George Bush: Few signs of self-doubt in the White House

One thing about the Iraq crisis has left no room for doubt: George Bush is the master of his own Presidency. He may be a son of privilege with dubious credentials for the most powerful political post in the world. He may have surrounded himself with ideologues and advisers with histories of radical conservative thought far longer and deeper than his own. But nobody listening to the President in recent weeks can be in any doubt that the policy buck stops with him, that he means what he says and that he is taking a deliberate, open-eyed gamble on his future as well as the future stability of the world.

While his advisers still pussy-foot around with hypotheticals and (insincere-sounding) caveats about war being something the Administration is keen to avoid, President Bush has shot straight from the hip. The conditional tense has long ceded position to the future when he discusses the forcible removal of Saddam Hussein. In his most recent radio address, last weekend, he treated the war as a foregone conclusion and skipped over it to the next item on the agenda, the form of Iraq's future government.

George Bush is someone who likes to operate on narrowly defined moral certainties, and this, in his book, is one of them. He seems to have decided that invading Iraq will be a good thing, pretty much irrespective of the contingencies attached. So what if the United Nations Security Council does not come through with a resolution authorising military action? We will go it alone. So what if Turkey does not allow US troops there? Who needs a northern front anyway?

This forthright way of thinking has been with his Presidency from the start, when his approach to overcoming doubts about his electoral legitimacy was to act as if he had an unambiguous mandate to do all the things US voters had expressed considerable doubts about, cut taxes for the rich, rip the environmental rule book to shreds, and so on. The moral and religious dimension really crept in only after 11 September, when President Bush memorably declared his mandate to be nothing less than to "rid the world of evil". He remains apparently incurious to deepen his knowledge of that world. David Frum, a former speechwriter who wrote a largely admiring memoir of the Bush White House entitled The Right Man, said there is scarcely anyone around the Oval Office who can qualify as an intellectual, or who even reads. The President does not expect his views to be questioned; he expects them to be respected and followed through with 100 per cent commitment.

The smugness he exudes is only reinforced by his view of himself as a no-nonsense manager and his White House as an admirably tight-run ship. Everyone stands when he enters the room. There are prayers and Bible study sessions. And, for all his extravagant ways with the federal budget, Mr Bush prides himself on being a frugal man. He even – claim his aides – turns off the lights when he leaves an empty room.

This moral certainty may be the key to understanding Mr Bush's stance on Iraq. He believes toppling President Saddam is the right thing to do, and hang the precise reasons, which, perhaps unsurprisingly, remain elusive. Mr Bush does not even seem to care what it might do to America's standing in the world, or to its relationship with its allies.

"At some point, we may be the only ones left," Mr Bush is quoted in another recent book, Bush At War, by Bob Woodward of The Washington Post. And he adds: "That's OK with me. We are America."