Curious about President George W. Bush’s veto of a bill to continue funding for military operations in Iraq, I called my favorite inside source: Ananias Ziegler, media relations director for the Committee That Really Runs America.
“I think our president made it perfectly clear, Quillen,” he said after the usual pleasantries. “The Decider promised he would veto any funding bill that set a withdrawal timeline, and that’s what those cut-and-run Defeatocrats in Congress gave him. He’s a man of his word, and he sticks to his guns.”
Nothing in that surprised me. So I quoted from President Bush’s veto message: “Members of the House and the Senate passed a bill that substitutes the opinions of politicians for the judgment of our military commanders. … American commanders in a combat zone would have to take fighting directions from politicians 6,000 miles away in Washington, D.C.”
“Sounds like good old plain common horse sense to me,” Ziegler said in an avuncular drawl that made me suspect he was secretly working for Fred Thompson’s unannounced presidential campaign. “What’s your problem with it?”
“But isn’t the military supposed to take directions from politicians in Washington, D.C.?” I asked. “Isn’t that what civilian control of the military means? And isn’t the president a politician in Washington, D.C., one who is supposed to be the commander in chief of our military?”
Ziegler harrumphed. “How dare you call our president a politician in Washington? Don’t you know how hard the Committee has worked, over many long years, to convince America and the world that he is no mere politician, but a shining exemplar placed here by divine favor when America most needed such a leader?”
I conceded that somebody had worked hard to peddle that line, but pointed out that if Providence truly were guiding the president, Bush presumably wouldn’t have messed up quite so often.
Then I shifted the subject: “In early 2003, just before the invasion of Iraq, Gen. Eric K. Shinseki told the Senate Armed Services Committee that ‘something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers’ would be needed to maintain stability in Iraq after an invasion. He was the Army’s chief of staff, and that was his judgment. So why didn’t the administration ask for a force big enough to do the job? Why did the president substitute his opinion for Shinseki’s?”
Ziegler explained that “You’re forgetting the expert guidance we had from Paul Wolfowitz, deputy secretary of defense, who said then that Shinseki’s estimate was ‘wildly off the mark,’ and that Donald Rumsfeld, secretary of defense, agreed that the estimate was ‘far off the mark.”‘
I protested. “Here you have two political appointees in Washington substituting their judgment for that of a military commander back in 2003, and now in 2007 the president is telling us that’s wrong? Why didn’t he say so then?”
Ziegler tried to mollify me. “You have to realize there’s a big difference. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz weren’t really politicians, since they weren’t elected to their positions. The House and Senate are elected, so they are politicians. See the difference?”
“But isn’t the president a politician too?”
“I keep telling you that the president is not a politician.” He paused. “Let me put it this way. If the Decider were in fact a politician, wouldn’t he know how to earn an approval rating higher than 29 percent?” Ziegler concluded with “I rest my case.”
He hung up, which was just as well, because I had no answer for that one.
Ed Quillen of Salida (ed@cozine.com) is a former newspaper editor whose column appears Tuesday and Sunday.
