Well written doesn't mean right

An email from my sister called my attention to a personal attack on President Bush by one of the best authors currently writing today, E. L. Doctorow.


As always, his piece is well written, because he is one of the best writers at work in the US today. But I see no description in his biography of any training as a psychologist or psychiatrist, much less as a medium. How can this man produce such an intimate psychological portrait of a man he has never met? I believe what you see in this article is more revealing of Mr. Doctorow's psychology than of George Bush's.

Just a few points. Mr. Doctorow says that World War II was a war of national survival, but the war against terrorists is not. I find that logic hard to follow. Eisenhower was the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe. The attack on the US came from Japan, which I am led to believe is not in Europe. We included Germany as an enemy, not because they attacked us, but because a) they allied themselves with our enemies; b) they had a policy of extermination towards anyone within their control that they found to be racially or morally deficient by their standards; c) they were ruled by an amoral dictator who intended to control all neighboring territory; and d) they were actively engaged in scientific development of weapons of mass destruction (it is no coincidence that a large fraction of the Project Manhattan scientists were refugees from the Third Reich). These are almost exactly the same reasons for making Saddam Hussein our enemy. No one can ask Eisenhower whether he would have led the war to liberate Iraq like he did in the war to liberate Europe, but I firmly believe he would. After all, he was a professional soldier and senior military officer who swore an oath to "preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies". That Constitution specifies that the President is the Commander-in-Chief of the military forces, and that Congress declares war against our enemies. Whether you like it or not, that is the way the war in Iraq was decided.

The idea that we should use war as an instrument of policy only when there is no other option may sound reasonable, but it is not; it is no different than saying we should never wage war. There are always other options, but in many circumstances the other options pose more of a risk. We could have continued to pay ransom and tribute to the Barbary Pirates in the nineteenth century, but President Jefferson decided it was in the best interest of the United States to destroy them. We could have tolerated British ships stopping American ships at sea and impressing Americans into the Royal Navy, but once again, President Jefferson found that to be more of a risk to our nation than to declare war on the most powerful nation on earth at that time. The criteria that Mr. Bush elucidated are the same as all 43 of his predecessors; that war should be the last choice when all other options have failed.

There are other illogicalities in this essay, too. Mr. Doctorow at one point claims that "millions of people here and around the world marched against the war". He has sanctified and exaggerated a staged political event into a groundswell of anti-war sentiment that never existed and still does not. Pacifist activists getting their act together for a few days is not any kind of indication of public opinion. Foreign policy and national security are not decided by polls or inflammatory writing or political demonstrations or foreign opinion. They are determined by the elected officials who are answerable to the voters at the next election. The Democrats who voted to authorize the war changed their position as a political strategy. That strategy failed when Mr. Bush was re-elected by a larger margin than before.