Given George W Bush’s profound religious beliefs, might not it have been more appropriate if he had written his autobiography in the form of a confessional? The scene is a dimly lit church in the style of Al Pacino’s visit to the box in The Godfather. A single bell sounds grimly as Dubya slips inside; there is a rustle of cassocks and a nervous cough through the mesh as the padre recognises the voice: “Furgive me father for ah have sinned…”
Then a pause before he continues: “Father, I believe I am a good man and tried to serve in the ways of the Bible. Some things happened down in Florida, with my brother Jeb and those voting papers after the Presidential election in 2000, that I still feel bad about. Jeb is family and he meant well about wanting me in the White House, but I guess it wasn’t right.
“Then there are the people I gathered around me. Dick and Don seemed like good, proper God-fearing people. Pa said they were solid men, so I never suspected they were nothing but a couple of snakes out for themselves and taking care of all their old buddies in the oil industry. So after September 11, when they said: “George, you gotta do something, you gotta go kick the shit out of the Taliban, you must invade Afghanistan” well, I listened to them and I took their advice – after all, when you’re President of the United States, you’ve got to be seen to be doing something, even if it’s the wrong thing.
“How was I supposed to know, when they told me Saddam Hussein has so many WMDs he was five minutes away from blowing up the world, and we had to kick him out, that it was just so Dick and Don could award all those nice fat contracts to their buddies and make billions out of the deal.
“I am sorry, too, about Hurricane Katrina. I should have imposed a news blackout so the stories about all the lootings, rapings and violence, while I was back home doing other things, never got out. Besides, I have never forgiven New Orleans since their football team beat the Dallas Cowboys in 19…”
There is the sound of movement from the other side of the mesh; then, all that can be heard is the sound of the padre’s disappearing footsteps, and after a moment’s silence the church bells begin to toll.
If only it were that way. In truth, George W’s autobiography follows much the same tenor as the self-justifying memoirs of his great buddy Tony Blair. Anyone hoping for the slightest suggestion of mea culpa, that maybe, just maybe, I got it wrong about scrapping stem cell research, announcing Syria, Iran and North Korea were part of a unified Axis of Evil when he couldn’t even place them on the map, and perhaps he should look at human rights in Saudi Arabia as well as Iraq, should look elsewhere.
In fairness to the man, there is a clever twist that would never have occurred to TB. Instead of starting by listing his crowning achievements, Dubya begins by detailing his battle with booze: “I was a drunk and an alcoholic and I never saw a bottle of liquor I didn’t want to gulp down” (I paraphrase) he recalls of his life in the early 1980s. By setting out in this way the subtext is that this is going to be a warts and all sort of book – the whole truth and nothing but the truth diary of his years in power – an honest telling about his years in office. An autobiographical rarity, in fact.
What naive optimism! Because what follows is the inevitable justification of every act from waterboarding to war atrocities, from falsified intelligence to the economic meltdown and toxic debt – and let’s not even talk about Guantánamo Bay – every item skated over with breathtaking glibness. No wonder he took such a shine to Blair, on whom he lavishes praise.
Not for a moment is there any admission that he might have been wrong about Syria as they took in more than one million Christian refugees displaced by his invasion of Iraq. Never is there the slightest sense of regret that he may have got it wrong when he boasted it was “Mission accomplished” in Iraq, even though the killing continues all these years later. Nor does he see the irony of stating that Iran had the “wrong” kind of democracy when examined through the microscope of his own election. Nor, for that matter, is there any cloud of conscience about the way he nixed the Kyoto agreement, setting back efforts to combat global warming by years.
But the most damaging evidence that this man was clearly not fit to be allowed into the White House, even as a member of a touring party, comes when he details his reaction to hearing the news that fateful morning on September 11 2001 as he sat in on a reading class at a primary school in Sarasota, Florida. Instead of quickly departing, he continued listening to them reading. “I looked at the faces of the children in front of me… Millions like them would soon be counting on me to protect them… If I stormed our hastily, it would scare the children and send ripples of panic throughout the country…” Such calmness! His reaction to the most horrifying act of terrorism was to look at the children’s faces and think about how they were depending on him. How touching, how reassuring, oh noble leader…
Perhaps he really believes that nine years later this sounds plausible, or maybe he thinks we are such saps we will believe such utter nonsense. The evidence, of course, is perfectly clear; in the face of some utterly unexpected disaster, and without Dick and Don to guide him, George W, in this instance as with Hurricane Katrina, rather than leading from the front, just froze. Not that such matters concern George W. A man who marches through history with a Bible in one hand and the sword of justice in the other fears little, least of all the truth.
Interestingly, while Tony Blair merits multiple entries and is compared to Winston Churchill, Gordon Brown gets just one name check – and that’s one fewer than Bono.
