Playing with Fire

By JOE KLEIN

In 2001, George W. Bush's hand wavered in the air as he took the oath of office, pushing against the words "so help me God." The speech that followed was humane and poetic, if uncertainly delivered; the President later admitted he had been pretty nervous. Bush's hand was rock solid last week as the oath was administered, his look calm and confident--but the speech that followed was far less accommodating than the one in 2001. It was, in fact, a fearsome statement of petulant idealism, a challenge to the nation and the world. It was a powerful and admirable speech. I'm not sure, however, that it was a wise one.

The words, once again, were gorgeous. This is a President who has uttered more stunning sentences than any since Reagan. It would be hard for even Bush's most hateful opponents to gainsay such sentiments as "America will not pretend that jailed dissidents prefer their chains or that women welcome humiliation and servitude ..." And so Bush's critics have an uphill struggle. They risk sounding pinched, curmudgeonly. It is impossible to dispute the superiority of freedom over tyranny, of democracy over dictatorship. And yet ...

We understand more about the double-edged quality of idealism than we did four years ago. We know more about the dangers of imposing "freedom" by force of arms. As the man said, "Freedom, by its nature, must be chosen." In context, with the Iraqi elections less than a week away, the President's sweeping oratory almost sounds a bit defensive. It is entirely possible--probable, according to intelligence sources--that the newly elected Iraqi government will attempt to establish its legitimacy by calling for a quick timetable for a phased withdrawal of U.S. troops. If the Iraqis make such a request, what can the President do but agree? If the withdrawal does take place soon, what are the chances that Iraq will stabilize, given the sorry nature of its security forces? And if Iraq doesn't stabilize, if it becomes an anarchic haven for Islamist radicalism--as a recent National Intelligence Council report suggested it might--then how will the President's rhetoric sound a decade from now? Will he appear as foolish in retrospect as Woodrow Wilson does, holding out for a League of Nations in the negotiations after World War I instead of using his leverage to hammer out a more equitable and practical European peace?

Within moments of Bush's speech, a conservative blogger found the roots of the President's most distressing image--freedom as "a fire in the minds of men." It came from Dostoyevsky's The Possessed and referred to the burning of a village by radical anarchists: "The fire is in the minds of men, not on the roofs of houses." This is a familiar image to members of Bush's, and my own, baby-boom generation--incendiary idealism, soldiers torching straw huts with Zippo lighters in Vietnam, "destroying a village in order to save it." Bush, in the end, is a classic boomer. His was a speech that could only have been delivered by a member of our exorbitantly messianic generation. Our rhetoric has always been the rhetoric of freedom, framed by Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, which marshaled the mighty word as frequently as Bush did and was delivered, appropriately, at the opposite end of the Washington Mall in 1963. But ours is also a generation that has self-indulgently perverted King's call to freedom into a defense of excess, of freedom from responsibility. Our grandiose notion of ourselves was stoked by John F. Kennedy's crusading rhetoric and by Lyndon Johnson's foolishly literal attempts to turn Kennedy's idealism into action.

In fact, Bush's declaration of war on tyranny reminded me of nothing so much as Johnson's announcement of an "unconditional" war on poverty: "It will not be a short or easy struggle," Johnson proclaimed to the Congress in 1964. "No single weapon or strategy will suffice, but we will not rest until that war is won. The richest nation on earth can afford to win it. We cannot afford to lose it."

Johnson's slovenly idealism came at the end of a great liberal pendulum swing. His attempt to throw money at urban problems created all sorts of unintended consequences. It hastened a new culture of poverty, subsidizing the collapse of poor families, reinforcing a plague of out-of-wedlock births and soaring crime rates. And Bush's attempt to confront tyranny with utopian bellicosity may presage the end of the conservative pendulum swing. It flies in the face of reality. The Iraq fiasco has weakened our military and our standing in the world. Indeed, our intemperate behavior has sent a powerful countermessage. The unpunished excesses of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib give a rationale to China and all the other human-rights violators.

The decision to take on relatively weak Iraq and leave North Korea and Iran undeterred sends a message to dictators everywhere: Get yourselves a nuke, and we won't bother you.

After the anguish of the past four years, the President may seem steadier. But, like many of his fellow baby boomers, Bush is still young for his age, a belated student radical aroused by the first flush of passionate idealism and playing with matches.