Explaining Bush’s thinking on Iraq

Bush’s approach to statebuilding in Iraq genuinely puzzles Kevin Drum :

Bush’s conduct toward Iraq continues to be something that I just shake my head over. He lost my support before the war because I eventually became convinced that he wasn’t serious about postwar reconstruction. After the war, it became clear that my suspicions were well grounded and that virtually no serious postwar planning had been done. And now, his continuing refusal to admit that we need more troops in Iraq or to make any effort to rally the country behind the time and money it will take to do the job right is simply inexplicable. Obviously he realizes that failure in Iraq would be an enormous blow both to the U.S. and to the war on terrorism. And he — or his advisors, at any rate — must realize that we can’t do it with the troops and funding we have in place now. There’s just too much contrary evidence for him not to realize that. So what is he doing?

I point Kevin to this Richard Brookshier profile on George W. Bush’s decisionmaking style from the March 2003 Atlantic Monthly. Reading the artivle, it’s clear that answer to Kevin’s question gets to Bush’s greatest strength as a leader — and potentially his greatest weakness. On foreign policy issues, Bush will stick to policy positions even in the face of considerable public criticism. This served him very well in the Afghanistan war, when skeptics questioned the wisdom of attacking so soon after 9/11, and called for more boots on the ground when the initial bombing campaign seemed to produce meager results. The administration stayed the course on this, and was ultimately vindicated. The same thing is taking place in Iraq. The administration has clearly decided that the only way it will accept greater multilateral support in Iraq is on U.S. terms and not U.N. terms. Given the U.N.’s management of its own security, I don’t blame them. As I’ve said before, I think the U.S. needs more troops in country. However, I could be wrong. The jury in the blogosphere is still out (see Adesnik vs. Yglesias). Bush has clearly decided that this is not necessary in the long term, and he’ll take his lumps about it in the short term. If he’s right — and I hope he is right — it will be a true demonstration of leadership. The problem is that the ability to stay the course in the face of public criticism can often morph into pig-headedness about refusing to recognize the error of one’s ways. Bush has been right about a lot of the political gambles he has taken during his presidency — pulling out of the the ABM treaty, the Afghan war, pushing for big tax cuts. A constant record of success makes it more difficult for somone to admit that they need to change course. Developing… UPDATE: Atrios and others seem to believe that I was suggesting that there was considerable opposition to attacking Afghanistan. As the section of this post that Atrios actually quoted should have made clear, and as one of his commenters points out, that was not my implication. My implication was that there was criticism regarding the timing (not waiting until Spring 2002) and tactics (using more conventional army forces) of the Afghan campaign. And there certainly was a point in early November 2001 when some started to criticize those decisions are ill-considered, inspiring Andrew Sullivan‘s Von Hoffman awards. Hope that clears thing up.