A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency

by Glenn Greenwald

  The president understands a basic truth about tyrannies that employ terrorism and seek weapons of mass destruction: They are systemically evil. Their leaders are amoral dictators, with an acute appreciation of power politics and their enemy’s jugular. They inevitably corrupt and destroy their own civil societies. You negotiate with them at your peril.

  As Gerecht recognized, the goal for those wishing to induce the president to act with entrenched belligerence toward another country is to persuade him that that country is “Evil.” That is of far greater importance than persuading the president that the country is a threat to the U.S. And with those Manichean, moralistic premises the president embraced, Iran was decreed, in early 2002, to be our “evil” enemy, beyond reason and incapable of understanding anything other than brute force. And there it has immovably remained, for the next five years, while the Bush policy toward Iran has become ever more hostile and ineffective.

  One can reasonably argue that the U.S. should have a policy of supporting its most important allies and/or other democracies, including Israel. The U.S. provides security guarantees for all sorts of countries. That’s all fair game for open discussion. But few things are more threatening to Israeli interests than deceitfully securing American policies based on pretext, conflation, and contrivance whereby Americans are manipulated into supporting policies based on false pretenses. People can be fooled for only so long, and people who feel deceived generally backlash against the deceivers.

  It is not the case that those who attempt to trigger U.S. military action against Israel’s enemies are guilty of doing too much to help Israel. Though “helping Israel” might be their motive, they achieve the precise opposite result.

  A strong argument can be made that Americans are likely to be supportive of a democratic, long-standing ally like Israel and to sympathize with the need for America to protect all of its allies—including Israel—from genuine existential threats. But if Americans are being induced to support wars not in American interests but rather Israel’s, and if American lives and treasure are being squandered in wars justified by false pretenses, by a hidden agenda, they will realize that at some point—likely at the point when such a war has gone particularly awry and they begin to search for the real reasons we entered it in the first place.

  When the realization begins to dawn that at least one substantial factor as to why America waged Middle Eastern war(s) is because influential individuals with an overarching devotion to Israel pushed for war against Israel’s enemies, then an anti-Israeli backlash is highly likely to occur. And the backlash is likely to be far more severe and hostile than anything that would ever happen naturally, meaning in the absence of such manipulation.

  Despite the fact that right-wing pro-Israeli advocates of the Iraq War have suffered significant losses of credibility over their prewar prognostications, the pressure on the president to view Iranian hostility toward Israel as a justification for American attacks on Iran has not waned any. To the contrary, in 2006, demands that the U.S. view Iran as the ultimate enemy have been increasing.

  As Americans have soured on U.S. military intervention in the Middle East as a result of the Iraq disaster, neoconservatives have become more desperate and less risk-averse in the argumentation they use. They disguise their underlying beliefs far less and have become much more explicit about their demand that President Bush view Israel’s enemies as Evil and wage war on them.

  In July 2006, when war broke out between Israel and Hezbollah, Bill Kristol came right out and candidly put his views on the table. In a Weekly Standard article bluntly entitled “This Is Our War” (by “Our,” he means the U.S.), Kristol argued explicitly what many have contended for some time is an unstated belief of neoconservatives: that the U.S. should view the threats to Israel as threats to the U.S., because the enemy is the same, and should join Israel in the destruction of those numerous enemies.

  Kristol actually argued that President Bush should immediately abandon the G8 summit in Russia—where he was meeting with long-standing European allies of the U.S. whom Kristol disdains, largely because they are too evenhanded with regard to Israel’s conflicts with its neighbors—and fly to Jerusalem in order to stand by Israel, in “our” new war, which should be waged against Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah, just for starters. With Israel in the midst of a brutal war it was widely perceived to be losing, Kristol all but demanded that the U.S. intervene and attack Iran, the country widely viewed as the ultimate supporter of Hezbollah (emphasis added):

  What’s happening in the Middle East, then, isn’t just another chapter in the Arab-Israeli conflict. What’s happening is an Islamist-Israeli war. You might even say this is part of the Islamist war on the West—but is India part of the West? Better to say that what’s under attack is liberal democratic civilization, whose leading representative right now happens to be the United States….

  The war against radical Islamism is likely to be a long one. Radical Islamism isn’t going away anytime soon. But it will make a big difference how strong the state sponsors, harborers, and financiers of radical Islamism are. Thus, our focus should be less on Hamas and Hezbollah, and more on their paymasters and real commanders—Syria and Iran….

  For while Syria and Iran are enemies of Israel, they are also enemies of the United States. We have done a poor job of standing up to them and weakening them. They are now testing us more boldly than one would have thought possible a few years ago. Weakness is provocative. We have been too weak, and have allowed ourselves to be perceived as weak….

  The right response is renewed strength—in supporting the governments of Iraq and Afghanistan, in standing with Israel, and in pursuing regime change in Syria and Iran. For that matter, we might consider countering this act of Iranian aggression with a military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities. Why wait?…

  But such a military strike would take a while to organize. In the meantime, perhaps President Bush can fly from the silly G8 summit in St. Petersburg—a summit that will most likely convey a message of moral confusion and political indecision—to Jerusalem, the capital of a nation that stands with us, and is willing to fight with us, against our common enemies. This is our war, too.

