10

The Ethics of George W. Bush

I think what this country needs to do is to usher in what I call ‘the responsibility era’—where you are responsible for the decisions you make. But we can’t usher in the responsibility era when a figure that is on your TV screen on a daily basis has behaved irresponsibly. It sends a mixed message. What’s needed in a president is a consistent message.

—George W. Bush, in an interview published in Charisma, November 2000

We have now examined Bush’s words and deeds on the key ethical issues he has addressed during his presidency. We have seen how frequently he defends his actions in terms of right and wrong. Yet it still isn’t obvious what kind of ethic the president holds. He insists that right and wrong are universal, and provides specific examples of good and evil, but offers no broad ethical principles or framework for thinking about what makes something good or evil. In several speeches there is an implicit appeal to one kind of ethic, but then other speeches or other decisions appear to be based on a quite different, and even contradictory, ethical stance.

Is Bush’s ethic based on individual rights?

Individual rights have an important place in American ethics— not surprisingly, since the Declaration of Independence begins with the ringing statement that the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are self-evident. The Bill of Rights incorporates strong statements about rights into the Constitution of the United States. Belief in the importance of individual rights is part of the American conservative tradition from which Bush draws his support, for individual rights are seen as a barrier against the tyranny of the majority and the power of the state, and so a necessary bulwark for a free society.

Bush’s rhetoric often emphasises individual rights. In his commencement address to the US Coast Guard Academy in May 2003 he said that the advance of freedom is ‘our calling’ and added: ‘If the self-evident truths of our founding are true for us, they are true for all.’ From there he went on to assert that America is ‘a people dedicated to civil rights’ and is ‘driven to defend the human rights of others’. We have seen Bush—consistent with his belief that individual rights are inviolable, and that human beings have a right to life from the moment of conception— refuse to provide federal support for research that would destroy a small number of human embryos in the hope of developing medical techniques that could save the lives of many more children and adults. His statements on taxation can also be seen as consistent with a philosophy based on individual rights, including the right to property. For when he says ‘It’s your money’, he implies that taxation, at least beyond what the state needs for some basic functions, is a violation of the property rights of citizens. He has also suggested, as many defenders of individual rights do, that the scope of the state’s power should be reduced.

To hold a workable ethic based on rights, however, it is not enough to make broad statements expressing general support for individual rights. The difficult part is defining the scope and limits of those rights, and the circumstances, if any, in which they may be overridden. One way of doing that was taken by the Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick in his book Anarchy, State and Utopia. Nozick begins with a firm statement of a rights-based ethic: ‘Individuals have rights, and there are things no person or group may do to them…’³³⁶ So strong and farreaching are these rights, Nozick argues, that they lead to a libertarian ethic. The only state that is compatible with respect for individual rights is a minimal one. It must limit its functions to defending its citizens from attack, whether from their fellow-citizens or from outside forces. Beyond that, the state has no right to tax its citizens, and must leave people alone to get on with their lives as they see fit (and as best they are able, without any other government assistance).

Bush evidently rejects the libertarian view. His tax cuts have been large, but they do not go so far as to challenge the modern state as we know it, which funds a host of government programs beyond providing law and order and national defence. The modern state can be justified, consistently with a moral framework based on rights, by saying that while some rights are inviolable, the right to property is not one of them—it is not, after all, mentioned in the opening sentences of the Declaration of Independence. But then, what rights does Bush take to be inviolable? He appears not to think that the right to liberty— which is part of the Declaration of Independence’s trinity of ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’—is inviolable. If he did, how could he have detained hundreds of people—both American citizens and others—for more than two years without charging them with any offence? Nor can he hold that the right to life is inviolable for all human beings, for that would be incompatible with the conduct of wars he has ordered. But if Bush does not take the rights to life and liberty as inviolable, it is difficult to say what rights he does consider inviolable.

Is Bush a utilitarian?

Utilitarianism is the view that the right action is that which is expected to have the best consequences for all those affected by our actions, now and in future. Typically, utilitarians focus on consequences like pleasure and pain, happiness and misery, or the satisfaction and frustration of preferences. They seek to maximise the net surplus of the good consequences, after subtracting the bad ones. Individual rights have, at most, a derivative role to play in utilitarian thinking. (Utilitarians will support individual rights only if recognising such rights will, in the long run, have better consequences than not recognising them.) In the aftermath of September 11, John Ashcroft and other senior officials in the Bush administration gave a classic utilitarian argument for overriding individual rights. They said that the indefinite detention of suspected terrorists was justified by the risk of much greater harm if a suspect was allowed to go free and later carried out a terrorist attack. Bush seemed to use a utilitarian argument in justifying the war in Iraq. Along with his argument about America’s right to take pre-emptive action in its own defence, he suggested that the great good of liberating millions of Iraqis from Saddam’s brutal tyranny justified the harm inflicted on a smaller number of Iraqis, even though many of them were innocent of any wrongdoing. In a different way, when Bush said, before his trip to Africa in July 2003: ‘We believe that human suffering in Africa creates moral responsibilities for people everywhere,’ he might have been reading from a utilitarian textbook.³³⁷ Utilitarians would want to go much further than the limited amounts Bush has agreed to spend on relieving human suffering and assisting those at risk from AIDS, but from a utilitarian perspective he has moved in the right direction on these issues.

