President hostage to events in Iraq
WASHINGTON – With ballots replacing bombs as the dominant images out of Iraq, President Bush’s most difficult year may be ending with the possibility of a more hopeful 2006.
For one historic day at least, Iraqis were primarily citizens rather than targets of suicide bombers or subjects of a dictator. For one day, the images of beaming voters showing purple-stained fingers as evidence they’d cast a ballot were compelling and powerful antidotes for the chaos that has marked 2005 news out of Iraq. If support for Bush and the war does rise, it may be partly because after many months of rising opposition, Bush took responsibility both for the failures of intelligence before the invasion of 2003 and for problems since.
But his presidency is still hostage to events on the ground in Iraq. Bush faces conflicting challenges: extolling freedom and long-term democratic reform, while dealing with the reality that terrorists won’t pack up and go home simply because Thursday’s election for a new parliament came off without major disruptions.
“The Iraqis still face many challenges, including security and reconstruction and economic reform,” Bush said in a speech on the eve of Iraq’s vote. “But they are building a strong democracy that can handle these challenges, and that will be a model for the Middle East.”
The venue for the last of four speeches Bush delivered leading up to Iraq’s vote was the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a choice steeped in irony. Bush can only hope that the legacy of Wilson’s presidency – the failure to get the United States to confront troubling times with a legitimately larger role in the world – does not become his own legacy.
As students of Wilson know, the reluctant internationalist ultimately failed to get Congress and the American people to agree to join the new League of Nations after World War I.
It was Wilson’s consuming vision. He worked so hard to create it and to make the United States a part of it that the task incapacitated him during the final months of his presidency and nearly killed him. When the Senate rejected the United States’ entry into the league, the “war to end all wars” became, instead, a precursor of World War II.
Will Bush have better luck convincing Americans over the long term that the possibility of a stable and democratic Iraq in the Middle East is worth further risk to the United States’ prestige, image and treasury?
The stakes today are not that different from December of 1918, when Wilson traveled to Europe to sell his League of Nations. Now, as then, a president is staking his legacy on successfully asserting U.S. influence around the globe.
Both men saw internationalism based on democracy as the only way forward.
“We cannot turn back,” Wilson said during a cross-country trip to sell the league idea. “We can only go forward with lifted eyes to follow the vision. America shall in truth show the way.”
Like Bush, Wilson’s initial instincts were more isolationist. He won re-election in 1916 as the president “who kept the country out of war.” But continued German aggression on the high seas and on the battlefields of Europe forced war.
“We entered it not because our material interests were directly threatened, but only because we saw … free government imperiled everywhere,” Wilson wrote.
When he first ran for president in 2000, Bush eschewed “nation building.” But as in Wilson’s case, events beyond his control seized history. The 2001 terrorist attacks, Bush said, “changed our country” and threatened freedom everywhere.