George W. Bush, whither? / Another Sampras victory

Not since Franklin Delano Roosevelt has a US president held the entire world in the palm of his hand than George W. Bush. FDR didn’t take long after Pearl Harbor to propel the entire armed might of America into the Second World War. And the non-Axis world roared in approval as the skies over Normandy darkened with US fighter-bombers the day of the invasion, June 6, 1944. On sea and on the ground, teen-age GIs by the tens of thousands poured into coastal France to drive the once invincible German Wehrmacht relentlessly inland as Adolf Hitler started to ponder his fate. Once the great patrician FDR made his decision to invade, it was almost a sure thing the Allied armies would emerge victors in this biggest holocaust of history.

Today, a year after 9-11, when Twin Towers and the Pentagon were reduced to pit debris and smoke, President George W. Bush remains ensconced in near isolation in the White House. Soon, he will make the fateful decision whether or not to invade Iraq, capture Saddam Hussein dead or alive, and commit 250,000 US soldiers to battle. It is a war he and the US will certainly win. Iraq will crumple like an abandoned accordion. Its present regime will disappear. Whatever weapons of mass destruction it possesses – chemical, bacteriological – will be expunged. No longer will these weapons be used to threaten American with extinction.

Why then does George W. Bush hesitate?

He hesitates because there is a terrible price to pay. It is a price America has never paid before, the possible hatred of the rest of the world. There is no doubt the entire Muslim world will rise in outrage. There is also no doubt even America’s traditional European allies, except possibly Britain, will recoil since they prefer continued negotiation to war. They have gone through two world wars, and their horrors remain in their memory, China, Japan, Russia. Pakistan, India have stuck their hands into the sand. As the American historian Arthur Schlesinger said: "I think we are in a very dangerous relationship with the rest of the world."

It is time, I suppose, that everybody takes a good, close, piercing look at George W. Bush. If he commits America to war in Iraq, it is like committing the rest of the world to a conflagration nobody, no great power, no constellation of powers, may be able to control.

I didn’t think much of the younger Bush when he was still governor of Texas. But he was already making noises because of the prominence of his father and the political magnitude of Texas. When he threw his hat into the presidential ring against Vice President Al Gore, I figured he was biting off more than he could chew. When during a debate he couldn’t identify by name the leaders of various nations, I dismissed him as a pipsqueak and a pretender, a political roustabout fit only to govern a mediocre state. During the many debates he had with Al Gore, his grasp exceeded his reach. He knew nothing about the world, about foreign policy, international relations. The young Bush reminded me of his father. While still vice president, the elder Bush gushingly told Ferdinand Marcos: "We admire your adherence to democracy."

And yet, George W. stayed the presidential campaign The surveys showed him not storming ahead, but plodding along. In this, he showed a certain tenacity. In prizefighting, he was a hungry fighter who didn’t have much to show except a fierce determination to stay on his feet even if the blows were exploding on his head.

He had something else which probably prevented his presidential campaign from hitting the shoals. He had charm. He smiled easily. He was folksy and familiar. He was not distant. Al Gore on the other hand was stiff. He didn’t know how to smile. And although Gore had a brilliant mastery of issues, details, certainly the art of governance and foreign policy, he was no exuberant, eloquent Bill Clinton. While George W. Bush couldn’t keep up with the campaign’s intellectual drumbeat, he made up for it by exuding charisma, this much abused word which simply means an ability to make people like you.

And yet, and yet. If the votes during the presidential elections were all to be counted, George W. Bush would have missed the presidency, by a million votes. But the Supreme Court ruled in his favor. Also in his favor was the fact that his younger brother, Jeb Bush, was governor of Florida. Counting was stopped by court edict as it was on the verge of giving victory to Al Gore. Alors, Bush swept the federal votes in Florida and won the presidency. Did he really?

Maybe this is what is haunting President Bush today. Political philosophy is unanimous in saying that "Great decisions should never be made on slender majorities." That wasn’t even a slender majority. Many are those who still accuse George W. Bush and the Republican Party of stealing the presidential elections. But it could also work the other way. The brass ring worked for Bush September 11, 2001. When all of America huddled in fear, shock, spreading consternation, Bush’s was the voice that mattered, the political figure that mattered, the thunderbolt atop the hill that mattered.

Like FDR during the Great Depression in the early 30s, Bush rallied America behind him. He unfurled the flag of the "land of the free and the home of the brave." He exclaimed the words America wanted to hear. He said 9-11 had united the nation as never before, that America would go after the terrorists to the end of the world and back and deal justice to all of them, that America would never relent, that America was the great, impregnable, invincible power nobody could ever subjugate. All of America loved that. And they began to love Bush. His popularity soared to above 90 percent.

If Bush had invaded Iraq shortly after 9-11, he would have had little difficulty getting America behind him, and also Congress. Maybe not the United Nations, but so what? Almost everbody was worked up against terror, against Osama bin Laden, particularly Europe and the West. They might have believed then the geographical warrior face of Islam had to be beheaded.

Still, despite the passage of a year after 9-11, everything hinges on the personality of George Bush, his gut convictions, his dreams, his ambitions. Every US president needs a bridge to historical greatness. And this bridge normally is war. George Washington gained entry to Mount Rushmore by leading the war of independence against Great Britain. Americans will never forget his daredevil Crossing of the Delaware. Abraham Lincoln earned his niche by his heroic exploits during the Civil War and the abolition of slavery. Franklin Delano Roosevelt tamed the Depression, after which he ended America’s isolationism and spearheaded the Allied victory over Adolph Hitler, Benito Mussolini and Hideki Tojo.

So, despite what anybody else thinks, will President George Bush make his bid for greatness by invading Iraq?

Bush knows that if he does not move now, he might forever miss his chance to scale Mount Rushmore as one of the greatest presidents in US history. Already, the American people are turning from ramifications of 9-11 as a world problem to domestic issues where the economy is in trouble. The stock market is wobbly. Corporate giants like Enron and WorldCom have disintegrated because of capitalist greed and corruption. America’s most rabid allies in Europe, with the possible exception of Britain, now believe the idea of invading Iraq is crazy. They probably think the US president is nuts.

Maybe if George W. Bush can subdue Iraq in a week or ten days’ time, he could still pull it off. In a prizefight, this would be the equivalent of a first or second round knockout. Get Saddam within days. Break the spine of Iraq within a week. Minimize collateral damage and throw back still nascent, still thin Arab and Muslim outrage. Which wouldn’t be possible if the invasion and the war would last weeks and perhaps months. Which would pummel the world to an epileptic fit of unprecedented scale.

In the latter case, Bush would wither on the grove of history, recede into abject humiliation — the man who would be God and failed.

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I only have a few lines left, but they are significant lines for they hoist Pete Sampras anew on a pedestal. We thought he had shot his last spectacular bolt in the US Open when he beat Britain’s Greg Rusedski in five grueling sets. A bad loser Rusedski said Sampras was way, way past his prime. To add insult to injury Rusedski said that was Sampras’ last victory in this year’s US Open. He would hobble out, Rusedski said, and everybody would forget about Sampras.

It was not to be. Sampras, a four-time US Open champion, next met Tommy Haas of Germany, who had youth, power and speed. Well, Sampras walked on air and beat Haas in four sets 7-5, 6-4, 6-7, 7-5. The old magic was back, the spray of passing shots, the silvery squeeze through narrow openings, the explosive serve, 13 aces in all, the volley that simply danced away from the German. Sampras said after the match: "This is the US Open. You dig deep. You do whatever you can to win."

That includes walking on water.