Within a utilitarian framework, there is scope for disagreement about how the prospective good and bad consequences are to be assessed, and of course the probabilities of achieving these consequences are also relevant. Utilitarians would accept the ethical framework that Ashcroft and Bush are using when they justify detention without trial and the war on Iraq. But many utilitarians would disagree with the calculations Ashcroft and Bush used in order to justify the detentions and the war. They would point to the risk of abuse when basic rights are not protected, and to the virtual certainty that war will bring great suffering, without any comparable assurance that it will have the desired good consequences. Utilitarians might suspect that Ashcroft and Bush’s calculations are not truly utilitarian, but biased towards protecting American lives and American interests, rather than impartially protecting the lives and interests of all those affected by what they do.

On other issues, however, Bush firmly rejects utilitarian ethics. It is hard to see what utiliarian grounds there are for denying terminally ill people the assistance of a physician in ending their lives, as long as such decisions are carried out under strict guidelines like those required by Oregon’s physician-assisted suicide legislation. The same can be said about the medical use of marijuana. Most notably, though, as we have seen, Bush’s decision on the use of stem cells derived from embryos fits much better within a rights framework than within a utilitarian one.

Is Bush’s ethic Christian?

Some will say that Bush’s ethic is based neither on rights, nor on utility, but on his Christian religious beliefs. As we have seen, Bush’s speeches include many religious, sometimes specifically Christian, references. But Christians hold a wide range of ethical views. Christian ethics has been, in the teachings of different Christians, neo-Platonic, Aristotelian, Kantian, Marxist and existentialist. Some Christian ethicists, pointing to what they claim to be ‘natural law’, say that it is always wrong to violate moral rules like ‘do not kill innocent human beings’ and ‘do not tell a lie’. Others say that Christianity is love, and develop forms of ‘situation ethics’ that are very close to utilitarianism. Protestant Christians often look to the Bible, but cannot agree on how to interpret it, nor what priority to give its varying suggestions. To see to what extent Bush’s Christian faith explains his ethical views, it is necessary to take a more detailed look at some of his views and their relationship to Christian scriptures or teachings.

Anyone seeking to show the Christian origins of Bush’s values would be most likely to start with his professed reverence for human life. In his second inaugural speech as Governor of Texas he said, in words he quotes in A Charge to Keep:‘All of us have worth. We’re all made in the image of God. We’re all equal in God’s eyes.’ Elsewhere in that book he writes ‘my faith teaches that life is a gift from our Creator,’ and that ‘In a perfect world life is given by God and only taken by God.’³³⁸ Subsequently, in his August 2001 speech on federal funding for stem cell research, he says that his belief that ‘human life is a sacred gift from our Creator’ influences his position on whether the federal government should fund research on human stem cells. A year later he used similar language when signing the Born Alive Infants Protection Act:‘Today, through sonograms and other technology, we can clearly—see clearly that unborn children are members of the human family, as well. They reflect our image, and they are created in God’s own image.’³³⁹

Does it follow from acceptance of the Christian faith that frozen human embryos are precious and need to be protected, even when destroying them could save many more lives? Obviously the Bible says nothing about how frozen embryos should be treated, because the idea that a viable embryo could survive outside the human body—let alone be frozen—was beyond the comprehension of the Bible’s authors. The Bible doesn’t even have anything directly to say about abortion, and what it does say suggests that the death of a fetus is not to be thought of as equivalent to the death of a normal adult human. (For example, in Exodus we read that the penalty for hitting a pregnant woman and causing her to miscarry is a fine; but if the woman is injured, the principle of a life for a life, an eye for an eye, and so on, is to be applied.³⁴⁰ ) Many Christians support the use of embryos for research and consider that a woman’s right to control her body overrides any right to life that an embryo or fetus may have. So a Christian can come to different conclusions from those that Bush comes to, and his view on these issues is not inescapably implied by his Christian belief.

The difficulty of resolving what is a distinctively Christian view emerges even more sharply when we contrast Bush’s opposition to abortion and embryo research—on which Jesus, the founder of Christianity, and Paul, the first great exponent of Christian teachings, are silent—with his readiness to strike out at his adversaries, which they both quite explicitly oppose. Jesus famously said: ‘Do not resist one who is evil. But if any one strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.’³⁴¹ Paul reinforced this message: ‘Do not repay anyone evil for evil…Be not overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.’³⁴² The early Christians took these texts seriously and were pacifists. Tertullian, Origen and Clement of Alexandria—leading thinkers of the early Church—were all agreed that a Christian could not be a soldier. If one of the faithful becomes a soldier, Clement said, he must be cast out of the church, for he has ‘scorned God’. It was not until 312, when Constantine, the Roman emperor, became a Christian that this attitude changed, and Christian thinkers like Augustine began to develop the doctrine of the ‘just war’. Accepting that war could be justifiable was a smart political move—without it, Christianity could hardly have become the official religion of the Roman Empire—but it is flatly against the explicit teachings of Jesus and Paul. Yet after September 11, Bush did not turn the other cheek—and from the account given by Bob Woodward in Bush at War, he never seriously contemplated doing so.

On Iraq, Bush’s pro-war view was opposed by most Christian religious leaders. The Pope spoke out forcefully against the war and so too did the leaders of most, though not all, American Christian denominations, as well as most leading Christian theologians.³⁴³ When the leaders of the National Council of Churches, and of Bush’s own church, the United Methodists, asked for the opportunity to present their objections to the war, Bush refused to meet them.³⁴⁴ On any reasonable interpretation of the Christian message, there was nothing especially Christian about his decision to go to war, and there is a strong case for saying that it was distinctly un-Christian.

