Resize Text: I would be willing to risk a small sum of money to bet that you never saw or heard of a short television documentary that I made about you for the BBC in 2002. It followed the trajectory of your political career from the governor’s mansion in Texas to the White House, and it made an attempt to trace the corresponding or correlating evolution of your views of the wider world. It did not fail to notice that in the presidential debates of 2000 you had taken a considerably less “interventionist” view of foreign policy than then-Vice President Gore, and it advanced the thesis that you had initially hoped to govern the United States much as you had governed the Lone Star State: somewhat part-time at the helm, with the aim of lower taxation and smaller government, and the lifting where possible of restrictions on trade with oil-bearing regions of the Middle East.
It could have been predicted that there would be another terrorist attack on our homeland from the forces of Islamic jihad, but so facile did that prediction seem that in some paradoxical way it appeared by repetition to lose some of its urgency. It could also have been predicted that China would become such a successful state-capitalist power as to emerge as a direct rival to the United States, but this very emergence was itself partly the outcome of a long American attempt—somewhat identified with the career of your own father—to condition and encourage precisely the outcome of a booming and entrepreneurial Chinese system.
Other guesses and forecasts, made at about the same date, would have proved mostly correct also. It might well have been foreseen that a version of Peronism would recur here and there in the southern hemisphere of the Americas, just as it might have been surmised that this phenomenon would not have a very durable social or economic base. And we certainly all knew, even if we sometimes buried our awareness of the fact, that there would have to be some kind of reckoning with Saddam Hussein as the sanctions regime that constituted his “box” continued to erode. Prime Minister Tony Blair was the most prescient on this point, in a now-famous speech delivered in Chicago in 1999.
So in some ways, absurd though it may seem in view of the shocks and casualties and traumas of the past eight years, we were in fact quite often braced for what might be coming. Yet now I must speak for myself, though I fear I am also voicing a want of foresight and indeed insight that is very common within and without your administration. Who would have predicted, when you first took the oath of office, that our cartoonists would so soon have been able to recycle their old frames and images, of a vicious Russian bear engaged in gouging and clawing the smaller creatures in its vicinity?
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and a Media Fellow at the Hoover Institution.
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