  Kristol’s demand that President Bush wage war against Iran in order to assist Israel was quickly echoed by some of the president’s most influential Israeli-centric supporters. Writing the next day in National Review, John Podhoretz excitedly celebrated “Kristol’s very arresting take,” while Michael Ledeen, also in National Review, complained bitterly that President Bush hadn’t yet thrown the U.S. militarily into this new war, and even unleashed the worst neoconservative insult there is by equating Bush with Chamberlain:

  But we have not heard anything about “seizing the moment.” We hear lawyer talk and diplotalk, surrender talk and appeasement talk, and there is no action whatsoever. Is this not the time to go after the terrorist training camps in Syria and Iran? What in the world are we waiting for?

  And finally, if we dither through this one, the next one will be worse. Maybe much worse. It’s not going away. Stability is a mirage. Chamberlain had a choice between dishonor and war. He chose war and got dishonor. You too, Mr. President. It’s the way it works.

  As the president’s neoconservative supporters are now expressly arguing, Israel’s enemies are America’s enemies, and President Bush must wage war on all of them. If he refuses, he will be guilty of the dreaded sin of cowardly appeasement, of failing to confront pure Evil that threatens Western civilization.

  All of these various influences and factions have fueled an approach to Iran by President Bush that is fraught with danger for the U.S. and is extremely difficult to derail. Yet the president is also without any credible military threat, with the burden being carried in Iraq, and is further burdened by an American public that plainly would not stand for a whole new war. Yet his depiction of Iran as Evil has left him with no real options. As intended, the wedge inserted between the U.S. and Iran seems impossible to remo
ve during the Bush presidency.

  THE NON-CARTOON IRAN

  The caricature of Iran as pure Evil and the grave threat it poses to the U.S. are grounded in pure pretext. Much of the caricaturing of Iran has been enabled by the outlandish and malicious statements of Iran’s elected president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, including his expressed desire for the elimination of Israel and doubts about whether the Holocaust really occurred. Though advocates of war with Iran have depicted Ahmadinejad as some sort of supreme leader of Iran, he is, in fact, nothing of the sort.

  Iran’s most powerful leaders are the unelected Ayatollahs and mullahs who control most of Iran’s critical power centers; the power of the president in Iran is secondary and limited by multiple factors. Ironically, many of those who seek to inflate President Ahmadinejad into some sort of supreme dictator in order to capitalize on the outrageousness of his statements were the same ones who continuously belittled the power of the Iranian presidency when it was occupied from 1997 to 2005 by an Iranian moderate/reformist, Mohammad Khatami.

  Indeed, Khatami openly rejected the notion that Iran was on the opposite side of a war of civilizations with the West, but instead aggressively advocated détente. During the Khatami presidency, those who sought to persuade the U.S. to continue to view Iran as an enemy repeatedly insisted that Khatami’s moderation was irrelevant because it was the radical clerics who had the real power in Iran, and the position of president was a virtual sinecure, maintained to placate demands among Iranians for some type of democratic representation.

  Writing in National Review in 2003, Amir Taheri, the neoconservatives’ favorite Iran “expert,” called Khatami “irrelevant” and a mere “figurehead.” In 2002, The New Republic editors dismissed him as “timid and powerless.” And the Financial Times warned that it is “doubtful he has the powers” to impede the agenda of Iranian radicals. But now that an easy-to-demonize hard-line figure, rather than a reformist, occupies the presidency, voices from the nation’s war-hungry precincts focus almost exclusively on Iran’s president as though he is its supreme leader (a title which is, revealingly, exactly that claimed by Iran’s true leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei).

  The notion that Ahmadinejad possesses absolute dictatorial power along the lines of Adolf Hitler, or even that he is the most powerful figure in Iran, is sheer fiction. Indeed, by the end of 2006, Ahmadinejad had suffered a series of significant defeats and public indignities, including the year-end loss of his supporters in local Iranian elections and the victory of one of his most powerful political rivals, Hashemi Rafsanjani.

  Those elections installed moderate and reformist candidates who are opposed to Ahmadinejad in a whole spectrum of political positions. And the rebuke he suffered was personal in nature, as both his “spiritual adviser,” Ayatollah Mohammed-Taghi Mesbah-Yazdi, and even his own sister, Parvine, suffered crushing electoral defeats.

  One of the leading anti-Ahmadinejad parties, the reformist Islamic Iran Participation Front, issued a taunting victory statement after the election results were certified, which read in part:

  The initial results of elections throughout the country indicate that Mr. Ahmadinejad’s list has experienced a decisive defeat nationwide. They were tantamount to a big “no” to the government’s authoritarian and inefficient methods.

  Manifestly, the freedom of opposing political parties to mount serious challenges to Ahmadinejad’s power, let alone to triumph over him and freely express such harsh criticism, negates the ludicrous attempt to depict him as some type of Hitler-like dictator with absolute power in Iran. He is nothing of the sort.

