Beating about the Bush

Simon Hoggart
Saturday April 14, 2007
The Guardian

American joke: "What's the difference between Iraq and Vietnam? George W Bush had an exit strategy for Vietnam." It's startling to see how much the American press has turned against the president. Partly it's because every new president starts with a very fair wind, so the disenchantment is greater.

And there is a view that, however much you might dislike the man, the office deserves a degree of respect. Even in the darkest days of the soon-to-end Carter presidency in 1980, when his attempt to rescue the hostages in Tehran failed catastrophically, you'd hear people apologise for being rude about him, because after all he was still the president and commander in chief. In Britain we tend to the view that all politicians are much the same, and while some may look more promising than others, in the end they'll let you down.

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But the mood has turned completely against George W, even in rock solid Republican states. They don't really have chattering classes in the states, but they do have the pontificating classes, and they certainly know what they think now. Take Joe "Primary Colors" Klein, writing in Time magazine: "I've tried hard to be respectful to the man and his office, but the three defining sins of the Bush administration - arrogance, incompetence, cynicism - are congenital: it is increasingly difficult to imagine yet another two years of slow bleed with a leader so clearly unfit to lead."

· With that in mind I went to a talk by Joseph Wilson (I'm on my annual visit to the Conference on World Affairs - a splendid piss-up with speeches, held in Boulder, Colorado). Wilson is the career diplomat who served Bush's father in Baghdad during the first Gulf war. In 2002 he was sent to Niger to investigate claims by the British government that Saddam had bought 500 tons of "yellowcake" - uranium-bearing ore.

He quickly discovered there was no truth in the story, so was shocked to hear it delivered as fact by Bush Jr in his 2003 State of the Union speech. When he wrote an article pointing out this fib, the administration set out to discredit him and finally - treasonously, he says - named his wife as a covert CIA agent. The details are complicated, but it's why Lewis Libby, the former chief of staff of the vice-president, has been convicted of perjury and other offences, and might even end up in the slammer.

So Wilson is a hero to anyone who is anti-war, and his speech was interrupted by much loud cheering (in American terms, Boulder is pretty leftwing). "We spend 20 times as much on intelligence as the British, who have no presence in Niger, so does it make any sense to believe what your own intelligence service tells you is baseless?" he asked.

The invasion of Iraq, he said, was "a war not to defend our nation, but to validate an academic theory". It's generally assumed that Libby's lawyers will try to spin the appeal process out until after the 2008 election, when Bush will be able to pardon him. But as Jeffrey Toobin writes in another grand pontificating journal, the New Yorker, "George Bush should not be giving pardons; he should be begging the nation's".