- The new revelations about President Bush's shirked Air
National Guard service will continue the campaign debate about physical
bravery. But with Bush, the real issue isn't physical bravery but moral
cowardice.
-
- We have a more immediate sense of what physical bravery
and cowardice are. In fact, when we speak of bravery and cowardice, the
physical variety is almost always what we,re talking about. It's whether
or not you can charge an enemy position while you,re being fired at. It's
whether you,re immobilized by the fear of death.
-
- Moral cowardice is more complex. A moral coward is someone
who lacks the courage to tell the truth, to accept responsibility, to demand
accountability, to do what's right when it's not the easy thing to do,
to clean up his or her own messes. Perhaps we could say that moral bravery
is having both the courage of your convictions as well as the courage of
your misdeeds.
-
- On the balance sheet of moral bravery " as opposed
to physical bravery " John Kerry and George W. Bush were about as
far apart as you could be on Vietnam. On the one hand, you have Kerry,
who already had doubts about whether we should be fighting in Vietnam before
he went but put his life on the line anyway. On the other hand, you have
Bush, who supported the war, which means he believed the goal was worth
the cost in American lives. Only, not his life. He believed others should
go, just not him.
-
- That is almost the definition of moral cowardice. And
it's a trait he continues to display as he smears other people's meritorious
service (John McCain, Kerry, et al.) without taking responsibility for
what he's doing. He gets other people to do his dirty work for him.
-
- What's gone unsaid through most of the campaign is that
the president's moral cowardice is a big part of why we,re now bogged down
in Iraq. It's a key reason why 1,000 Americans have died there. Bush has
set the tone for this administration, and his moral cowardice permeates
it.
-
- Consider only the most obvious examples.
-
- The president didn't think he could convince the public
of the merits of his reasons for going to war. So he and his key advisers
lied to them. He greatly exaggerated what was thought to be the evidence
of weapons of mass destruction and completely manufactured a connection
between Iraq and al Qaeda. He couldn't get the country behind him on the
up-and-up. So he took the easy way out; he took a shortcut; he deceived
them. And now the country is paying a terrible price for it.
-
- He and his advisers knew that if they leveled with the
public about the costs of war " in dollars, years, soldiers "
he'd have a very hard time convincing them. So he didn't level with them.
He took the easy way out.
-
- The sort of forward planning that would have made a big
difference in postwar Iraq was scuttled or derided because it made the
job of selling the war harder. Those who sounded the alarm had their careers
cut short.
-
- Once we were in Iraq and it was clear that we had been
wrong about the weapons of mass destruction " a judgment that's been
clear for more than a year " the president refused to admit it. And
he still hasn't. A year and a half after we invaded Iraq and he still can't
level with the American people about this simple and now obvious reality.
He still relies on his vice president to try to fool people into thinking
Saddam Hussein was tied to al Qaeda and the Sept. 11 attacks.
-
- More important, once it became clear that the president's
plans for postwar Iraq were producing poor results, he refused to shift
policy or to reshuffle his team. He refused to demand accountability from
his own team because of how it would have reflected on him. He has preferred
to continue on with demonstrably failed policies because to do otherwise
would be to admit he,d made a mistake and open himself up to all the political
fallout that would entail. That was something he wasn't willing to do.
-
- The stubborn refusal ever to change course, which the
president tries to pass off as a sign of leadership or devotion to principle,
is actually an example of his cowardice.
-
- For the same reasons, he runs from soldiers, funerals
as if they were burying victims of the plague " because it's the easy
way out. If there's a problem, he denies it or finds someone else to take
the fall for him.
-
- Everyone has these tendencies in their measure. No one
is perfect. But they define Bush.
-
- The same sort of moral cowardice that led him to support
the Vietnam War but decide it wasn't for him, run companies into the ground
and let others pay the bill, play gutter politics but run for the hills
when someone asked him to say it to their face " those are the same
qualities that led the president to lie the country into war, to fail to
prepare for the aftermath and then to refuse to take responsibility for
any of it when the bill started to come due.
-
- ----------
- Josh Marshall is editor of talkingpointsmemo.com. His
column appears in The Hill each week. Email: jmarshall@thehill.com
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