Where did George W. Bush get his confidence as he
took his country into war in Iraq?
From a fighting World War II family? From a carrier-pilot father? From the Yale fraternity culture? Or just from Texas, the state where high-testosterone,
low-reflection politicians seem to rise from the soil?
No, none of those. He got it from a professor of social and political ethics at
the Divinity School of the University of Chicago. Her obituary in yesterday's New York Times (Jean Bethke
Elshtain, 8-16-13) tells us how: through a conference at the White House after
the 9-11 attacks, one of several Bush called with "a handful of scholars
and religious leaders" to discuss his response to the attacks.
We can guess at what she told him by what she has
argued in her publications. In
1993 she argued against the separation of religion and politics:
"Separation of church and state is one thing. Separation of religion and politics is something else
altogether." Earlier, relying
on St. Augustine, she had argued that "while Christians could not justify
killing to protect themselves, they could engage in war to protect the lives of
others." That would be
"a Just War."
Opinions of those who know her and her work give us
another clue. "Underpinning
all her work," colleagues said, "were bedrock convictions derived
from her Christian faith."
These include "the existence of an absolute good and evil, the
imperative of ethical behavior and the responsibility of all people for the
welfare of the vulnerable."
That makes a pretty good fit with the advice Bush
was getting from the neoconservatives in the Defense Department and the Wheaton
College (Chicago area, fundamentalist) people on his staff, including the one
who, by one report, advised him to change "axis of hate" to
"axis of evil" because it was "more theological."
What we want from Bush and his staff is a little
better look at history, the look realistic statesmen take, the look once-burned
generals take, the look Europeans like Jacques Chirac were taking. Hadn't these religious people noticed
that looking to God didn't relieve you of this other kind of looking? Hadn't they noticed the damage
single-vision God-gazers had been doing in the world — taking planes and
buildings down with "God is great" on their lips, taking over land
because God had given it to them, destroying temples and statues because they
weren't the true God's. All this
by people sure of God's will.
OK, I know there were plenty of people on Bush's
staff doing rational, realistic analysis.
Their memoirs show it.
But they were over-ruled, or over-powered, or out-faced. Was it a matter of confidence, and the
authority of the office?
Bush himself, at the beginning, lacked
confidence. And what did he do? Called in experts in God's will,
scholars with all the academic credentials. Get a reading from them and you'll be as sure as you can
be. You can walk into your staff
meeting, into your war, with
confidence.
There are two things, though, that you can't be
confident about, that nobody can be justifiably confident about: that you know
God's will, and that you know how to carry it out, down here on earth.
It's the latter, the part President Bush's
theologian looked away from, the part generals and statesmen and historians
look so closely at, that will make you as president look foolish. Whether what you're doing is God's work
or not you will screw it up. And
God, they say, will not have his work in the world be made manifest by fools.
But before he undertook God's work George Bush
didn't need to reflect on that. The
experts from Chicago apparently gave him enough confidence to do what something
in him (I'm not leaving out the Texas soil) made him want to do.
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