Rain was pouring down on Washington, DC, on Monday morning.
But as we walked through the corridors of the White House, from the press briefing room toward the Oval Office, it brightened outside. And by the time we were being greeted by George W. Bush, the sun was breaking through. Appropriately so, for this president.
The Oval Office is a deliberately sunny place. The president drew our attention to the cheerful yellow circular rug chosen to dominate the small room. Although his wife, Laura, made the final decisions in these matters, he said lightly, the color reflected the optimism he brought to work each morning.
It's heady to interview the leader of the free world in the room where much that will determine the current of global affairs takes shape. But Bush is a welcoming host, certainly possessed of a sunny disposition, and, indeed, an optimist too - defiantly so.
Surprisingly, with time at a premium, the president chose to speak at considerable length off-the-record during our interview. More unusually still, the comments he then made were not the stuff of particular secrecy and sensitivity that he might understandably not want widely reported. Rather, he expounded on his world view, the moral imperatives that he said had driven his presidency.
Many of these off-the-record comments were similar to remarks he has made publicly and that he restated in speeches during his visit to Israel this week, relating to the centrality in his outlook of the divinely bestowed gift of freedom, and the obligation of the president of the United States to protect and expand that freedom around the world.
His critics would scoff, but Bush sees himself as a man of principle, a president who, as he said in remarks that were intended for publication during our interview, has resisted the impulse to pursue protectionism and isolationism and the better domestic popularity ratings that more insular and parochial policies might have achieved for his presidency.
And, plainly, he wants this to be more widely appreciated. He claimed a few times that he wasn't bothered about his legacy, that he wasn't "running for the Nobel Peace Prize," and that he'd be "long gone before some smart person ever figures out what happened inside this Oval Office." Yet he also spoke of the way he hoped history would come to perceive him.
He wanted to believe that Israelis, when they thought about his role, would conclude that "if vision accounts for anything, he has got a vision of how to deal with the extremists and radicals." And when that "smart person" finally did figure out the key achievements of his White House years, he said, "one of them has got to be, he clearly saw the threat and he did something about it."
Bush insisted his presidency was far from over, that he'd be working right up until the last day, that there was no changing-of-the-guard mindset in his White House. But as his two-term tenure enters its final months, there's no escaping the question of how effectively Bush has furthered his principles - admirable principles, as regards the challenge of Islamic extremism - particularly given the familiar truism about Israel catching a cold when America sneezes.
THE WAY leaders do, Bush has constructed an "everything's going just the way I planned it" conception. The trouble is that this serves to insulate him from the less gratifying global developments that he has failed to thwart or that have directly flowed from his sunny office. This in turn, one fears, produces a presidency stubbornly declaring that things aren't too bad, while not doing enough to make them better.
Bush insisted in our interview that the United States is succeeding in Iraq. And that, he asserted, was only one of several reasons why Israel is much better off for the Bush years. Yet this and other assertions he made were sometimes difficult to reconcile with reality as we know it.
For instance, he was adamant that the elections that gave Hamas its Palestinian parliamentary majority were a good thing, in principle, and that he had been right to impose the vote on a very unhappy Mahmoud Abbas and a deeply wary Israel. "One of the reasons I supported the elections in Gaza," said Bush, was "because there had to be a moment for everybody to be able to express themselves, and the [Palestinian voters'] expression, by the way, was, 'We're sick and tired of corrupt government. We were tired of Arafat's false promises; we want to live in peace.'"
Certainly, much of the backing for Hamas was in protest against Fatah's Arafat-led corruption. But a "vote for peace"?
Bush went on to acknowledge that "what they got was a government of war," and that "the truth is Hamas is not a passive political party trying to embetter people's lives; they are trying to destroy Israel."
But then he again articulated a narrative somewhat at odds with the facts on the ground, declaring that "people now see the truth" about Hamas, and that, in the wake of Israel's withdrawal from Gaza and amid the current Annapolis negotiations, "all of a sudden the Palestinians say, well, maybe there is a better future for us."
He sounded abjectly, unpresidentially helpless on Lebanon, which is threatening to collapse before our eyes into a full-fledged Iranian client-state. "The Lebanese democracy is vital for a peaceful Middle East, it's a part of the vision," he declared ringingly. But what exactly is he planning to do to salvage that democracy and thwart Hizbullah?
"I'd advise the world backing [Prime Minister] Saniora," said the president. "He's a good guy. He's tough and he's in a really tough situation. I admire him. And we're doing that by support of the Lebanese armed forces. We believe that he needs to have a modern force behind him that's capable of responding... See, I have found you can't make people have courage. It's a wellspring inside their soul. But you can support courageous people. And so that's our attitude."
If you were the embattled Lebanese prime minister, with Hizbullah at your throat, would that constitute the reassurance you need?
