George Packer on W's Memoir

George Packer offers a thoughtful review of George W. Bush's memoir "Decision Points" in The New Yorker.

There are hardly any decision points at all. The path to each decision is so short and irresistible, more like an electric pulse than a weighing of options, that the reader is hard pressed to explain what happened. Suddenly, it's over and there is no looking back. The decision to go to war "was an accretion," Richard Haas, the director of policy planning at the State Department until the invasion of Iraq told me. "A decision was not made--a decision happened, and you can't say when or how."

Here is another feature of the non-decision: once his own belief became known to him, Bush immediately caricatured opposing views and impugned the motives of those who held them. If there was an honest and legitimate argument on the other side, then the President would have to defend his non-decision, taking it out of the redoubt of personal belief and into the messy empirical realm of contingency and uncertainty...For Bush, making decisions is an identity question: who am I? The answer turns Presidential questions into foregone conclusions: I am someone who believes in the dignity of life, I am the protector of the American people, I am the calcium in the backbone. This sense of conviction made Bush a better candidate than the two Democrats he was fortunate to have as opponents in his Presidential campaigns. But real decisions, which demand the weighing of compelling contrary arguments and often present a choice between bad options, were psychologically intolerable to the Decider. They confused the identity question.

--Ballard Burgher