Bush and Sacrifice: Stupidity or Strategery?

NBC’s Brian Williams recently interviewed the president during his Katrina anniversary trip to New Orleans. Sure, Bush’s “ec-a-lec-tic reading list” – which, we are told, includes a remarkable “three Shakespeares” – has justifiably garnered plenty of attention. But while this may have been the interview’s most classic “this guy really is as stupid as we think he is” Bushism, there was another segment that gave me plenty to think about.

Williams: "The folks who say you should have asked for some sort of sacrifice from all of us after 9/11, do they have a case, looking back on it?"

Bush: "Americans are sacrificing. I mean, we are, we are...you know, we pay a lot of taxes. Um, the uh...Americans sacrifice when they, um...you know, when the economy went in the tank. Americans sacrificed when...you know, air travel was disrupted. American taxpayers have paid a lot to help this nation recover. Um, I think Americans have sacrificed."

It’s worth watching (this exchange starts at 1:15) to see just how much the president, with downturned eyes, stumbles and bumbles over himself. This is the speech and body language of a man who is acutely aware that he’s been called out, big time. Keep in mind how discouraged his supporters and how outraged his critics were after 9/11 when Bush emphatically declared “It is not business as usual” and then failed to ask Americans to give anything more than an extra hour at the airport in the battle against terrorism (with the fifth anniversary at hand, guys like Thomas Friedman still haven’t forgotten, and they don’t want you to forget either). And Bush’s response to Williams’ query is that Americans sacrificed when they had to pay a lot of taxes? This from the man who insisted that we cut taxes across the board after 9/11 based on the logic that that economic sacrifice would undermine the economic recovery! Talk like this is enough to crush some of the most ardent Bush cheerleaders while launching most liberal critics into alternating paroxysms of laughter and rage.

So is he just that stupid?

Or have his handlers not even bothered to coach and re-coach a coherent answer to this question because they know that for all the talk among Bush’s critics on the left and right alike, that there really is – and, more importantly, perhaps has never been – much of an appetite for universal sacrifice in post-9/11 America?

I’ll admit that this line of thought doesn’t come easily to me. My undergraduate thesis examined what I thought was the unprecedented political opportunity presented by 9/11. The attacks precipitated a deeply traumatic moment of national vulnerability. At a time when Americans were more anxious, proud, and afraid than they had been for decades, it seemed that our collective fear and patriotism could be harnessed by a leader willing to call on us to leave behind the personal concerns that in those days seemed so trivial, impressing upon all citizens the greater purpose of serving a homeland under siege. Indeed, according to the research of Harvard public policy expert Robert Putnam, “As 2001 ended, Americans were more united, readier for collective sacrifice, and more attuned to public purpose than we have been for several decades.” The will to sacrifice seemed nearly universal, uniting left and right, radical communitarian and mainstream politician.

Certainly a call to sacrifice from the commander-in-chief would have given social conservatives a new leg up in the culture wars, helping to combat the individualism and materialism that in their view had been eroding personal responsibility and decency in America since the upheaval of the 60s. But for the neoconservatives whose influence was on the rise within both the Bush administration and the conservative movement at large, the real prize of 9/11 was to be found in the realm of foreign policy. Bush’s neocon supporters saw a particular strategic advantage in asking all Americans to put aside their own wants in service of the needs of their country. “If only President Bush would issue the call,” lamented a Weekly Standard editorial less than two weeks after 9/11, “the recruiting offices of the armed services would be filled tomorrow. If only he would issue some call commensurate with our willingness, Americans would give freely – ‘The awful daring of a moment's surrender’ of ourselves to a purpose, as T. S. Eliot described it, ‘Which an age of prudence can never retract.’” In the same issue, Robert Kagan and William Kristol argued that there were “steps that should be taken immediately – some to prepare for the coming conflict [in Afghanistan], others to guard against any future attention-deficit syndrome” – and I don’t think they were talking about putting Adderall in the water supply.

As Prof. Cutler has shown in his brilliant essay, Beyond Incompetence: Washington’s War in Iraq, the occupation, though it turned out to be quite the mess, was not the product of a brash and bumbling president. At the core of the administration (at least during the run up to the invasion of Iraq) was a group of what Cutler calls Right Zionist thinkers, who comprise one of two major factions within the neocon movement. And while some have also called these folks deluded, they are nothing if not intelligent, strategic thinkers who believed that their plan for invasion and occupation, if executed properly, would result in an outcome favorable to the liberation of oppressed Shia minority populations in some of the more strategically desirable regions within the Middle East. By emboldening and leveraging Shi’ite power in Iraq, Right Zionists thought that they could trigger a chain reaction across the region, allowing them to build a new bulwark of US-friendly, oil-rich regimes in the Middle East at a time when Saudi Arabia could no longer be relied upon as an ally.

