Over at the New Yorker’s blog, George Packer (whose December 2006 piece played a big part in bringing counter-insurgency guru David Kilcullen to prominence) is reflecting on Karl Rove’s departure from the White House at the end of this month:
Karl Rove’s resignation brought to mind a conversation I had a few weeks ago with an Administration official who genuinely wanted to hear my account of why the Iraq war has gone so badly.
In a word, I said, “politics.” At every turn, the White House has tried to use the war, and the larger war on terror, to consolidate power, to reward ideological and political loyalists, to win electoral advantage, to push the Democrats into a corner, to divide the country into patriots and defeatists. President Bush insisted on pursuing a highly partisan domestic agenda rather than unite the country around the war in the spirit of F.D.R. (who said that “Doctor New Deal” had been replaced by “Doctor Win the War”). So many disastrous wartime decisions can be traced back to the original sin: policy mattered less than politics. The message in Washington was more real than anything happening in Iraq…
The Rove approach to governing helped lose Iraq. That may be the most enduring legacy of this supposed political genius.
