Bush "Worse than Johnson or Nixon"

Roger Morris in the Globe and Mail, on our Imperial President.

The groundwork for this usurpation was laid last September with the National Security Strategy Mr. Bush sent to Congress. In this document, the President claimed the right -- indeed, responsibility -- to take pre-emptive action against perceived future threats to the security of the United States. From this, it was but a short jump to his Iraqi venture. Claiming a prerogative to invade Iraq as a "clear and present danger" to peace -- it was by no means "clear" to much of the world or even Iraq's closest neighbours, and it was by no means "present" even in his prediction of a threat "in one year or five years" -- Mr. Bush erased long-recognized limits on the right of any nation to attack another.

If the unilateral abrogation alarmed allies, friends and the United Nations, however, it went unchallenged on Capitol Hill, another sign that any internal democratic restraint on the President's war-making was a dead letter.

Not least in a new calculus of an imperial presidency is the man in the Oval Office. George W. Bush, of course, was an unlikely emperor -- America's least informed modern president in world affairs. For the first nine months of his term -- it now seems hard to remember -- he was a lacklustre, evidently purposeless and unprepossessing politician of ridiculed syntax and shrouded electoral legitimacy. Questions about his suspect business dealings, or the sway over his administration of corporate interests, even more egregious than Washington's accepted captivity to moneyed power, began to swirl about the White House. Then, in perhaps the most dramatic effect of its kind in American history, Sept. 11 transformed the man as well as the political setting.

Finally, there is Mr. Bush's paradoxical popularity. If 70 per cent to 75 per cent of Americans approve of his war and performance, the same number question a sagging economy and other issues that are his least-imperial domains. Yet the White House has a manifest capacity to keep the terrorist threat a political preoccupation. Its public shows an equally clear acceptance of a strong leader to deal with the post-Sept. 11 world. The combination will certainly rescue Mr. Bush from the return to domestic concerns and resulting fall in popularity that his father suffered after the first war in the Persian Gulf -- yet another reason why this imperial presidency will not soon wane.