Bye Bye Bush

If newspaper reports constitute the first draft of history, then books by magazine journalists may constitute the second. That second-drafting process never abates these days, and it accelerates as an election looms, particularly at the end of an administration widely thought to be scandalous or incompetent. It is therefore no surprise that critical postmortems of George W. Bush's administration are already pouring forth. Recent books by Fred Kaplan, Jacob Heilbrunn, and Jacob Weisberg are cases in point: all three were written by political journalists and published by commercial houses that know well their customers' political profiles, and all are critical of Bush and what his two administrations have wrought.

These books will not satisfy true Bush haters, however. None, for example, claims that administration principals lied deliberately about the presence of weapons of mass destruction in prewar Iraq or about anything else of significance. But none will satisfy scholars either, for they do not follow the strict rules of social science sourcing, and they have structural flaws. Kaplan and Heilbrunn both propose plausible and interesting theses but do not develop them sufficiently. Weisberg carries his through, but it is hopelessly speculative. Still, despite these shortcomings, later drafters of the Bush legacy will find all three books useful -- Kaplan's and Heilbrunn's mainly as historical background to the Bush presidency, Weisberg's as an insightful and nuanced account of what has happened since January 2001.

BURNING BUSH

Kaplan argues that the cardinal error of the Bush administration was a compound misreading of the end of the Cold War and of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Contrary to the reigning assumptions of the American political class, Kaplan claims, the end of the Cold War did not enhance America's relative power but reduced it, and contrary to the administration's assumptions, 9/11 did not "change everything." The administration's overwrought reaction to 9/11, combined with its "inclination to devise policies based on the premise of omnipotence, made America weaker still."

Kaplan's thesis bears the unmistakably musky scent of realism. This will appeal to some readers more than others but, in any event, is hardly novel. Observations that the passing of the bipolarity of the Cold War sharply reduced Washington's influence over its allies and encouraged other powers to balance against the American hegemon are commonplace. But they are correct and deserve to be developed and illustrated. Instead, Kaplan detours into other subjects long dear to him. He spends more than a hundred pages discussing the origins of the "revolution in military affairs," the background to Washington's North Korea policy, and the multidecade saga of ballistic missile defense before addressing Bush's first term. These discussions are often illuminating, but they are disproportionately detailed for what they contribute to Kaplan's main argument.

Once Kaplan places the Bush administration at center stage, he relies on a biographical approach, set in a political context and presented chronologically. But he focuses as much on Michael Gerson, Bush's chief speechwriter, and Natan Sharansky, the Russian dissident turned Israeli politician, as on President Bush and his principal aides. Gerson, Sharansky, and others are important to Kaplan's argument because his purpose is to illustrate the familiar point that after the shock of 9/11, only the neoconservatives had in hand an explanatory template that fit the president's temperament. His discussion is too clipped, however, to adequately describe the evolution of the administration's thinking and behavior, especially the protean policy known as the Bush doctrine. The same is true of the fewer than 40 pages devoted to the Iraq war and the rest of the administration's Middle East policy.

Kaplan's conclusion focuses on the flaws of the president's so-called freedom agenda: "There is no Universal Man marching inexorably down a common path to freedom. Real human history is molded, not fated. . . . It is not only naïve but reckless to believe that blowing off a tyrant's lid will unleash the geyser of liberty. It will unleash only whatever social forces have been teeming or festering underneath." This is true, and Kaplan is correct to insist that details will not take care of themselves even if one gets the big ideas right. Those in charge of the president's policies, Kaplan notes, "cared little about the details of warfare, knew little about the realities of the Middle East, and had not thought through what made freedom work in their own country, much less what might make it work elsewhere." As a result, Kaplan concludes, in the administration's "attempt to pass off America's ideals and interests as one and the same, President Bush and his advisers damaged both."

Yet only at the very end of the book does Kaplan grapple with the implications of his own thesis. Neoconservatism overreaches, isolationism is unavailable, and amoral realpolitik is unworkable as an American policy. So how can the United States best understand and act in the world of the twenty-first century? How does the internal character of foreign regimes matter? How can the tensions between sovereign rights and the logic of preemption be resolved? These are good questions, but they and others remain virtually unexplored, and Daydream Believers ends leaving its most attractive features all too poorly adorned.

A CERTAIN IDEA