Bush II had a Manichean sensibility. He was a recovering alcoholic and had become a fervent Christian, of the evangelical sort so far as one can make out, in the course of his recovery. To Bush II our world is divided between good and evil, and this was his thought as he recruited his “coalition of the willing”—a coalition of the coerced, as I have always thought of it.
It is well enough known that Jacque Chirac and his able foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, refused to take France into the coalition. An invasion of Iraq would destabilize the region, the French president thought (quite correctly). This made Paris a holdout among the major Western powers.
“Iraq does not represent an immediate threat that would justify an immediate war,” Chirac insisted two days before the U.S.–led invasion began. “France appeals to the responsibility of all to respect international law. Acting without the U.N.’s legitimacy, putting power before law, means taking on a heavy responsibility.”
Three-quarters of the French stood with Chirac, whose refusal to enlist France in Operation Iraqi Freedom strained Franco–American relations for several years. Remember “freedom fries” and the French as “cheese-eating surrender monkeys?” This was the level to which Bush II brought American discourse as he manipulated public opinion prior to the invasion. Good guys, bad guys. Black hats, white hats.
There is one detail of the U.S.–French confrontation over Iraq that remains very little known. Just before the 20 March 2003 invasion, Bush II called Chirac in a late-hour attempt to persuade him to change his mind. The exchange was very heated. Bush II made a vigorous argument that with the events of 11 September the prophesied war of Gog and Magog had at last begun. I can only imagine what went through the worldly Chirac’s mind, or indeed the look on his face, as Bush II discoursed in this manner.
I know of only one account of this conversation. It is in The Irony of American Destiny: The Tragedy of American Foreign Policy (Walker & Co., 2010), a book William Pfaff published late in his life. The book sits at the end of Pfaff’s long and principled career as a sort of summation. It is rightly read as his causes-and-consequences critique of American exceptionalism. And it includes, inter alia, a description of the Bush–Chirac exchange. He got it, if I recall correctly what he told me later, from a high source in the French Foreign Ministry.
Bill Pfaff was a colleague and a friend. He taught me to trace the path of U.S. policy from the narrow project of Soviet containment in the immediate postwar years to the never-ending messianic mission to save the world with which we now live. Bush II and his Gog and Magog delusions were preposterous, yes. But they were, illogically and logically at once, the outcome of a consciousness that had endured—how shall we count?—since the 1945 victories, or since Wilson’s make-the-world-safe-for-democracy, or the seventeenth century Pilgrim landings.
Pfaff was pithily right to name his book as he did. American foreign policy has been a tragedy since the U.S. has had one worthy of the term, beginning with America’s attack on the Spanish empire in the last years of the nineteenth century. With the world wars among the exceptions, it has since been a line of tragedies from Wilsonian universalism through the Cold War and Vietnam and the post–Cold War triumphalism of the 1990s.
Afghanistan, Iraq, the Balkans, Libya, Syria: The tragedies have but worsened since 11 September. What unifies these disastrous adventures? This is simply understood. Few senior officials since Bush II have professed to view the world as an end-times confrontation with Gog and Magog, but the fundamental belief remains just as Bush II had it: It is good-vs.-evil in our time, and it is as simple as that. Mike Pompeo, Trump’s secretary of state and another Christian true believer, actually did think and speak in terms of the end-times. Jake Sullivan, President Biden’s national security adviser, formed his outlook—this by his own admission, remarkably enough—as he watched Westerns and those juvenile “Terminator” films during his youth. “I see the world as divided between good guys and bad guys,” he has unabashedly said.
We are talking, in sum, about a set of policies not rooted in thinking but in belief—irrational policies, in a word.