The clearest sign of a Christian, and more specifically evangelical, influence on Bush’s ethics is his repeated invocation of a conflict between good and evil. We have seen that Bush often talks of ‘the evil ones’ and even occasionally of those who are ‘servants of evil’. He urges us to ‘call evil by its name’, to ‘fight evil’ and tells us that out of evil will come good. This language comes straight out of apocalyptic Christianity. To understand the context in which Bush uses this language, we need to remember that tens of millions of Americans hold an apocalyptic view of the world. According to a poll taken by Time, 53 per cent of adult Americans ‘expect the imminent return of Jesus Christ, accompanied by the fulfillment of biblical prophecies concerning the cataclysmic destruction of all that is wicked’.³⁴⁵ One of the signs of the apocalypse that will precede the Second Coming of Christ is the rise of the Antichrist, the ultimate enemy of Christ, who heads Satan’s forces in the battle that will culminate in the triumph of the forces of God, and the creation of the Kingdom of God on earth. Projecting this prophecy onto the world in which they live, many American Christians see their own nation as carrying out a divine mission. The nation’s enemies therefore are demonised. That is exactly what Bush does. When, in discussing the looming war with Iraq with the Australian Prime Minister John Howard in February 2003, he said that liberty for the people of Iraq would not be a gift that the United States could provide, but ‘God’s gift to every human being in the world’, he seemed to be suggesting that there was divine endorsement for a war to overthrow Saddam Hussein.³⁴⁶ David Frum, Bush’s speechwriter at the time of his ‘axis of evil’ speech, says of Bush’s use of the term ‘evil ones’ for the people behind September 11: ‘In a country where almost two-thirds of the population believes in the devil, Bush was identifying Osama bin Laden and his gang as literally satanic.’³⁴⁷

Frum has given an account of how Bush came to use the phrase ‘axis of evil’ to refer to Iraq, Iran and North Korea. In his initial draft, he compared America’s enemies today with those in World War II, and referred to them as the ‘axis of hatred’, but Michael Gerson, who had overall responsibility for the speech and is an evangelical Christian, changed ‘hatred’ to ‘evil’ because he ‘wanted to use the theological language that Bush had made his own since September 11’. Despite being criticised, especially in Europe, for introducing such heavily moralistic language into international relations, Bush used it again and again until, in Frum’s words, it ‘ceased to be a speechwriter’s phrase and became his own’.³⁴⁸

Don Evans, who is not only Bush’s commerce secretary but also his close friend, says that Bush’s religious faith gives him ‘a very clear sense of what is good and what is evil’.³⁴⁹ Seeing the world as a conflict between the forces of good and the forces of evil is not, however, the orthodox Christian view, but one associated with the heresy of Manichaeism. The Manicheans were ferociously attacked by Augustine, who thought that seeing some kind of evil force as the source of all that is bad is a way of masking one’s own failings. Centuries of suppression and frequent persecution, however, did not eradicate the Manichean way of looking at the world. After the Reformation, the Manichean view appeared in some Protestant sects and was brought by them to America, where it flourished. Writing at a time when America entered World War I, the commentator and critic Walter Lippmann called the idea of a war betweeen good and evil forces ‘one of the great American traditions’.³⁵⁰ Bush’s readiness to see America as pure and good, and its enemies as wholly evil, has its roots in this American-Manichean tradition.

That Christian teachings have influenced Bush’s ethics is highly probable. They support Bush’s professed concern for the world’s poor. In promoting his initiative against AIDS, he spoke of the ‘wounded traveler on the road to Jericho’. His support for the ‘sacred institution’ of marriage and for faith-based organisations also very probably derives from his religious beliefs. But his readiness to go to war suggests that he does not simply derive his ethics from his reading of the Bible. There has to be some other basis on which he sometimes chooses to follow the path more compatible with Christian teachings and Christian scripture, and sometimes chooses not to do so.

An intuitive ethic

If Bush’s ethics cannot be fitted into any of the three frameworks that seem likely to be compatible with the positions he has taken, from where does he derive his ethical views? A clue can be found in what Bush said to Bob Woodward during an interview he gave for Bush at War:‘I’m not a textbook player. I’m a gut player.’When Bush spoke about the North Korean president, Kim Jong Il, he twice said that his reaction was ‘visceral’. During the interview,‘the president spoke a dozen times about his “instincts” or his “instinctive reactions”’. As Woodward comments:‘Bush’s role as politician, president and commander in chief is driven by a secular faith in his instincts—his natural and spontaneous conclusions and judgments. His instincts are almost his second religion.’³⁵¹

Bush’s views do not fit within a coherent ethical framework, because he reacts instinctively to specific situations. He feels that he knows what to do on any given occasion, but because he is not a reflective kind of person, he makes no attempt to put his judgments on specific issues together and see how coherently they fit with each other. David Frum describes the president as ‘a politician of conservative instincts rather than conservative principles. He knew in a general way what he believed and what he did not. But on any specific issue, nobody could ever be sure where the line was beyond which he could not be pushed.’³⁵²

We can see the limitations of Bush’s instinctive approach to ethical issues in his failure to resolve the inherent conflict between his own two ethical imperatives of building ‘a single nation of justice and opportunity’ and returning to the taxpayers what he saw as ‘their money’. For Bush, each of these was no doubt self-evidently right, but he never made a serious attempt to work out to what extent the government should tax its citizens in order to provide the resources for creating a single nation of justice and opportunity. The same is true of the conflict between protecting the liberty of the individual and fighting the ‘war against terror’. Obviously Bush thinks both are right; but there is no sign, in his pronouncements or his actions in detaining those he has designated ‘enemy combatants’, that he has tried to reach a considered judgment on how to balance the two. Only in his speech on stem cell research does Bush make an explicit attempt to reconcile two conflicting values. John DiIulio, who was at the White House at the time, regarded this decision as showing ‘unusual depth of reading, reflection, and staff deliberation’.³⁵³ In the Bush White House that is, indeed, lamentably unusual.

