Top Blair Aide: Bush Wasn't 'Hellbent on War'
In The Guardian, British journalist and former Blair aid Alastair Campbell reviews former President Bush's new memoir, Decision Points:
This self-serving memoir confirms that George W Bush is a moronic war-monger who can't think straight, can't string two words together and spent his presidency looking for countries to invade, oil to snatch and ways to make the world a more dangerous place.
There, I've said it, and the conventional wisdom chatterati will nod amen to that. The problem is that none of the above is true. Cue avalanche of Guardian Online vitriol.
You see, in Guardianland, as in other parts of the world, one is not supposed to think anything but ill of Bush. "Is he as stupid as he looks?" is up there alongside "did you invent the phrase the 'People's Princess'", "do you regret the dossier?" and "is Malcolm Tucker based on you?" as frequently asked questions at Q&A sessions I do.
My answer to the first is that you don't get to be US president – twice – by being stupid; that he is more reflective and self-analytical than the public image suggests – a trait confirmed by his book; that September 11 changed the world in the eyes of most Americans; and that I do not buy the idea that he was hellbent on war in Iraq – also confirmed by the book, and in particular by the letters to his father and daughters. They are the letters, and this is the account, of someone who tried to avoid war, but could no longer ignore Saddam's defiance, or the view of every intelligence agency in the world that Iraq had WMD, a threat that could be parked pre-September 11, but not after it. And surely he has a point when he says: "If I wanted to mislead the country into war why would I pick an allegation that was certain to be disproven publicly shortly after we invaded the country?"
Doubtless the Bush-haters will assume he wrote the letters to his family as a form of prewar spin planning that could be trotted out postwar when it all went wrong. All I say is: read them. You would be hard pressed, on a fair reading, to say the chapters on Iraq show a "rush to war".
The reactions Bush provokes sometimes make me think the public don't mean it when they say they want politicians who speak as they find. I remember a dinner in the White House where Bush said he had pleaded with German chancellor Gerhard Schröder not to fan anti-Americanism in his re-election campaign. Schröder said he wouldn't. Then, struggling in the polls, he did. Schröder fares badly in this book.
Yasser Arafat fares worse, not least over corruption. I remember Bush telling us he had warned the PLO leader that if he lied to him about involvement in terrorism, he would not get back in the White House. "Arafat had lied to me," he writes. "I never trusted him again. In fact, I never spoke to him again." Obstinacy, stupidity, or a politician saying what he would do, and then doing it – that trait we are supposed to want in our leaders?
The Bush-haters will say this is just the usual thing of American presidents doing Israel's bidding. But as he points out proudly, he was the first president publicly to call for a Palestinian state as a matter of US policy, against the wishes of the powerful trio of Dick Cheney, Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld (I was surprised to learn Rumsfeld's appointment was Condoleezza Rice's idea, by the way).
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