  And while Ahmadinejad’s rhetoric toward Israel and about the Holocaust is repugnant, there is nothing unique about Iran’s position regarding Israel, particularly when compared to the broader Middle East. Scores of Middle Eastern countries share the Iranians’ refusal to recognize Israel’s right to exist, including countries cooperative with, even allies of, the United States.

  President Bush, for instance, has long hailed the United Arab Emirates as a “good friend” of the U.S. He repeatedly praised that country and vouched for its reliability and Goodness during the controversy provoked by his administration’s attempt to turn over operations of various American ports to a company controlled by the UAE government.

  Yet the position of the UAE with respect to Israel is virtually indistinguishable from that held by Evil incarnate Iran. Both deny Israel’s right to exist. Indeed, the UAE officially prohibits any Israeli citizen even from entering their country, to the point of refusing to allow Israeli athletes entrance in order to attend international sporting events, including an annual professional tennis tournament held in Dubai.

  One can get a sense of just how extreme is the UAE’s anti-Israeli position merely by reviewing its official website for tourists, which includes some information about the country’s entrance and visa policies:

  General Information

  There are several types of visas for visitors to Dubai.

  • Nationals of “Israel” may not enter the U.A.E.

  • Citizens of the Arab Gulf Co-operation Council member states (Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, Saudi Arabia) do not need a visa.

  It is not merely that Israeli citizens are barred from entering the country. Note the snide quotation marks around the word Israel—to the UAE (and Iran), that is a concept that is not real, that is nonexistent. By rather stark contrast, the UAE does not even require a visa before it welcomes citizens of Saudi Arabia—the country that gave us fifteen out of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers (with two sent courtesy of the UAE, and none from Iran).

  There is nothing exceptional about Muslim states refusing to recognize Israel’s right to exist and singling it out for hostility. Malaysia, for instance, is considered to be a perfectly moderate Muslim country and a reasonably friendly nation to the U.S., yet it expressly denies Israel’s right to occupy the territory known as “Israel,” and its formal policy pronouncements are replete with statements like this one:

  Bilateral relations with other Asian, African, Middle-Eastern, and Latin American countries would continue to be pursued without neglecting our traditional economic partners in Europe and America. Japan, the European Union, the US, and Australia and the Republic of Korea, would remain Malaysia’s major trading partners as well as the source of investment and technology, particularly in connection with the establishment of Malaysia’s multimedia super corridor. The only exception is Israel.

  Iran’s relations with other countries around the world by itself belies the claim that it is some sort of irrational, crazed personification of Evil, a reincarnation of Nazi Germany. Iran has developed cooperative relations and solid alliances with scores of countries in every region of the world, including countries that are also allies of the United States. To varying degrees, Iran has also developed close commercial and otherwise constructive ties with countries as diverse as China, Russia, France, Germany, and numerous others in the Middle East. As a world actor, Iran conducts itself in accordance with the basic principles of rational self-interest.

  Moreover—and ironically—Iran has developed a particularly close relationship with the elected Shiite government of Iraq. Thus, the very Iraqi government which American troops are fighting to defend and stabilize has made clear that it intends to pursue a close alliance with its Iranian neighbors.

  In September 2006, Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki visited Iran and met with President Ahmadinejad. The New York Sun documented the extremely friendly relations that both countries vowed to maintain with one another:

  Mr. Maliki, who lived in Iran during part of a long exile from Iraq during the rule of ousted leader Saddam Hussein, received a red-carpet reception at the presidential palace before talks with President Ahmadinejad.

  Asked at a joint press conference following their talks about allegations that Iran was interfering in Iraq, Mr. Maliki said, “There is no obstacle in the way of implementing agreements between Iran and Iraq.”

  “All our assistan
ce to the Iraqi people will be to establish complete security in this country,” Mr. Ahmadinejad said, according to a state-run news agency report of the press conference. “Iran and Iraq enjoy historical relations. These relations go beyond neighborly ties. Our relations will remain excellent,” Mr. Ahmadinejad said.

  The Iranian president, on his own website, celebrated the “excellent bilateral ties between the Iranian and Iraqi governments and nations.” And Iran’s official news agency made clear on the day following Prime Minister Maliki’s visit that the event evidenced a true lovefest between the two countries:

  Nuri al-Maliki described Iran as the good and great neighbor of Iraq and reiterated that there resides no impediment in the way of the implementation of the agreements signed with Iran.

  “We have witnessed Iran’s tolerance and preparedness and the agreements we have concluded in the different political, security and economic areas prove fruitfulness of our visit to Tehran,” he stressed.

  It is certainly true that Iran is internally oppressive and a severe violator of human rights. International human rights groups across the spectrum agree that Iran violates basic precepts of liberty. But even in that regard, it is hardly the worst regime around. Quite the contrary, there are close and important allies of the U.S. that are at least as repressive and brutal, in some cases more so. The Washington Post reported on Dick Cheney’s activities during one week in January 2006 as follows:

  Vice President Dick Cheney met with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak Tuesday for talks on the political process in Iraq and the West’s standoffs with Syria and Iran.