We all draw on our intuitions to decide what is right and what is wrong. In the hustle of everyday life it would be impractical to go back to first principles every time we need to make rapid moral decisions or to pass judgment on what someone else has done. So we rely on a general intuitive sense that works most of the time. Usually our intuitions fall back on simple principles, like ‘Don’t lie’,‘Keep your promises’, ‘Do good to those who do good to you’,‘Do no harm’ and so on. Following these simple intuitive rules produces the right answer, most of the time—that is, the answer that we would have reached, had we had the time and capacity to go back to fundamental principles and work out what they would imply in our particular situation. So intuitive thinking about ethics is usually a good thing. But in any complex situation, we are likely to have clashing intuitions, and then an appeal to intuitions alone does not help. To take a famous example discussed by philosophers down the centuries, if a man seeking to kill another comes to my door and asks if I have seen his intended victim, must I tell the truth, and say, ‘Yes, he is hiding in my closet’? Here the intuitive judgments ‘Tell the truth’ and ‘Do no harm’ are in conflict, and we must think about which is more important. That requires us to consider what ethical principles we take as ultimate.

For someone in Bush’s situation, called upon to decide important and complex issues on a daily basis, relying on moral instincts or intuitions is not enough. Reflection and critical thought are needed as well; but that is not something Bush relishes. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof has described Bush as ‘less interested in ideas than perhaps anybody I’ve ever interviewed’ and added ‘Nuance isn’t his natural state’.³⁵⁴

Here we return to Bush’s tendency to see the world in the stark terms of good and evil. We’ve already read Greg Thielmann, of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, saying that the Bush administration had ‘a faith-based intelligence attitude:“We know the answers, give us the intelligence to support those answers.”’We can now add to this account. It seems probable that it was not faith in general that gave Bush and his aides a misplaced confidence that they knew the answers. It was the idea that Saddam was evil. Writing in Newsweek on how Bush justified going to war with Iraq, Howard Fineman observed:‘He decided that Saddam was evil, and everything flowed from that.’³⁵⁵ That alone made it intuitively obvious that Saddam must be building weapons of mass destruction. But it is a mistake to divide the world neatly into good and evil, black and white without shades of grey, in a manner that eliminates the need to learn more about those with whom one is dealing. For an unreflective person to have a sense of ‘moral clarity’ that disregards the shadings in human motivation and conduct can be a vice, not a virtue. When it is coupled with a firm belief that the nation you lead is on the right side of history, pursuing ‘God’s justice’, and even that there is some divine plan that has put you in the position of leader of that nation, what you see as moral clarity, others will see as self-righteousness. When that self-proclaimed moral clarity is coupled with actions that fail to live up to the rhetoric, others will see it as hypocrisy. In the president of the most powerful nation on earth, self-righteousness and hypocrisy are dangerous vices.

An honest man?

Many people believe that George W. Bush is fundamentally a morally good person. John DiIulio, who Bush appointed to head the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, wrote after he had left the White House:‘In my view, President Bush is a highly admirable person of enormous personal decency. He is a godly man and a moral leader.’³⁵⁶ David Frum, also writing after he had ended his employment at the Bush White House, described Bush as ‘a good man’ with the virtues of ‘decency, honesty, rectitude, courage, and tenacity’.³⁵⁷ Frum, himself very much a conservative, offers us an extraordinary glimpse of what he calls ‘the moral fervor of the Bush White House’. But the moral fervour of the White House could be extraordinarily petty. Ethics rules for staff behaviour were enforced to, in Frum’s words,‘every last absurdity’. At a meeting, Frum was asked if he was sure about something, and he replied: ‘Yes, I am damn sure.’There was a prolonged silence and the atmosphere suddenly turned chilly. Eventually Frum realised what he had done wrong, and amended his reply to ‘I am quite sure’. This kind of moral fundamentalism—that is, a tendency to take simple moral rules in an absolute and literal fashion— appears to have been set by Bush himself. Frum tells us that Bush ‘scorned the petty untruths of the politician’ and insisted so strictly on not departing from the truth that when, a day before departing for a trip to California, he was asked to make a radio address to be broadcast the following day, he would begin reading,‘Today I am in California…’Then he would break off, saying with exasperation,‘But I’m not in California.’

Taking the obligation to be truthful so literally suggests an arrested moral development. The Harvard psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg studied moral judgment in children, adolescents and adults from the United States and other countries, and concluded that, across a wide range of cultures, as we develop morally, we pass through the same stages of moral growth in the same order. (Kohlberg would agree with Bush in rejecting ethical relativism and believing that we can educate our children in terms of universally valid standards of moral development towards a higher stage of moral reasoning.) As young children, Kohlberg says, we are at the pre-conventional level, concerned only about doing what is in our own interests and not being punished for what we do. Then we reach a conventional level, where we obey social conventions for their own sake.Kohlberg describes the higher of the two stages within the conventional level, as ‘an orientation toward authority, fixed rules, and the maintenance of the social order’. He found this to be the dominant conception among thirteen-year-old boys. By the age of sixteen, many had moved beyond the conventional level to the postconventional, or principled level. A person at this postconventional level can see the possibility of altering rules on the basis of larger considerations of social utility, or on the basis of ethical principles one has chosen for oneself, not in an arbitrary manner, but ‘in accord with self-chosen ethical principles appealing to logical comprehensiveness, universality, and consistency’.Kohlberg stresses that the principles chosen at the postconventional level are not concrete moral rules, like the Ten Commandments (or the simple rule ‘Do not lie’) but broader ethical principles like the Golden Rule or Kant’s categorical imperative (‘act always as if the maxim of your action were to be a universal law’).³⁵⁸ Frum’s account of Bush’s appeal to ‘fixed rules’ and his apparent inability to assess the simple rule against lying in terms of larger considerations about why we have such a rule, suggests that Bush has not progressed beyond Kohlberg’s conventional level of moral reasoning. This is the stage typically reached by early teenage boys, although Kohlberg notes that many develop no further, and hence it is not unusual for an adult to be at this stage.

