Bush's Choices May Be 'Tough,' but My Choice Is Not

To: Ed Gillespie
Chairman, Republican National Committee

Dear Mr. Gillespie:

Your letter informed me that I have been chosen to take part in the census of the Republican Party as a representative of all Republicans living in my area. It is doubtful that my view of the party's presidential candidate represents that of most party members in my district. However, the Republicans I know personally share many of the concerns I take this occasion to express – on a matter of considerable bearing on the future direction of our party, in light of the upcoming elections.

I voted for Mr. Bush in the last presidential election because he promised us an America with a more humble foreign policy. I will not vote for him again this year because he has not made good on that promise.

I have been critical of what Mr. Bush calls a "war on terror" from the moment the term was used. It quickly came to suggest adopting the mentality of the terrorists in order to fight them, and I believe that is exactly what Mr. Bush has done. He speaks in terms that imply a completely innocent America, on the side of unqualified good, squared off against those "not on our side," who are therefore on the side of absolute evil. This is the same kind of black and white thinking that informs the world-view of Mr. bin Laden. By adopting such a simplistic mentality in response to terrorist actions, Mr. Bush has played directly into the terrorists' hands.

Republicans and Democrats agree on very little. But since Sept. 11, 2001, the two parties appear to share a point of view I have often heard expressed as follows: "The worst thing that could happen to the United States of America is another 9/11-type attack." I disagree.

Horrible as such a physical assault would be, a far worse disaster, in my view, would be our own moral failure if we were to adopt the terrorists' "might makes right" stance and their reckless disregard for the value of human life. This is hardly an unrealistic concern, given the paranoia and the trigger-happy revenge mentality that has flourished in large segments of American society since the 9/11 attacks. To resist this wave of irresponsible militarism and false patriotism is to follow an ancient wisdom that dates back to the age of Socrates, who insisted with utmost clarity that no greater evil can befall a nation than its own moral corruption.

Our country responded with strong emotions – anger, frustration, desire for retaliation – to the terror attack of 2001. Such an initial reaction was both understandable and appropriate. And it was also normal and appropriate that the president of the United States would share these emotions at an instinctive level, as an immediate reaction to the horrors of that day. It was the next step that was vitally important to watch.

As moral leader of a great country, it was the duty of our president to transcend the emotional upheaval and fury triggered by that attack, and to ensure that America's reaction in the world arena would proceed not from reckless rage, but from the universal good as apprehended by reason – which is supposed to guide human and civil behavior in all circumstances.

In my opinion, Mr. Bush failed to articulate a rationally grounded response to the terrorist threat. Instead, he reacted to the attack of 9/11 like a frightened and enraged animal, stoking the fires of passion in the American populace instead of leading the country forward beyond blind anger to a well-reasoned response. Such intemperate action represents a monumental failure in one who would aspire to lead any human community – but especially the world's lone superpower.

A rational response to the attacks on America would have included, in the first place, an honest look inward – a truth-seeking self-examination, which would have revealed long-standing injustices in our own foreign policy that have fueled the rage behind the murderous actions of terrorists throughout the world.

Self-directed scrutiny would also have uncovered disturbing negligence in terms of what was left undone to prepare for or, more importantly, to prevent the 9/11 attacks. You ask in your census survey: "Do you support President Bush's initiatives to promote the safety and security of all Americans?" I find it difficult to answer that question without first strongly indicting Mr. Bush's failure to accept any responsibility for the intelligence and security failures of his administration prior to 9/11.

"Saddam was a threat." So runs the mantra Mr. Bush repeats in his attempt to justify America's unprovoked war of aggression on a third-world country that did not attack us, and that had no capability of doing so. The president appears to believe that any thinking mind would move inexorably from this bald statement (assuming, for the sake of argument, that it is true) to the conclusion that he was justified in launching a preemptive war against Iraq – one that would inevitably kill thousands of innocent Iraqis and well over a thousand young Americans, not to mention seriously injuring many thousands more.

