Immediately after the 9/11 attacks, President Bush sat down to play poker with the biggest stack of chips at the table, the odds-on favorite to win one of the highest-stakes games ever played. This huge initial chip advantage was built from a unified and supportive citizenry at home, a mainstream media that rarely questioned his judgment or intentions, an international community prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt, and a military machine bigger than the next couple dozen countries combined. But since those early heady days, Bush and his close advisers and neocon allies have made one horrendous decision after another. The great tragedy, of course, is that the president has not only been playing with his own chips. Rather, in this game his poor play has cost the lives of our courageous soldiers and many Iraqi civilians, our country's stature in the world, and our national resources desperately needed for other purposes, domestic and international.
Others, realizing how poorly they've been playing, would recognize that they don't belong at the table—or at least conclude that they had entered the wrong game. Not so with the president. Rather, all signs suggest that this stubborn poker player is unlikely to learn any constructive lessons from his abysmal performance. There are at least five reasons why this is so. First, although a relative novice at the game, he has refused to prepare adequately, hasn't mastered the likelihood of various outcomes, and seemingly hasn't even tried to understand his opponents and their style of play. Second, he has cultivated and embraced an Old West saloon mentality where a loaded six-shooter and a quick draw can turn losing hands into winners. Third, he has a personal history of being bailed out whenever he has come up short in the past, whether through family connections or the highest reaches of our judicial system. Fourth, he has convinced himself that God is personally by his side, presumably with an unlimited supply of aces. And fifth, he is now concerned about his legacy, and likely suspects that only a miraculously successful reshaping of Iraq and the Middle East can save him from being a frequent answer in "worst president ever" debates in the decades ahead.
My list is undoubtedly incomplete, but it is daunting. It suggests that Bush will ultimately be driven to go "all in" regardless of any wiser counsel he might receive. And at the very least, "all in" means continuing to play the Iraq hands as he has done thus far--or perhaps with even greater recklessness and abandon. More frightening still, "all in" may mean saving his very last stack of chips for Iran. As a new year begins, we should all be asking whether anyone can pull him away from the table before it is (again) too late.
As an addendum, the appeals Bush and his supporters will use in defense of their actions are predictable. I describe some of them in detail in an online video entitled "Dangerous Ideas: How Conservatives Exploit Our Five Core Concerns" that can be viewed HERE.