Frum concludes, after describing Bush’s moral character, that ‘The country could trust the Bush administration not to cheat and not to lie.’³⁵⁹ But events have proven Frum wrong about that, and the Bush White House has provided us with a textbook example of what is wrong with an ethic based on rigid adherence to fixed moral rules, literally interpreted. While Bush may naively consider that it would be lying, and therefore wrong, to say that he is in California when he is recording a speech in Washington, he has failed to see the he did something gravely wrong when he created false impressions in his worldwide audiences about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and its links with Al Qaeda. These false impressions were fostered by the White House on the basis of a highly selective dossier of evidence. Bush included in his own State of the Union address statements about Iraq’s attempt to purchase uranium from Africa that either he or his staff—or perhaps both—knew to be highly doubtful, if not false. In July 2003, when questions were raised about how the statement was allowed to remain in Bush’s State of the Union address, both Condoleezza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld tried to argue that the statement was accurate. The way in which they did so suggests that Bush’s childishly literal notion of what it is to be truthful has set the tone for his entire administration.

Bush’s actual words, in the State of the Union address, were ‘the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa’. Bush’s statement took this form because the CIA had objected to an original version, which flatly stated that Saddam Hussein had sought to buy uranium from Africa. The White House staff member involved in that discussion with the CIA then suggested changing the sentence so that it stated that the British had reported that Saddam Hussein had sought to buy uranium from Africa. This would have been literally true, because the British had indeed made such a report. It was nevertheless misleading, for the CIA had earlier informed the British that their information was not reliable. The fact that Bush only referred to a British statement is the basis for Rice and Rumsfeld’s defence of the statement. Rice said that ‘the statement that [Bush] made was indeed accurate. The British government did say that.’ Rumsfeld said that Bush’s statement was ‘technically accurate’.³⁶⁰ In fact, even on the most literal interpretation of Bush’s statement, it was not accurate. Bush did not merely say that the British had ‘reported’ that Iraq had sought to buy uranium from Africa, he said that the British had ‘learned’ this. To say that someone has learned something is to endorse what they say they have learned as true. (Imagine that the British had said that Saddam Hussein was a peace-loving man about to bring democracy to his country. Would Bush have said that the British had ‘learned’ that?) But quite apart from these weak attempts to justify what Bush said as ‘technically accurate’, the more serious charge is that even if what Bush said really were technically accurate, it still would have been designed to mislead the world into thinking that Iraq had been trying to buy uranium from Africa, when Bush’s staff had good reason to believe that this was not true.

If Bush’s staff knew that the information in his speech was not reliable, then Bush himself should have known. If he knew, he is, of course, as culpable as they are. If he did not know, then either he had not properly instructed his staff on the importance of passing such information on to him, or he had properly instructed them, and they failed to follow his instructions. If they had failed to follow his instructions, then a president who was sensitive to the seriousness of misleading the Congress and the American people on so vital a matter as the basis for starting a war would, on first learning of the possibility that his staff had acted improperly, have seen that whoever was responsible for this serious error of judgment suffered the usual consequences that befall senior officials or political leaders who make such mistakes. Bush, however, did nothing of the sort. When the issue became public, instead of launching an investigation into what went wrong and why, Bush’s initial response was to condemn his critics as ‘revisionist historians’ and to evade questions about the credibility of the information he had provided by asserting that the war has had, in the removal of Saddam, a good outcome.³⁶¹ Then Bush said that his speech had been cleared by the CIA, as if that absolved him of all responsibility for it. After CIA director George Tenet took responsibility for the inclusion of the misleading material, Bush said that he ‘absolutely’ had confidence in Tenet and the CIA, and that he considered the matter closed. When asked at a press conference why Condoleezza Rice was not being held responsible for the mistaken inclusion of the statement about African uranium, he simply said:‘Dr Condoleezza Rice is an honest, fabulous person and America is lucky to have her service. Period.’There was no further explanation of her role in the matter. (Rice later admitted that she feels ‘personal responsibility for this entire episode’.³⁶² ) Then, asked directly if he takes personal responsibility for the inaccuracy, Bush said:‘I take personal responsibility for everything I say, of course, absolutely.’³⁶³ But Bush seems to think that ‘taking responsibility’ is a mere matter of words, for neither Tenet nor Rice lost their jobs for the mistakes for which they took responsibility—or were even reprimanded—and Bush himself made no admission of error, nor did he apologise to Congress and the American people for having misled them.

