Trust Me, He Says

CHRISTOPHER MORRIS/VII FOR TIME
The President has frequently altered his Iraq pitch to try to win support

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These are laudable goals, but trying to achieve them could mean detonating the entire Middle East and wrecking the economy, estranging America's allies and enraging its enemies. It could mean nonstop al-Jazeera TV footage not of Iraqis welcoming G.I.s in the streets but of fighting them while the world's jihadists cheer and moderate Muslim leaders either crack down hard or are toppled themselves. A campaign to make the world safer may wind up making it even more dangerous, as every anxious European editorialist has warned. Yet the very size of the risk cuts both ways for Bush at home. Much as it unnerves people, it also convinces many that he must know something they don't or he would never try something this risky.

Confidence is a Bush family trademark cocky was the word everyone used to describe George W. for years yet he came into office without the one kind of confidence he needed most: America's faith in him. Every President is supposed to have the public's trust, or at least the benefit of the doubt, on Inauguration Day. But the tortured 2000 election outcome meant that Bush would have to start by earning it, and in the end it took a national crisis to do that. The nation's trust in Bush was lifted when so much else was lost. "Times have changed after September the 11th," Bush said recently in Pennsylvania. "It used to be we thought oceans would protect us." But not anymore. "We don't have any choice in this new war, see. We learned that the enemy has taken the battlefield to our very own country. My most important job is to protect America."

In the wake of the attacks, while many people wrestled with how to address Islamic hatred of America, Bush was consumed only with how best to fight it. The man who said his own father had failed to spend his political capital was not going to make the same mistake. He had his own evil empire to battle now. In Bush's view, everything that worked through 50 years of tyrant containment treaties and deals and bribes and threats was expunged all at once by an enemy with no home address, who can't be pressured, can't be bombed, can't be sanctioned, can only kill or be killed. "That's why I've started and stimulated a discussion on Iraq," Bush says, mixing a familiar enemy like Saddam with a new and terrifying one like al-Qaeda. If there was no visible evidence to link the two, he just used that fact to argue his point: the danger is everywhere, even if we can't see it; the threat is growing, even if we can't prove it. The Administration's argument for war is based not on the strength of America's Intelligence but on its weakness. On the anniversary of the Cuban missile crisis last month, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld recalled that "the missile shipments to Cuba took the U.S. completely by surprise." More than a generation later, he said, "the only time we'll have perfect evidence that a terrorist regime has deliverable weapons of mass destruction may be after they've used those weapons. And needless to say, that's a bit late."

That leap of faith is all but impossible for the President's critics to make. They flinch at his bluster, challenge his evidence and wonder where it will end. Even some Republicans who want to see Saddam gone wish that Bush would show more discipline when he makes his case. Iraq's record is bad enough, they say, without embroidering it. Yet when the cia can't put hard evidence of an al-Qaeda Iraq connection on the table, the Pentagon forms its own mini intelligence agency to find it instead. If Iraq is importing aluminum tubes, the Administration says it can only be for enriching uranium for bombs; if there are al-Qaeda agents hiding out in Iraq, they must be guests of the government. And that message has been received: nearly three-quarters of Americans surveyed think that Saddam is currently helping al-Qaeda; 71% think it is likely he was personally involved in the Sept. 11 attacks, something even the hawks haven't said aloud. "They just assert a reality and stick with it," says a former Clinton Administration official with evident frustration. "They do it with tremendous discipline. They keep it simple and use the bully pulpit, and they say it again and again and again until people believe it."

Whatever Bush actually knows or believes, exaggeration itself can be a deliberate tactic. To an adversary who has consistently underestimated America's resolve, it signals that the nation will assume the worst and act on that assumption. While Bush sounds hell-bent on making war, his more subtle defenders will cite the lessons of master warmakers back to Sun Tzu: "To fight and conquer in all our battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists of breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting." While many Presidents may have appeared reluctant about war, even if, like Woodrow Wilson, they were more than willing to enter the fray, Bush has chosen the opposite path, flaunting all the ways he is preparing to fight because doing so may mean he won't have to. In the spirit of cold war Presidents facing nuclear nightmares, it even serves his purpose to seem a little irrational in his itch to fight. "Iraq will not cooperate," Secretary of State Colin Powell told National Public Radio last week, "unless the element of pressure in the form of potential military force is there."