What struck me most about the president’s Tuesday-night introduction of John G. Roberts was his emphasis on the nominee’s purported qualities of “wisdom, fairness and civility.” It seemed clear that given the multiple problems Mr. Bush is experiencing as a result of possessing none of these qualities himself, the president hopes to improve his image by at least associating with them.
There’s a huge problem with that tactic, though. Roberts is the great judicial White Hope only because he has practically no paper trail. He may, or may not, be wise, fair and civil in future deliberations. But there’s no hope for Bush. He has a paper trail of human wreckage that’s easy to read and no amount of association with another’s wisdom, fairness and civility can overcome the staggering fact of his absolute poverty of these qualities.
For instance -- and this is merely the biggest for instance -- on the day he nominated Judge Roberts the Oxford Research Group and IraqBodyCount.org released their latest cooperative findings in “A Dossier on Civilian Casualties in Iraq, 2003-2005.” Its details horrifyingly confirm what every informed, levelheaded student of the Middle East predicted well before Bush Inc. blundered ahead with military intervention. Virtually every aspect of the report screams an utter absence of presidential wisdom, not to mention his rude unfairness and incivility toward an innocent population.
I’m sure the report’s statistical breakdown will be scanned in a removed, clinical way by the icy “metrics” crowd of Don Rumsfeld’s world, and fittingly, the breakdown is indeed chilling.
For example in the two years since Bush decided to remake Iraq into a garden of democratic tranquility not possible under Saddam Hussein’s violence, 24,865 civilians have been killed, according to the report. Approximately 5,000 were women and children.
But as casualties of war, right? Well, no, not all, not even most. In fact, 70 percent of these civilians were killed after POTUS declared “Mission accomplished” in May 2003. The bereaved should be pleased to learn, however, that roughly 6,900 more civilian deaths have come from their liberators’ firepower rather than from that of anti-occupation forces. Over half of all deaths resulted from “explosive devices” and 64 percent of that half from air power, including lovely cluster bombs.
But these are only numbers on paper. As such they lack the heart-wrenching impact of eye-witness portraits of the bloodshed and mayhem occurring in Iraq on a daily basis. It was therefore welcome that the freshly released “Dossier on Civilian Casualties” included some of these portraits in print, gathered by a variety of on-the-ground journalists.
Here’s a sampling of the exquisite fairness and civility suffered by innocents of that country, courtesy one wise GWB:
“Nearly 100 villagers were killed by US bombing and strafing on April 5, including 43 in one house, for reasons that they do not understand. ‘There was no military base here,’ says [one resident]. ‘We are not military personnel. This is just a peasant village.’” (Christian Science Monitor, May 22, 2003)
“The victims, including seven children, were crushed when the back room of the house became a pile of cement rubble. [A man] said he lost his wife, a daughter, a son and seven grandchildren. He dug out three other family members with his bare hands, he recalled today, after hearing cries of ‘Baba! Baba!’ -- ‘Father! Father!’ -- from under the collapsed brick.” (Washington Post, April 9, 2003)
And finally, a hospital physician in the Iraqi town of Nasiriyah recited to the (London) Times some of what he witnessed within a mere three days: “The boy of 11 with a tiny chest wound who took an hour to die; the mother who arrived at his hospital trying to push her three-year-old daughter’s liver back into the child’s ripped abdomen; the middle-aged man who lost his right leg during the war against Iran, and whose left leg was amputated after his home was attacked by a US Cobra helicopter.” (April 14, 2003)
Wisdom, fairness and civility. It’s like an old “Karnak” routine. Name three things you might find in a Supreme Court Justice, won’t find in Iraq and can’t find in George W. Bush.
Yet when pondering the Iraq mess and how we came to neoconservatively create it, let’s remember one mitigating truth. Bush isn’t a jackass because he’s a right-wing neocon. He’s a right-wing neocon because he’s a jackass.