When the Senator Jon Corzine, a Democrat from New Jersey, moved to establish an independent twelve-member commission with a broad mandate to examine questions like whether Iraq possessed so-called weapons of mass destruction, had links to Al Qaeda or had tried to buy uranium in Africa, the Republican-controlled Senate, voting along party lines, killed the proposal. A word of support from Bush would have cleared the way for it. But he was evidently more interested in protecting his own position than in establishing the truth about these matters, or in preventing something similar from happening again.³⁶⁴

That Bush had something to hide is suggested by the fact that in October 2002 the CIA had already removed a reference to Iraq’s attempts to purchase uranium from Africa—specifically, from Niger—from a speech Bush was to give. If Bush was aware of that, then he should have known that he was on dangerous ground in repeating a similar claim in his State of the Union address the following January. And since he receives a daily briefing from the CIA, it seems that he would have known that. Bush said, on 14 July 2003, that doubts were only raised about the intelligence underlying the African uranium claim after his State of the Union address, but this was contrary to earlier statements from both the CIA and Bush’s own White House staff, including Condoleezza Rice. At a press conference on the following day, a reporter asked Scott McClellan, the White House spokesperson, why the president had made an inaccurate statement on this matter, but McClellan evaded the question. Another reporter then asked whether the president was aware that the CIA had insisted on removing the reference from his earlier speech. McClellan evaded that question too. The reporter tried four more times to get a definite answer from McClellan to his question, but eventually gave up in frustration, the question still unanswered.³⁶⁵

The way in which the Bush administration handled the issue of misleading information about Iraq offers the clearest demonstration of its gross misunderstanding of the moral requirements of honesty, but there are many other instances in which Bush has made rhetorically powerful statements and then failed to live up to the expectations he has created. John DiIulio has written:

Remember ‘No child left behind’? That was a Bush campaign slogan. I believe it was [in] his heart, too. But translating good impulses into good policy proposals requires more than whatever somebody thinks up in the eleventh hour before a speech is to be delivered.³⁶⁶

After a White House spokesperson described DiIulio’s charges as ‘baseless and groundless’, DiIulio subsequently apologised, saying his criticisms were ‘groundless and baseless due to poorly chosen words and examples’. But the original statement reads as if it were well-considered, and the apology appeared to have been made under pressure.

As a candidate, Bush led people to believe that it was important to him that no child should be left behind. As president, he did not make a genuine effort to do something to prevent millions of children being left behind—in fact his tax cuts deprived the state of the resources it would need to tackle this problem. Similarly, he says that he supports free trade, but when there is a political advantage to be gained by protecting the American steel industry or granting unprecedented subsidies to wealthy farmers, he does not stick to his free trade principles. He speaks of America’s calling to promote democracy around the world, but his administration reacted positively to the first reports of an apparently successful coup against the left-leaning, but democratically elected, Venezuelan government of Hugo Chávez.³⁶⁷ Following the Enron scandal, he pledged to increase enforcement against corporate rip-offs, but his 2003 budget actually reduced funds for such enforcement by $209 million.³⁶⁸ We may take these deceptions lightly because we have come to expect them of politicians, but if a candidate campaigns by stressing his moral character and his honesty, and then fails to make even a serious attempt to implement his campaign promises, he has damaged the moral fabric of democracy.

Belief in Bush’s honesty led many voters to prefer him to Gore in the 2000 presidential election. Among voters who rated ‘honesty’ as an important factor influencing their choice of candidate, 80 per cent said that they voted for Bush.³⁶⁹ These voters were disgusted with Clinton, not only for his sexual relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, but for lying about it. That Clinton did lie about his private life is clear, and he was wrong to do so. But his lies did not lead his country into a war that cost thousands of lives. The false impressions created in the mind of the American public by Bush have had far more serious consequences.

Taking a cynical view

In ancient Athens, if we can believe the account given by Plato in The Republic, the sophist Thrasymachus argued that whatever is in the interests of those who are strongest is just. Thrasymachus didn’t mean that we should really do whatever is in the interests of the strongest. He was suggesting that the very idea of justice is a kind of fraud perpetrated on the weak by the strong, the better to further their own interests. Some people take this view of Bush’s ethics. His real motive, these cynics suggest, is to please his wealthy friends and supporters. His many speeches and comments on ethics camouflage decisions that are just as self-serving as those of any other politician, perhaps more so. Even his religious conversion was so conveniently timed—shortly before he revived his long-abandoned political career with the Republican Party, then increasingly coming under the influence from evangelicals, especially in the South—as to give rise to doubts about how genuine it was.³⁷⁰ To take Bush’s ethical views seriously, to subject them to a reasoned critique and try to fit them into a coherent ethical framework, is therefore to treat them more seriously than they deserve. Instead, we should expose the naked political and economic interests that lie behind them.

Among the cynics, none has been more forceful than the Princeton economics professor and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman.‘We are well advised,’ Krugman tells us, ‘not to trust anything the administration says about the goals of its domestic policy.’The real interest of the Bush White House, in Krugman’s analysis, is not to achieve social objectives, but to win political support.³⁷¹ On free trade:‘the Bush administration is all for it—unless there is some political cost, however small, to honoring its alleged principles.’³⁷² Bush’s plan on global warming is ‘a sham, relying on the kindness of corporations’.³⁷³ On tax cuts, the administration ‘knows exactly what it’s doing’ and what it’s doing is ‘shamelessly misrepresenting the content of its own policies’ to disguise how much of the cut is going to the rich.³⁷⁴ Even before it began to look as if no weapons of mass destruction would be found in Iraq, Krugman pointed to Bush’s ‘credibility problem’, saying that his mendacity ‘has reached almost pathological levels’.³⁷⁵ Nor does Krugman spare Bush’s personal character, pointing to the many unanswered questions about his business dealings before he became Governor of Texas and his history of taking ‘institutions traditionally insulated from politics’ and turning them into ‘tools for rewarding your friends and reinforcing your political control’.³⁷⁶

