Bob Geldof has written a nice piece about his time on Air Force One with the President, traveling to and around Africa. It’s probably the most complimentary piece I’ve read about Bush since Hurricane Katrina wiped out the last of his unapologetic apologists. And, yet, even in the midst of praising Bush for his generosity to Africa, Geldof tells us:
I don’t know how, but eventually we arrive at the great unspoken. “See, I believe we’re in an ideological struggle with extremism,” says the President. “These people prey on the hopeless. Hopelessness breeds terrorism. That’s why this trip is a mission undertaken with the deepest sense of humanity, because those other folks will just use vulnerable people for evil. Like in Iraq.”
I don’t want to go there. I have my views and they’re at odds with his, and I don’t want to spoil the interview or be rude in the face of his hospitality. “Ah, look Mr. President. I don’t want to do this really. We’ll get distracted and I’m here to do Africa with you.” “OK, but we got rid of tyranny.” It sounded like the television Bush. It sounded too justificatory, and he doesn’t ever have to justify his Africa policy. This is the person who has quadrupled aid to the poorest people on the planet. I was more comfortable with that. But his expression asked for agreement and sympathy, and I couldn’t provide either.
“Mr. President, please. There are things you’ve done I could never possibly agree with and there are things I’ve done in my life that you would disapprove of, too. And that would make your hospitality awkward. The cost has been too much. History will play itself out.” “I think history will prove me right,” he shoots back. “Who knows,” I say.
It wasn’t awkward. It wasn’t uncomfortable. He is convinced, like Tony Blair, that he made the right decision. “I’m comfortable with that decision,” he says. But he can’t be. The laws of unintended consequences would determine that. At one point I suggest that he will never be given credit for good policies, like those here in Africa, because many people view him “as a walking crime against humanity.” He looks very hurt by that. And I’m sorry I said it, because he’s a very likable fellow.
I’m sure that Bush was hoping for a good interview, and on the whole, the Geldof piece is positive. Unfortunately, the man is a ‘walking crime against humanity’. It’s funny because Geldof never would have had the balls to say something like that to Idi Amin, Pol Pot, or Saddam Hussein. It’s important to ruminate on what it is that distinguishes one mass killer from another. What are unintended consequences for those that order war? And what are we to think of this?
Then, in what I took to be a reference to the supposed Chinese influence over the cynical Khartoum regime, Bush adds, “One thing I will say: Human suffering should preempt commercial interest.”
It’s a wonderful sentence, and it comes in the wake of a visit to Rwanda’s Genocide Memorial Center. The museum is built on the site of a still-being-filled open grave. There are 250,000 individuals in that hole, tumbled together in an undifferentiated tangle of humanity. The President and First Lady were visibly shocked by the museum. “Evil does exist,” Bush says in reaction to the 1994 massacres. “And in such a brutal form.” He is not speechifying; he is horror-struck by the reality of ethnic madness. “Babies had their skulls smashed,” he says, his mind violently regurgitating an image he has just witnessed. The sentence peters out, emptied of words to describe the ultimately incomprehensible.
Does an experience like this have the potential to change a man like Bush, even at this late stage of his life? Can such a visible witness to what otherwise remains abstract statistics (600,000 dead in Iraq, for example) stir some sense of dread in Bush’s soul? ‘I, too, have filled pits like these.’ Does it even matter if that is what he intended to do?
What a dreadful legacy this man built. And to try to face his demons sober? What maintains his wall of denial? Evil does exist, as Bush says, and in such a banal form.
