The April 2, 2001, edition of National Review featured President Bush on the cover in a white shirt and red tie, his arms crossed, his head affably cocked, his eyes trained on a blue blazer of a headline: "A Return to Modesty." The "accidental president" (as The Economist dubbed him in a less-fawning cover story a few weeks earlier) wasn't three months into his tenure, but the consensus of low expectations that helped him smudge into office was gelling into an ideology of humility, in appearances anyway: Humility doesn't generally get your citizens charred and hung from bridges above cheering barbarians half a world away. But in the spring of 2001, the administration's fictions seemed politically savvy. They'd done the job thus far.

Bush himself had projected the illusion during his campaign, most famously during his second debate with Al Gore. Moderator Jim Lehrer had asked him this question: "Should the people of the world look at the United States, Governor, and say -- should they fear us? Should they welcome our involvement? Should they see us as a friend to everybody in the world? How do you -- how would you project us around the world, as president?" Bush's answer: "I don't think they ought to look at us with envy. It really depends upon how our nation conducts itself in foreign policy. If we're an arrogant nation, they'll resent us. If we're a humble nation but strong, they'll welcome us."

By the standard Bush himself established we've been an arrogant nation, because we've been resented everywhere, welcomed nowhere. To be tolerated -- to be suffered, to be endured, as we are wherever we're garrisoned -- isn't the same as being welcomed. Central Command's public information brigades do their best to confuse the two, but sooner or later their jolly news conferences end up sounding like the old Iraqi minister of information's briefings during the first month of war, when the ministry claimed imminent victory with every crumble of its credibility.

As I write this, news is dribbling in of what looks like an uprising across Iraq by the nation's Shiites. If it is in fact the uprising the Shiites have been promising, and the American military has been fearing, then Iraq is now a two-front war. It wasn't enough to be warring against the fanatics of the Sunni Triangle, who long for the old days of Saddam and sadism against any of Iraq's many minorities and the Shiite majority (and who've settled for roadside sadism against American troops in the meantime). Now we'll be warring against Shiite fundamentalists, the flower of Muslim fanaticism whose tendrils extend east to Lebanon's Hezbollah and west to Teheran's mullahs, the Mideast's dynamic duo of religion in the service of lunacy.

We asked for it. Or rather, our humble president asked for it -- the balkanization of Iraq into a mosaic of enmity, the Shiite uprising, and yes, the barbaric attack against the four American security guards in Fallujah. The responsibility for it is not only on the conscience of those who so enjoyed playing executioner. Savages will be savages. It ought to be on the conscience of President Bush, without whose verminous visions of Iraq as a contractors' paradise those Americans would not have been there, without whose imperial presumptions 616 American soldiers wouldn't be dead, and without whose deceptions the rest of us wouldn't be footing the bill for the costliest, most useless war since Vietnam.

Then again 56 percent of Americans, according to the latest Gallup poll, still think Iraq was worth going to war over. A crushing majority of Congress -- pitiful, after-the-fact backtracking such as Sen. John Kerry's notwithstanding -- not only approved the war, but continues to fund it, campaign on it, and bank on its dividends for those home-district industries lucky enough to make a buck off of it. North Carolina-based Blackwater Security Consulting, whose four "civilian" employees were killed in Fallujah, may sound like a benign operation providing a white-knight service to hard-working Americans in Iraq. It is, in fact, a paramilitary training company that operates, in part, on a $35.7 million Pentagon contract to train thousands of military personnel a year in what it calls "force protection," that hires out its own mercenaries on demand, whose presence in such towns as Fallujah, in distinctive white, armed SUVs, is hardly distinguishable from the authoritarian nature of military patrols, and whose men take on the risks of a war zone willingly, at handsome profits. They, too, are resented when they're part of an arrogant occupation.

Which is why the killings in Fallujah, like any of Iraq's daily killings, are symbolic of Bush's "return to modesty." The modesty was a nice illusion, a founding lie for an administration that has crusted into a junta of secrecy and dishonesty. The consequences were bound to burn.

Tristam is a News-Journal editorial writer. Reach him at ptristam@att.net

© 2004 News-Journal Corporation

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