What is the president's
job? I've been thinking about that question since President Bush's
April 13 press conference, in which he said that ''freedom isn't
God's gift to this country; it's The Almighty's gift to all of
humanity, and as the most powerful nation on the earth, America has
a responsibility to help spread freedom around the world.'' That was
followed by Bob Woodward's 60 Minutes interview on CBS, in
which he indicated that Bush strives to be a good ''messenger'' for
his ''higher Father.'' The implication is that Bush believes that
his job is to do God's work on earth, securing the blessings of
liberty everywhere, beginning with Iraq.
True, the call to ''secure the blessings of liberty'' is in the
preamble to the Constitution; but the next two words in the document
are ``to ourselves.''
Do Americans really want a president who feels that it's his
right to decide what God's work is, and to use the U.S. military to
carry out his religious mission?
Freedom is a wonderful thing; it's even something worth dying
for. My parents emigrated to the United States from places whose
presidents had the same last name for decades -- not because they
were father and son, like the Bushes, but because they were the same
guy. But however violent and tragic the histories of British Guyana
or the Congo, neither country ever merited ''liberation'' by
America.
And that's not necessarily a bad thing. Freedom is something that
people should try to win for themselves. Sometimes world powers,
including the United States, can and should intervene. But when this
country acts largely alone, shouldn't there be more on the
table?
It's one thing to ask Americans to die for their country, but to
ask them to die for the broad concept of ''liberation'' is a
stretch, particularly when it's getting harder and harder to see how
the invasion and occupation (and the death toll on both sides)
enhances U.S. security.
The stated purpose for the war was to disarm Iraq, and polls show
that support for the war was strongest when a majority of Americans
believed that Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11 and that Iraq had
chemical, biological and even nuclear weapons.
As those beliefs have begun to collapse, and as the casualties
mount, more Americans are losing their religion on the war. While I
avoid agreeing with political consultant Dick Morris, he and other
pundits are right when they say that Americans won't long support a
war to save Iraqi souls; it has to be about our security.
That fact has not been lost on the Bush administration, which has
continued to promote a link between the Iraq war and 9/11.
Karl Rove and the other managers of Bush's image know that
Americans won't be willing to sacrifice their loved ones for a cause
that does not involve a threat to the United States. Liberation
theology wouldn't have gotten the people into the pews in the spring
of 2003, and it won't get them there now.
Surely, Bush knows that, too, and that his job as president is to
protect Americans -- not to do God's work in Iraq. But you wouldn't
know it by his increasingly Messianic rhetoric.
Bush should drop the sermons and explain how the war has made
America safer, in the absence of weapons of mass destruction, and
given the way the war has raised the temperature of Arab and Muslim
rage.
That may not be what Jesus would do, but at the moment, it's
Bush's job.
Joy-Ann Reid is an online editor and a freelance writer.
