In his first public response to the recent protests against war with Iraq--protests that took place both in America and abroad --President George W. Bush was respectful, yet candid.
\Democracy is a beautiful thing,"" he waxed philosophically, ""and that people are allowed to express their opinions."" Nonetheless, allowing the protesters to influence him would be ""like saying I'm going to decide policy based upon a focus group.""
""The role of a leader is to decide policy based upon the security of the people,"" President Bush concluded.
As someone who has tended to believe in doing what is right rather than what is popular, part of me really wanted to applaud the president for sticking to his guns. Maybe, I thought, George W. Bush is a man who truly can't be bought.
Well, not by a few million peace-gooey liberals, anyhow.
Perhaps I'm missing the intended meaning of the president's words, but his apparently dismissive acknowledgement of last week's peace protests left me a little cold. It gave me the impression that, in George W. Bush's moral universe, the public is right on the money if they agree with him. If not, they're a focus group.
I mean, for an administration which prides itself on being the custodian of freedom across the globe, the White House seems to have an awfully cynical view of what freedom actually is. Granted, the President certainly seems determined to protect it, whatever it may be. The whole point of his ""war on terror""-- a war on which, it would seem, the sun never sets--is ostensibly to defend freedom across the globe. Freedom to live without tyranny, freedom to pursue happiness, and, according to the president, the freedom for people to ""express their opinions.""
Yet surely the freedom to express our opinions is an empty one at best if those to whom we are expressing them don't intend to actually listen. Expressing an opinion is not simply a matter of voicing it; it is an issue of having the merits of that opinion be seriously considered. If that weren't the case, then all of those millions of protesters who braved winter's chills to speak their minds last week might as well have stayed home and voiced their opinions into a chamber pot.
Which is why I'm a little concerned that, seeing as we live in a democracy and all, the president didn't offer a little more in the way of public dialogue to those who oppose a war with Iraq.
Maybe he is right when he says that he shouldn't be influenced by popular opinion. Maybe his role really is to make policy based solely on guaranteeing the security of the country. If he were to appeal to the Constitution, Bush would rightly point out that the office of the president was created, in part, to defend and to protect. Maybe going to war with Iraq is the only way to do that, in which case listening to the pacifists would be a grave folly.
Still, a lover of the Constitution would also consider how that document depicts the president not only as a protector and defender, but also as a peace-maker and mediator. It is the president who makes treaties and appoints ambassadors. It is the president who picks up the phone and chats with global leaders. Bush might do well, half-way through his term, to focus less on guarding freedom through war than on securing it through peace. That, I think, is what the protesters were asking him to consider.
At the end of January, the White House released a document entitled ""Apparatus of Lies,"" which catalogued the many ways in which Saddam Hussein had deceived arms inspectors, the people of his country and the rest of the world. It was an indictment of a ruthless dictator with a talent for misleading the world and ignoring his own people.
Last week's protesters gathered under the assumption that, in a democratic society, the will of the people--majority or not--counts for something. They marched under the belief that, in the end, what truly distinguishes democracy in America from dictatorship in Iraq is the fact that in one the people have a voice and in the other they do not.
When the president listens only to those Americans who already agree with him, I start to question how much of a voice we really have in this country. When he makes every case for a war in Iraq while turning a blind eye to North Korea, I begin to ask myself what he isn't telling us.
It makes you wonder: If the Iraqi government is an apparatus of lies--what's ours?
