Back in 1988, the father of our
current president was
bedeviled by what media outlets called "the wimp factor."
After eight years as vice president, George Bush was making a
run for the Oval Office. But quite a few journalists kept asking
whether he was a tough enough man for the job. Newsweek even
headlined the "wimp" epithet in a cover story about
him.
That image problem faded in late
December of 1989, when U.S. troops invaded Panama. The commander-in-chief
drew blood -- proving to some journalists that he had the right
stuff. A New York Times reporter, R.W. Apple, wrote that the
assault on Panama was Bush's "presidential initiation rite"
-- as though military intervention in a Third World nation was
mandatory evidence of leadership mettle.
But even later, while still ensconced
in the White House,
the senior Bush remained notably stung by the epithet. He couldn't
always keep the pain of it under wraps. "You're talking
to the 'wimp,'" President Bush commented on June 16, 1991.
"You're talking to the guy that had a cover of a national
magazine, that I'll never forgive, put that label on me."
Yet by then, George Herbert Walker
Bush had forgiven
Newsweek sufficiently to provide it with an exclusive
article under his byline -- titled "Why We Are in the Gulf"
-- appearing in the magazine's November 26, 1990 issue. Less
than two months afterward, the U.S. government fired missiles
at Iraq and the Gulf War began. The president was no wimp.
In recent weeks, since the events
of Sept. 11, countless
reporters and pundits have hailed George W. Bush for laying to
rest any doubts as to his own command of the presidency. Bush's
address to a joint session of Congress was pivotal in recasting
him as a consummate national leader.
Few journalists have been intemperate
enough to emphasize that greatness involves much more than doing
an excellent job of reading a finely crafted text on a TelePrompTer.
The circumstances were truly extraordinary, but the dynamic was
essentially formulaic. Presidents have customarily earned rapturous
media kudos by brandishing America's military arsenal against
evildoers.
If we can remove the red-white-and-blue
tint from our media lenses, President Bush's rhetoric is likely
to give more reason for trepidation than comfort. The world is
filled with national leaders, and religious true believers, who
assert that their country or exact faith is the locus of everything
good -- and foes are the incarnation of evil that must be wiped
from the face of the Earth.
"The problem is that America
wants its own version of
justice, a concept rooted, it seems, in the Wild West and
Hollywood's version of the Second World War," longtime
foreign correspondent Robert Fisk wrote in Britain's daily
Independent newspaper. "President Bush speaks of smoking
them out, of the old posters that once graced Dodge City: 'Wanted,
Dead or Alive.'" Such presidential verbiage plays to a U.S.
media gallery that is way too easily pleased by grand pledges
to avenge horrendous slaughter by -- in effect -- escalating
a cycle of violence.
President George W. Bush need not
fear that a national
magazine will emblazon him with the wrong "W." He is
not a wimp. But, as president of our beloved country, what is
he? And who are we?
Such questions may seem unduly abstract
and theoretical at a time of grave crisis. But what better time
could there be to search our souls? Terrible crimes against humanity
were committed on Sept. 11. Every person who died as a result,
in Manhattan and Virginia and Pennsylvania, was martyred by ultra-righteous
and murderous madness. How easy -- how incontrovertible -- it
is to recognize and condemn such madness when it strikes at our
own country. How much more difficult it is to recognize when
our own country brings deadly violence down on others. The world
already has too many martyrs.
When Soviet troops withdrew from
Afghanistan, they left
behind about 10 million land mines. "Of course," writes
Fisk, who has covered the Afghan wars, "the Russians never
went back to clear the mines." He predicts that American
bombs "will explode a few of them. But that'll be the only
humanitarian work we're likely to see in the near future."
With starvation closing in on literally
millions of Afghani
people this autumn, the U.S. government could make an
enormously profound statement by bombarding Afghanistan with
massive supplies of food instead of warheads. Such an approach
would surely earn America's commander-in-chief the media label
of "wimp" -- and much worse. Obviously, it's the sort
of risk that the president wouldn't dare to take.
Norman Solomon can be reached at mediabeat@igc.org
E_mail: Michael Tivana