Last week I posed the question: What is Patriotism? In response, I received a number of emails that compared the Bush Administration to the Nazi regime. This is a dangerous analogy.

The Nazis personified evil in the 20th century. Their systematic commitment to the legalization and implementation of malevolence was unprecedented. I associate the Nazis with gas chambers, incinerators, and concentration camps. My profound disagreements with the president do not elicit those particular feelings. Moreover, I fear such comparisons are insensitive to those who actually endured the horrors of Hitler’s Germany.

Perhaps a better analogy can be found within the political philosophy of Nicolo Machiavelli’s The Prince.

The Prince is an amoral critique suggesting that one knows no law beyond his or her own will and power. For Machiavelli, The Prince is a morally cynical examination of political power, how it is obtained, maintained and expanded.

According to a Newsweek poll, just prior to 9/11 the president enjoyed a respectable 54 percent approval, but the week following 9/11 it skyrocketed to 86 percent. With his extraordinary popularity, the president was able to get through legislation that gave him unprecedented power.

Weeks after the 9/11 tragedy, with the president’s 88 percent approval rating staring Congress in the face, the Patriot Act passed by a 98-1 margin in the Senate. In October 2002 the president’s approval still hovered in the mid to high 60’s, and the Senate voted 77-23 to authorize the president to attack Iraq -- if Saddam refused to give up weapons of mass destruction as required by U.N. resolutions.

Slightly over a year after 9/11, Congress had given the president war power exceeding that of Franklin Roosevelt after Pearl Harbor. Machiavelli would have been proud. But now, with the president’s approval rating back to a mortal 50 percent, there appears to be chinks in the once self-assured armor.

January has not been a good month for the president. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace issued a report that the administration exaggerated the evidence to go to war, Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institution made similar claims in the most recent Atlantic Monthly, and the former head of the US weapons inspection team, David Kay, very bluntly stated during a congressional hearing, “we were almost all wrong.”

In lieu of the evidence, the administration was slow to appoint an independent counsel. Conservative pundits dutifully opine from Kay’s testimony that fault lies solely with the intelligence community. The president’s loyal surrogates march in locked step, armed with revisionist history reminding us that the Clinton Administration reached similar conclusions about Saddam. How quickly they forget that Vietnam and the Bay of Pigs were children of the Eisenhower Administration, but Ike’s face is not the one we associate with either of those events. Harry Truman was on to something when he said, “The buck stops here!”

Assuming that one buys the theory that fault lies with the intelligence community, how is it possible the bright minds that serve this president failed to question the likelihood of an alliance between Saddam and bin Laden, allowing the president to publicly make false claims? It is amazing to think that no one within the administration remembered that it was bin Laden who first approached the Saudi royal family in 1990 offering protection against the “infidel” Saddam, who at the time was making advances against bordering Kuwait.

What is most curious and Machiavellian is this president’s failure to show any moral outrage knowing that he sold a war using bad intelligence. Since the war began, 3,000 troops have been wounded, disabled, or returned home by way of Dover AFB because of defective intelligence. The White House has provided no response beyond “the world is better off without Saddam.” The president’s silence belies the moral prism he claims as his worldview.

Tragedy, popularity, and bad intelligence combined to allow this president to consolidate his amoral agenda of power, selling it to the American people with overtly pious language. It is classic Machiavelli, utilizing moral language to validate an administration immersed in moral cynicism.

Byron Williams writes a weekly political/social commentary at Byronspeaks.com. Byron serves as pastor of the Resurrection Community Church.

© 2004 Working Assets.

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