In the summer of 2001, writes Robert Draper, George Bush ‘seemed strangely accidental, undersized, disinterested … lacking purpose’. His pledge to be ‘a uniter, not a divider’ had been wrecked by the manner of his Supreme Court-sanctioned ascent to the presidency. His promise to be ‘a different kind of Republican’ had been buried by the sweeping tax cuts, through which he chose to define the first months of his presidency. Only his desire for the United States to be a non-interventionist, ‘humble’ player on the world scene seemed attainable. And then came 9/11.
Dead Certain tells how the ‘war on terror’ gave the Bush administration the purpose it previously lacked but how the president’s own curious combination of near-total certitude, Manichaenism (‘I don’t do nuance’) and lack of intellectual curiosity has grievously weakened it. Bush seems both nonchalant and detached about these failings. Of one of the principal causes of the mire into which post-war Iraq was plunged, he off-handedly tells the author, ‘policy was to keep the Iraqi army intact. Didn’t happen.’
Draper’s not wholly unsympathetic portrait of the 43rd president is worthwhile principally because of the access the author, who has spent over a decade covering the president’s rapid rise through Texas politics to the White House, has had to Bush, his family and senior members of his administration.
It’s a remarkable account of how Bush’s team managed to turn their narrow, disputed victory in 2000 into a much more solid one in 2004 – substituting along the way the strategy of ‘things have never been better, vote for change’ for ‘things have never been worse, stay the course’ – and how the president’s second term has been characterised mainly by hubris. His domestic ‘Opportunity Agenda’ died long before the Democrats seized control of Congress; abroad, the limits of his ‘Freedom Agenda’ were cruelly exposed by Hamas’ victory and continued US support for the governments of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.
Bush promised aides reluctant to stay on after his re-election that his second term would be ‘fun’ and they’d all ‘have a blast’. ‘And, at the end,’ he promised, ‘we’ll load up Air Force One and go to the 2008 Olympics.’ As the president said, in a rather different context, ‘bring it on’.