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The battle for Bush’s brain

It’s extraordinary that in a complex modern democracy, so much comes down to the befuddled consciousness of a not very extraordinary man. We are seeing now the ramping up of a campaign to persuade George W. Bush to start a war with Iran before leaving office, so that President Obama would have a blazing Mid […]

It’s extraordinary that in a complex modern democracy, so much comes down to the befuddled consciousness of a not very extraordinary man. We are seeing now the ramping up of a campaign to persuade George W. Bush to start a war with Iran before leaving office, so that President Obama would have a blazing Mid East conflagration to deal with instead of a burning, but somewhat contained, inferno. Bill Kristol’s claim that Bush might bomb Iran if he thought McCain was going to lose the election was mostly an effort to push the relatively unlikely closer to the realm of plausibility.

Jim Lobe has very good post on Caroline Glick, a Jerusalem Post editor tied in with major Washington neoconservative networks, interviewed on NRO by Kathryn Lopez. Lobe finds Glick provides a lapidary summation of the neocon world view: Israel’s enemies are America’s enemies; Iran, Al Qaeda, the Palestinians all lumped together into one indistinguishable blob; Obama doesn’t understand the difference between good and evil. It’s trite but true to note that National Review in the old days looked a little skeptically on the Israeli right, or at least realized that the United States and Israel were different countries. The neocons have been fairly quiet for a while, but these are themes are we’ll be hearing more of, lest the American people seem inclined to choose diplomacy over war.

If I had to go out on a limb, I would bet Bush resists these pressures. He was surfing a wave of bellicose public opinion in 2002 when he decided to invade Iraq, and didn’t realize the wave was in part generated by the neoconservatives within and without his administration. (I’ve been told, by someone who would know, that Bush asked his father, in the summer of 2004, “Dad, what’s a neocon?”) But Bush has a certain amount of social intelligence; he’s always been a popular, go along guy. He might be stubborn about admitting his own errors, but I would guess he can sense how big a transgression it would be to compound them by doubling or tripling the war–especially if that means going against the flow. I can’t imagine that Laura, or his daughters, are clamoring for a much wider war to attach to their father’s (and their) names as they head into the post-presidency part of their lives.

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