Long-term foreign policy thinkers like Kagan and Kristol were obsessed with the cultural effects of 9/11 because they knew that with an expanded military and a citizenry surrendered to communal responsibility and national purpose, the stage would be set on the domestic front for the Bush administration’s efforts to achieve a radical restructuring of the balance of power in the Middle East. It’s no mistake that so many neocons compared 9/11 to Pearl Harbor – they knew that FDR was able to sustain a prolonged and costly war because he never shied away from sacrifice. The Roosevelt administration implemented dozens of special wartime programs on the home front, all of which implicitly, if not explicitly, underscored the importance of engaging Americans at home as the war progressed abroad. FDR’s Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr. explained that war bonds were not introduced primarily to fund the war effort. Morgenthau sought, in his words, “to use bonds to sell the war, rather than vice versa.” A memo to Morgenthau explained that such a program would “give the American people a sense of the magnitude and importance of the national defense effort” and to “do so by transforming people from being mere observers into becoming active participants in this effort." This was the Holy Grail for neocons - and lucky them, most Democrats and left-wing critics of the president were also salivating at the prospect of making every American feel that they were at war.

But Bush never did it. In fact, he did quite the opposite. He cut our taxes. He told us to “Fly and enjoy America's great destination spots. Get down to Disney World in Florida. Take your families and enjoy life the way we want it to be enjoyed.” I never really had a good answer for why the Bush administration passed on the potential gold mine that was 9/11: maybe they thought the economy was too fragile to handle the sacrificial motif? maybe they figured Bush wasn’t a good enough actor? But if the administration truly sought to achieve its aims by scaring Americans into submission, as the left has been insisting since the before the 2004 campaign, why not do what FDR did – give every American a feeling of personal investment in the war on terror, a role to play in a struggle that would soon span the globe. Even if the administration had set up a serious infrastructure for national volunteer work (a lot of lefties – and folks like John McCain, too – are furious that you can’t remember the last time you heard Bush mention the Freedom Corps) or energy conservation, it would have helped citizens understand that they have a stake in Bush’s leadership of the war on terror.

So why didn’t he do it?

Back to the Williams interview. Is Bush really as stupid as we think he is? The man may be more than a bit of a moron, and while it’s tempting to harp on his personal deficiencies, we all know that the president isn’t exactly the rudder guiding his administration’s domestic and foreign policies. Shortly after 9/11, he proved himself fully capable of talking the talk; I haven't heard anyone say that he ignored ignore wartime sacrifice because his administration just didn’t think of it. Would the economy really have tanked if Bush had reminded us of our solemn duties to the nation? I’ll buy that he can have trouble sounding sincere, but the man does revel in the charismatic nationalist leadership simplicity of it all. Remember the bullhorn? I think he could have pulled it off.

But would we have listened?

I have to believe that the administration heard the neocons howling for sacrifice - though we don't know too much about what those inside the administration were thinking, very many of the kinds of writers and think-tankers who aren’t exactly the type to have trouble getting the administration’s ear seemed to be on board with the sacrifice strategy. But someone in the administration – a Karl Rove, perhaps - somebody with his finger on the pulse of American culture and its lowest common denominator, could have put the kibosh on it. Why? Maybe because this person or persons saw that even in the face of a trauma like 9/11, the American way of life as it is currently constituted cannot sustain – because it will not tolerate – prolonged, collective sacrifice. And not from an economic standpoint (i.e. for the sake of the national economy the administration decides that Bush has to talk up consumption rather than sacrifice). From a cultural standpoint, I’m saying that perhaps because we are more integrated into market relations and attuned to our own desires than Americans were in the prewar era (much to the chagrin of the critics on left and right alike who cannot stop chiding Bush for spoiling us), maybe we don’t want to make sacrifices because there just aren’t that many things for which most Americans are willing to give up their SUVs, let alone die.

Our culture has changed tremendously since the first rumblings of World War II. When Pearl Harbor was attacked, Americans were already attuned to sacrifice due to the scarcity of the depression years. Let’s face it, the ‘90s were no ‘30s. The Roosevelt administration’s leadership throughout the depression could only have strengthened its hand in war. 9/11, on the other hand, closed out a period of relative peace, prosperity, and contented complacency, not to mention that it came after the liberatory movements of the '60s and '70s. The Bush administration heard the cries of the neocons outside the White House. But someone on the domestic politics side thought – someone knew – that the sacrifice game wouldn’t work for long. We’ve gotten quite used to our big cars and our carry-on luggage, and we'd rather spend our Sundays watching football than practicing terror drills.

