Iraq was invaded in the name of democracy and freedom. Yet the Bush administration supported the ill-fated right-wing military coup in Venezuela against the democratically elected Venezuelan president, Hugo Chávez. The invasion of Iraq was supposed to be a humanitarian intervention. Yet, George W. Bush ignores the more pressing Sudanese situation, and he opposed intervention in Rwanda where hundreds of thousands of innocent people were massacred. Bush’s failings, inconsistencies and blunders are well documented. We don’t need history to tell us that the invasion of Iraq was an unadulterated error.
Hence, if Peter Singer’s The president of good & evil: The ethics of George W. Bush were just a book detailing Bush’s ethical failings and hypocrisies, then it would not cover new ground. Moreover, such a book may be the intellectual equivalent of a slaughter as one of the world’s most influential philosophers tackles the inconsistencies of a man who can barely string two words together.
While The president of good & evil is an analysis of Bush’s ethics in relation to a few defining issues such as international relations, taxation, and the environment, it is also an examination of a dominant current of opinion running through American public life. A strand of thinking that guides the world’s only superpower, that is, the distinctively American conservative Christian perspective that divides the world into black and white, and that places the United States on a pedestal of inherent goodness above other nations. When Singer dissects Bush’s ethics he also dissects that world view.
The Christianity that Singer analyses is an idiosyncratic and literal variety, rooted in the dualistic battle between good and evil that will culminate in the Apocalypse. This view holds that as America is the promised land and therefore inherently good, the enemies of America must be ‘satanic’ or ‘evil’, and the projection of American power and values can be justified as God’s work. It is this perspective that acts as the ideological driving force behind American hegemony, and allows 3,000 American lives to be worth more than tens of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans.
Singer’s style is succinct and clear and his utilitarian approach make his arguments easy to follow and enthralling. It would be unfair to characterise The president of good & evil as simply one more book in a long line of anti-Bush literature. It is not Singer versus a man that—as depicted in Fahrenheit 9/11—read