The case for taking a cynical view of Bush’s talk of ethics cannot be lightly dismissed. There are two distinct versions of it. One is that Bush himself is carrying off this sham, consciously deceiving his audience every time he speaks of morality, of right and wrong, and even of his religious faith. The real Bush is not interested in living a morally good life at all, he’s motivated by personal ambition and the desire to help his rich friends. Though it is difficult to disprove such a hypothesis, I do not find it plausible. No one who has known Bush personally, at least not since he became a Christian, has suggested that he is so shameless, nor so good an actor. The standard view, even from those who, like John DiIulio, are prepared to speak critically of the Bush administation, is that Bush is a ‘decent’ man, though one with intellectual limitations. It is difficult to believe that Bush could be so successfully living a lie.

There is also a more intriguing possibility that will appeal to those who enjoy speculating about secret cliques that rule the world. We might attribute cynical motives, not to Bush himself, but to those who manipulate him for their own purposes. Several magazine and newspaper reports have highlighted the fact that followers of the political philosopher Leo Strauss play an important role in the Bush administration. A less likely person than Leo Strauss to have a major influence on the Bush administration is hard to imagine. Born in Germany in 1899, his ideas were shaped by the failure of the liberal, tolerant Weimar Republic to deal with the dual threat of communism and Nazism. That failure meant that Strauss, who was Jewish, had to flee his native country in 1938. He came to America and spent most of his remaining years, until his death in 1973, at the University of Chicago. There he lived quietly and without gaining much public attention, writing difficult and often obscure academic essays on the thought of philosophers like Plato, Maimonides, Machiavelli and Hobbes.Yet through his teaching Strauss gathered a band of followers devoted to his view of the world. They in turn attracted their own disciples, so that Strauss’s influence spread to a third generation.

Strauss’s ideas lend themselves well to a conspiracy theory. Central to all his writings is the doctrine that there is one kind of truth for the masses, and another for the philosophers, that is, for those in the know. Strauss claimed that all the great philosophers wrote in a kind of code, so that the masses could read them in a way that would not disturb necessary social conventions, while the philosophers could grasp the more radical meaning hidden in their texts. One of these not-to-be-revealed-to-the-masses truths is that the existence of God is, at best, unprovable on any rational, scientific view of the world. Strauss himself is widely regarded as having been an atheist. But this truth should not be revealed to the masses, because religion ‘breeds deference to the ruling class’, and without that, the masses may rise up and destroy the higher culture that is at the apex of Straussian values.³⁷⁷ Thomas Fleming, editor of the right-wing journal Chronicles, puts it more bluntly. Straussians, he says,‘believe that religion may be a useful thing to take in the suckers with’. Something similar is true, in Fleming’s view, of the attitude of the Straussian inner circle to democracy and liberty. They don’t themselves believe in them, but they teach others to believe in them.³⁷⁸ The conservative Robert Locke, who counts himself as a Straussian, would add equality to this list:‘Civic equality may be salutary for the functioning of society, but men are not truly equal in value.’ Indeed, we have ‘no higher duty, and no more pressing duty’, Strauss thought, ‘than to remind ourselves and our students, of political greatness, human greatness, of the peaks of human excellence’.³⁷⁹

The fact that Straussians are cultish and network to find one another jobs in Washington has taken them to a position of extraordinary influence in the Bush administration. Adding to the sense of a conspiracy is the fact that, to quote Locke once more,‘Straussians talk in a kind of code to one another.’ One of these Straussian codewords is ‘gentleman’ which refers to someone who lacks the intellect required for philosophy, but is nevertheless in some ways morally admirable. These ‘gentlemen’ have a special role to play in the Straussian scheme. In 1985 Miles Burnyeat, a scholar of classical philosophy, published an article on Strauss in the New York Review of Books that included this paragraph, which some might now consider prophetic:

The leading characters in Strauss’s writing are ‘the gentlemen’ and ‘the philosopher.’‘The gentlemen’ come, preferably, from patrician urban backgrounds and have money without having to work too hard for it…Such ‘gentlemen’ are idealistic, devoted to virtuous ends, and sympathetic to philosophy. They are thus ready to be taken in hand by ‘the philosopher,’ who will teach them the great lesson they need to learn before they join the governing elite.³⁸⁰

The picture will now start to look familiar. So who are the Straussians around Bush? Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld’s deputy and the man often credited with being the chief architect of the war on Iraq is one. Richard Perle, former chairman of the Defense Policy Board, and arch-critic of the United Nations, is another. So too is Abram Shulsky, who headed the Office of Special Plans, a unit set up by Rumsfeld because he wasn’t getting the kind of information he wanted from the CIA and the Defense Department’s own intelligence service, the Defense Intelligence Agency. Shulsky was responsible for analysing intelligence in a manner that selectively highlighted dubious evidence pointing to Saddam Hussein’s supposed arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. In the previous chapter I discussed the influential case made by William Kristol, founder of the Project for a New American Century, for going to war with Iraq. Kristol is a Straussian. In a different area, bioethics, Bush listens to another Straussian, Leon Kass, who now heads the president’s Council on Bioethics.³⁸¹

If we are persuaded that there is a Straussian conspiracy, we will view Bush as the ‘gentleman’ of suitably patrician background, being used by Straussians for their own political purposes. Bush’s frequent talk of God and faith keeps the masses in line. His rhetoric about ‘leaving no child behind’ and building ‘a single nation of justice and opportunity’ is helpful because belief in equality is ‘salutary for the functioning of society’. Naturally, the powers behind the president make sure that his actions are the very opposite of what would be needed to bring about a nation of equals, for in their eyes true equality is impossible and the attempt to approach it more closely is dangerous. It could imperil what is much more important: protecting from the multitude those who are truly great, the ‘philosophers’ and others who can aspire to ‘the peaks of human excellence’.