I guess I never gave the administration enough credit as cultural thinkers. How could they have passed up this unprecedented opportunity to truly mobilize the nation for war when nationalist sentiment was running as high as our feelings of vulnerability and loss? Probably for purely strategic reasons. It seems very possible that most of the big-picture foreign policy neocons wanted sacrifice, but that the political strategist(s) didn’t think it would fly. If the 9/11 moment had seemed to many (myself included) ripe for the picking, perhaps Rove knew that this approach wouldn’t bear fruit – that we didn’t have the stomach for a new era of universal sacrifice.

And while this possibility does raise a bunch of interesting questions about the dynamic between Rove and the administration neocons, more importantly it suggests to me that I hadn’t given American culture enough credit either. If we really are as individualistic, materialistic, and self-absorbed as social conservatives and communitarian leftists fear we are, I can totally see the sacrifice thing falling flat. Remember, this is Karl Rove we’re talking about. I find it hard to believe that he would have passed on such a massive opportunity if he thought he couldn't get away with it.

***

Five years later, Bush is in New York to commemorate the attacks. You can bet he'll keep talking about 9/11 right up until the elections in November. But left-wing critics of the war are also still hung up on 9/11. Believing that the sacred moment of 9/11 has been dragged through the mud by Bush, many still cling to that day when they might instead do what it seems most Americans had quietly accomplished not too long after the attacks: gotten over it. So while much of the left will continue to chide the Bush administration for giving us the easy way out on 9/12, it will fail to understand what Rove probably saw on that day. Even though the anti-war protests may have ended when the invasion of Iraq began, there was never that much potential for a public fervor in support of the kind of collective sacrifice - and for the kind of war - that the neocons wanted after 9/11.

So maybe instead of lamenting the fact that Bush squandered his chance to bring Americans together through collective sacrifice, we should look beyond collective life when we think about what an anti-war movement can look like. Prof. Cutler makes a crucial point: that while many on the left are outraged that we don't care about 9/11 anymore - heck, we don't seem to care about anything except text messaging and American Idol - our feelings of responsibility for and "caring" about the Iraqis ("I'm against the war, but if we leave now, how many will die in the ensuing civil war?") may be the only thing that is keeping the administration afloat in the face of continually mounting anti-war sentiment.

Cutler suggests that it's high time the left began to think about the politics - and power - of not caring. One could argue that the neocons' war on terror is sputtering, if not in its "last throes," precisely because American's don't care enough about Iraq to tolerate what are relatively minimal U.S. casualties. If we cared so much about war, then why (as John Kerry couldn't stop reminding us in 2004) didn't the Bush administration send enough troops to get the job done in Iraq? As the job has become bloodier and more protracted, the administration has flip-flopped on the who, when, where, and how of fighting the insurgency. Its notions of who the enemy is and who it wants to see in charge have shifted as the realities on the ground have changed. The neocon plan for Iraq may lie in shambles. This is not the war that could have been, had Bush succeeded in giving so many on the left what they seem to want so desperately: a chance for Americans to come together and give more of ourselves, to assent to more death, more loss, and more hardship in the name of fighting terrorism.

If the left wants to get this anti-war thing moving in the era of the individual, it would be wise to stop challenging Bush for his failure to change us after 9/11 and to look at who we are now. Are Americans hopelessly apathetic in a culture of instant gratification? Or is there hope to be found in just such a culture? Unlike the Democrats, Americans on the whole seem to know what they want and what they don't want. The left may have to get used to the idea that the banality of desire, rather than the sacred duties invoked on every anniversary of 9/11, may be just the ticket.

And this may be an invigorating opportunity for us to reconsider how we as individuals can influence our leaders' agendas. I’m no in-the-streets activist, but I can’t be the only one who’s been at least a little depressed that the only thing we seem to be able to change these days is the title, amount of snake-related carnage, and off-color language in a Sam Jackson movie (don’t get me wrong, the movie rocks) or the too-stalkerish capabilities of the recent upgrade to Facebook. But if, as Cutler suggests, there may be a power to indifference, if our leaders are unable to impress upon us the necessity of dying for their imperialist agendas, then the anti-war left may find that the American public has already made a difference in how the war has been conducted, both on the home front and abroad. And, to its surprise, the anti-war left may have a whole lot of allies out there: folks who'd rather go shopping or watch TV than talk about their solemn duty to serve the nation in its hour of darkness. It's time for the anti-war, anti-imperialist left to start thinking about where a politics of anti-imperialism might overlap with the (non-)politics of not caring.

On the fifth anniversary of the war on terror, one thing seems more important than ever: Those who stand against war might today consider commemorating the tragedy of 9/11 by forgetting the theme of sacrifice that this day has come to represent.