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Former US President George W Bush - Source: Reuters -
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A hazard of my occupation is that by temperament sometimes, but often from necessity, one often revisits strongly held positions.
This is to be expected. More information surfaces. Circumstances change. You get a little fed up with saying the same things to the same people, so merely for effect, you say different things.
This last mode is the most dangerous, because the thrill of saying different things can quickly degenerate into the high of saying the unsayable. From there, it's a short, skipping, dizzying leap to saying the unthinkable.
I note that the rewards for saying the unthinkable on a regular basis are high, but often too-briefly savoured.
So it was that I found myself about a month ago, about to defend George Bush's positions on terrorism. Having been absent from politics since he left office on January 6, 2009, with the lowest ratings in modern presidential history, save those of Richard Nixon, Bush had become for me the subject of a thought experiment.
Aspects of his stridency - so fearful during the early noughts - appear to have paid benefits. America has not been attacked. A strong offence is the best defence, etc. And - the rational side of me murmured - no person is utterly malign. Perhaps there was merit in some of Bush's views.
Julian Assange of Wikileaks saved my bacon, if not my self-respect. By publishing the graphic and detailed US Army logs of the war in Iraq, Assange reminded me and others of how the purity of the Bush administration's preoccupation with freedom is besmirched with blood and filth.
According to Wikileaks, Iraqi civilians were routinely flensed into mist by a hail of bullets, combatants not given a chance to surrender (I'm not sure I'd be able to extend that courtesy in a combat situation myself); the viciousness and horror of that war were revealed in bureaucratese that strengthened the link between this dreadful carnage and the moral slipperiness of paying lip service to unpleasant propositions simply out of complacency.
In office President Bush insisted the Iraq war was the right thing to do. He still does in Decision Points, the memoir of his Presidency that is out today, and which he has re-emerged from self-imposed obscurity to promote.
He's been on Oprah. People queued in their hundreds in Dallas last night to get a chance to have him sign a copy. Mr Bush says he was 'blindsided' by the horrors of Abu Ghraib, the prison where Americans tortured Iraqis sometimes to death. He is he adds, 'content'.
Well, that's largely how he entered office, an incurious glove puppet - to use Christopher Hitchens' deathless phrase - for less content, but more determined individuals around him, people like Dick Cheney. Mr Bush's certainty and contentment took America into a conflict that beggared it morally and fiscally and unleashed horror within Iraq.
Decision Points does reveal its author was sickened that the pretext for war, the WMDs that Saddam Hussein was supposedly stockpiling, proved inconveniently to not to exist. He was wrong about the evidence but right about the principal.
Proving that when journalists have thought experiments, they only embarrass themselves; when Presidents do so, innocents perish.
Read more of Tim Wilson's articles
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