It’s more about the President’s Image than Democracy in Iraq

For the past week, Bush has been traveling across the country delivering a set of speeches whose purpose is to set the record straight on Iraq. It is easy to show that the President never had a clear plan for occupied Iraq, and still doesn’t seem to have many good ideas. But the problem is deeper than simply coming up with a technical fix to a tumultuous reconstruction. President Bush’s interest in Iraqi democracy is not really about Iraqis but about his political image. His traipsing around last week, giving speech after speech on what’s happening in Iraq, only points up that the real campaigning and politics is happening over here not over there. The cynical take on the war – that it is about oil, or broader imperial designs, or corrupt corporate influence – misses the point. Bush has instrumentalized the war, from start to finish, but not for the sake of hidden interests, so much as to prop up an increasingly isolated and precarious presidency. Basking in the reflected glow of these elections is a tacky attempt at making a single, successful election half a world away stand in for the absence of any real project to offer those of us here in the US. The more Bush insists this is about the Iraqis, the clearer it becomes that this war is about Bush himself.