleable and it is in the legislative body that achieves the true work of a government of state. The tension which existed in the legislative body of Texas, the structure of the point and counterpoint offered, that Bush could man?uvrer with effectiveness thanks to her strong capacities of improvisation.
But the tables of mahogany tree were now in the situation room and the large adjacent room of conferences at Ovale Bureau. It directed a party to the capacity. Each question which penetrated in this sanctuary required a complex decision, a development, a great meticulousness and a power of analysis.
For the president, like said it Biden, to be aware of its weaknesses - and to worry about reveal its uncertainties, its needs or its confusion, even at his/her principal collaborators - something of intolerable would have presented. Towards the end of the summer of this first year, the vice-president Dick Cheney had ceased speaking in the meetings to which it assisted with Bush. They discussed into private or at the time lunching to them weekly. The president passed much from time out of the White House, often in its ranch, with its only people of confidence. The circle which surrounds Bush is narrowest who surrounded a president at the time modern, and "it is exclusive and one is excluded from it", Christopher DeMuth said to me, chair of American Enterprise Institute, the political group néo-conservative. "It is a too narrow process of decision-making. When they make decisions, a very small number of people are in the part, and that has a reducing effect on the range of possibilities offered".
September 11, 2001, the country waited impatiently to know if and how Bush was going to take the direction of the situation. After a few days during which it seemed shaken and dubious, it was begun again, and at the moment when it started to take the things in hand – upright in the debris of World Trade Center with a speaking pipe - for much of Americans, the doubts which remained disappeared. Nobody could have doubts, not at this moment. People wanted action, and George W. Bush was ready, not having never felt the reasonable hesitations which slow down the most determined men, and of many presidents, including his/her father.
A few days only after the attacks, Bush decided the invasion of Afghanistan and howled her orders. Its speech in front of the Congress on September 20 will be without any doubt the greatest moment of its presidency. It requested to obtain the assistance of God. And much of Americans, of all times, requested with him - or for him. All was simple and nondenominational: a prayer for which it had prepared until this moment, and consequently it - and, by extension, us as country - would triumph in these dark moments.
It is here that the presidency based on the faith takes really its dimension. Faith, who during months had coloured the process of decision-making, and a crowd of political tactics - started to guide the events. It was the most natural rise: George W. Bush turning to the faith in its darkest moment and discovering a source of being able and confidence.
When one considers the months which followed 11-September immediately, almost each important military analyst seems to believe that rather than to use Afghan intermediaries, we should more quickly have deployed a greater number of American soldiers, in order to continue Ben Laden in the mountains of Tora Bora. Much also criticized the way in which the president dealt with Saudi Arabia, country of origin of 15 of the 19 terrorists; in spite of the goals fixed by Bush in alleged "the financial war against terrorism", the Saoudi did not really cooperate with the American authorities in hunting for the financial sources of terrorism. However the nation wanted an action daring and it was charmed to have it. The rate of approval of the policy of Bush reached almost 90 %. During this time, balance between analysis and decision, between reflexion and action, was destroyed by a rigorous faith.
It was during the press conference of September 16, in answer to a question about the efforts made for the safety of the country which encroached on the civil laws that Bush used for the first time in public the revealing term of "crusade". "It is a new species - a new species of evil, it has says. And we include/understand. And the American people start to include/understand. This crusade, this war counters terrorism, will last a certain time."
The Moslems of the whole world were in fury. Two days later, Ari Fleischer - spokesman of the White House until 2003 -, tried to limit the damage. "I think that what the president said did not imply any consequence for anybody, neither Moslems nor nobody of other, it said simply that it acts of a great cause, and it called America and the nations of the whole world to join it."As" with the connotations which could wound one of our partners or no matter whom of other in the world, the president regrets if something of similar of it were drawn."
A few months later, February 1, 2002, Jim Wallis, of Sojourners, waited in Roosevelt Room to be presented at Jim Towey as a person in charge for the initiative of the community based on the faith of the president. John Dilulio, the preceding person in charge, had left its functions because it had the impression which the initiative did not relate to a "sympathizing conservatism", as promised in the beginning, but rather a gift made with the Christian right-hand side, a way of consolidating and of giving energy to this share of the base.
A few moments after the ceremony, Bush saw Wallis. It precipitated towards him and took the cheeks to him, one in each hand, and it tightened. "Jim, how you go, how you go!", it exclaimed. Wallis remained disconcerted. But Bush said to him very excited that its masseur had given him the book of Wallis, Faith Works (?uvres of the faith). Its joy of seeing Wallis - this last and others remember it – was palpable. A president who struggles with the faith and his role in one moment of danger, and which sees this rare bird: an independent adviser. Wallis as remembers to have said to Bush as it was well "but in the speech on the marked state of the Union a few days earlier, you said that if we do not devote all our energies, our concerns, our resources with this war against terrorism, we will lose it ". Wallis said: "Mr. President, if we do not devote our energy, our concerns and our time to also fight against poverty and despair, we will lose not only the war against poverty but we will lose also the war against terrorism."
Bush answered that it was for that that America needed the direction for Wallis and other members of the clergy."Not, Mr. President, Wallis said to Bush, we need your direction on this question, and all, we will support you. If we do not drain the marshes of the injustice in which are born the mosquitos from terrorism, we will never overcome the threat of terrorism."Bush looked at the priest of an air narquois, Wallis remembers. They spoke each other never again thereafter. (...)
Almost each month, a report/ratio, who uses a remarkably Messianic language, appears on the desk of the president, but it is pushed back by the White House. Three months ago for example, in a meeting deprived with Amish farmers in the county of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Bush would have said: "I am sure that God speaks through me."In this usual play of the covering joints of?il and the shakings of head, a spokesman of the White House denied that the president pronounced these precise words, but it added that "its faith the assistance in its action to the service of the people".
Ron Suskind
© Ron Suskind 2004 |
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SwedishChef
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Joined: Aug 19, 2004
Posts: 3028
Location: Køokin' der yummee-yummer
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| Posted:
Nov 05, 2004 - 04:34 PM |
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| Post subject: Re: Faith of George W. Bush |
| Benoist_Shanghai wrote: |
Faith of George W. Bush
"I do not know why you speak about the Swedes, Bush said. They are neutral. They do not have an army ".
Lantos was keep silent, a little astonished, and made an answer of gentleman: "Mr. President, you had to think that I spoke about the Swiss ones. It is them which are historically neutral and without army."Then Lantos announced, in aside, that the Swiss ones had a strong national guard to protect the country in the event of invasion.
Bush maintained what he had said: "Not, not, it is Sweden which does not have an army."
Silence was done in the part, until somebody changes subject.
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OK...
I thought that *stupid* couldn't surprise me anymore...I was wrong. |
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