I’m not particularly keen on conspiracy theories myself, but I have to admit that, as an explanation of why the Bush administration was so determined to go to war with Iraq, this one has some plausibility. Wolfowitz, Perle and Shulsky were key players in driving the United States into this war. Years before September 11, 2001, they wanted to overthrow Saddam Hussein, to secure America’s oil supplies and to change the political complexion of the Middle East. They seized the opportunity of the ‘war on terror’ to do so, despite the absence of any meaningful link between Saddam and Al Qaeda.

Could it really be the case, though, that Bush was a dupe in this situation? It is possible that he was given lines to speak—like the famous sentence about Iraq’s attempt to purchase uranium in Africa—and not told how weak the basis for believing them was. The possibility that Bush did not really understand everything he was saying may provide an explanation of the utterly bizarre account of the reasons for attacking Iraq that he gave to reporters three months after the war ended. Speaking in the White House’s Oval Office, in the presence of United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, Bush said, of Saddam Hussein, ‘we gave him a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn’t let them in. And, therefore, after a reasonable request, we decided to remove him from power…’³⁸² Anyone who can, in all seriousness and sobriety, offer such a totally fictitious account of events of global significance that took place only three months earlier, and in which he has been the central figure, can hardly have had a firm grasp of the situation that he was supposedly directing. Perhaps Bush was not sober, or had ingested mind-altering substances, or was having a psychotic episode? None of those explanations is at all likely, but in the absence of some such explanation, Bush’s astonishing statement makes it seem possible that on Iraq, he really was someone’s puppet.

If the president was someone’s puppet on Iraq, he might be someone’s puppet on other issues too. Not, presumably, Straussians—they are less well placed to influence Bush’s domestic agenda. In the early days of the Bush presidency, it was suggested that Vice-President Cheney was the controlling influence— when Cheney had heart problems, comedians joked that now Bush was ‘only a heartbeat away from the presidency’. More recently, the finger has been pointed at Karl Rove, the president’s chief political strategist. According to Time magazine, Rove ‘ranks among the most influential staff members ever to advise a President’.³⁸³ There is no doubt that when Bush abandoned free trade principles to protect America’s steel industry, mostly located in key mid-western states, he was following Rove’s advice. But some see Rove’s hand in much more than that. Tom Daschle, leader of the Democrats in the Senate, accused him of trying to gain political advantage for the Republicans out of the national security debate. Rove himself admitted making use of the war on terror to benefit Republican candidates at the mid-term elections.³⁸⁴ That is, of course, not the same thing as waging the war on terror in order to benefit Republican candidates. But some find it hard to determine the limit of Rove’s influence.

Bush’s ethical failure

Whether he really believes in the fine phrases and lofty rhetoric that he uses, or is consciously using it to win public support, it is clear that Bush has no real interest in the policy details needed to achieve the aspirations he has voiced. He has failed to follow through on most of the commitments he has made to work for a better, more just society. He has said that deep, persistent poverty is unworthy of America’s promise, but the number of Americans living in poverty increased in both 2001 and 2002. Instead of combating that increase, Bush has pressed for tax cuts that hobble the government’s capacity to do anything about it. Rather than ensure that the nation he leads is a good global citizen, Bush has spurned institutions for global co-operation and set back the task of making the rule of law, rather than force, the determining factor in world affairs. He has launched an unnecessary war, costly in human lives and in dollars, with a final outcome that is still uncertain. His protection of the steel industry and his signature on a law authorising the largest-ever subsidies to American farmers shows his strong rhetoric about free trade to be a brutal hypocrisy that is driving millions of impoverished farmers in other countries deeper into poverty. A comparison between the size of these subsidies and Bush’s proposed increase in foreign aid makes his compassion look stingy.

Nor has Bush’s own moral character stood up well to the test of high office. Handicapped by a naive idea of ethics as conformity to a small number of fixed rules, he has been unable to handle adequately the difficult choices that any chief executive of a major nation must face. A person of good moral character who takes a false step will admit it, seek to understand what went wrong, and try to prevent something similar happening again. When Bush’s use of misleading intelligence about Iraq was exposed, however, he blocked an open investigation into how he and his staff came to mislead the American public and the world about the basis on which he went to war. Instead he made further inaccurate statements about when the intelligence was first known to be unsubstantiated and about the events that led to the decision to go to war. This may be the kind of behaviour we expect from a politician more concerned to protect his reputation than to do what is right. They are not the actions of a person of good moral character.

In the end, it is impossible to be sure how genuine Bush and those who advise him are about the ethics that he advocates. This book can therefore be seen as an attempt to cover all the possibilities. When Bush speaks about his ethics, he is either sincere or he is insincere. If he is insincere, he stands condemned for that alone. I have started with the opposite, more generous assumption: that Bush is sincere, and we should take his ethic seriously, assessing it on its own terms, and asking how well he has done by his own standards. Even if that assumption should be false, the task has been worth undertaking, for we now know that, sincerely held or not, Bush’s ethic is woefully inadequate.