There were plenty of alternative actions that could have been taken and that were in fact being taken to deal with the threat, such as it was, that Mr. Hussein posed to American and world security. In spite of his protests to the contrary, Bush was clearly not interested in those options. His determination to go to war with Iraq was patent, and his frequent protestations that war would be for him a last option were dishonest in the extreme.

"Americans at least know exactly where I stand, what I believe" is another of Bush's favorite slogans these campaign days. Frankly, what Mr. Bush believes does not interest me in the least. As president of the United States, he should act in a rationally and morally defensible way, one based on objective facts and values. He did not do so when he chose to take America to war with Iraq, and his repeated assertion that "we did the right thing" does nothing to diminish the foolishness and immorality of his decision.

We are supposed to sympathize with Bush because, as he tirelessly reminds us in his stump speeches, his determination to go to war all over the world involves "hard" or "tough" choices. In that his choices seem always to involve the use of lethal force, you will pardon me for feeling more sympathy for the innocent victims of the president's "tough choices" than I can muster for his alleged agony in making them. And I have never thought that there is anything particularly "tough" about a president who orders missile strikes from his comfy leather executive chair.

Missile strikes almost inevitably kill noncombatants and "targeted" bombings reliably extinguish the lives of innocent civilians along with (or instead of) the intended target. In one of his recent televised debates with Senator John Kerry, Bush seemed annoyed, even peeved, that the Iraqis failed to cooperate, when we initially entered their country with a campaign of "shock and awe," by lining up their soldiers in an open field, where they would have been incinerated by bombs dropped from thousands of feet in the air by American pilots.

That by his own confession Commander-in-Chief Bush actually expected (and planned on) the Iraqis to embrace such a strategy of wide-open combat with an absurdly advantaged and dependably overpowering American force I find breathtakingly naive. That Bush feels no remorse or revulsion at the idea of having purposely launched a needless war of aggression that was supposed to feature such an orgy of human carnage I find obscene.

As a representative of Republicans in my voting district, I suppose I should say something about Bush's domestic policies. I choose instead to limit my comments to the president's "war on terror" because I think this global preemptive strategy, particularly as he defines and directs it, is by far the most significant aspect of the Bush presidency from a moral point of view. I happen to agree with much of the president's domestic agenda, in particular his support for the "pro-life" movement. But somehow the president's "pro-life" rhetoric rings hollow to me in light of his anti-life, militaristic foreign policy and the curious doctrine of never-ending preventive warfare in the interest of "securing world peace" that he has adopted from his neoconservative advisers.

In sum, my primary reason for rejecting the 2004 Republican presidential candidate is precisely the quality many party members regard as Bush's "strength," namely, his manner of "leadership" in the war on terror. A strong leader moving us in the wrong direction is worse than no leader at all. For this reason, my Republican friends and I were extremely disappointed that our party offered no alternative candidate to Bush in this year's primary elections.

Through the policies of this president, our country has drifted far from the spirit of its founding fathers and their principled pursuit of peace and opposition to American involvement in foreign affairs; and Bush's apparent enthusiasm for big-government "security" at home and big-government warfare abroad hardly exemplifies a conservative ideal. Instead of calming American fears through rational guidance and prudent leadership, Bush has led, and profited from, a surge of national paranoia and xenophobic militarism that is as morally bankrupt as it will be politically suicidal.

Leonard Maluf is a professor of Philosophy and New Testament at Blessed John XXIII National Seminay in Weston, MA, where he has been teaching since the fall of 1997. He studied scripture and theology in Rome, at the Pontifical Biblical Institute, during the 1980s and has been teaching in Catholic seminaries since 1994. He has published articles on biblical topics and philosophy, as well as an abstract of his doctoral thesis on the Benedictus of Zechariah, which was accepted in 1994 by the Gregorian University in Rome. In the last twenty-five years, he has translated a number books from French, mostly in the areas of philosophy and theology. While in Rome, he worked as a translator for the Osservatore Romano, and currently does translation work for the Catholic Biblical Federation in Stuttgart, Germany.