NON FICTION

MR. BUSH’S WAR: Adventures in the Politics of Illusion by Stephen R. Graubard (Hill & Wang: $20; 201 pp.). With three books lambasting the President in the next three weeks alone, it is apparently literary hunting season on George Bush. Attacking Bush on foreign policy is “George Bush’s War” by the elegant biographer Jean Edward Smith (Henry Holt: $24.95), intelligent Gulf War criticism that will be familiar to Op-Ed readers: Kuwait wasn’t really “liberated”; we easily could have predicted and thus prevented Saddam’s invasion. Excoriating the President on the domestic front is next month’s “The Culture of Contentment” (Houghton Mifflin: $22.95), John Kenneth Galbraith’s argument that Reagan and Bush promoted “self-serving economic comfort” while allowing the national infrastructure to rot.

Written by the editor of Daedalus, the flagship journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and blurbed by a shower of leading liberal lights, “Mr. Bush’s War” is the most loudly touted of these three. It is also, however, the one that stands the least chance of influencing the 1992 elections, for it is so consumed by the anger felt by the country’s intellectuals, who arguably have been more excluded from power under Reagan and Bush than under any previous Administration, that it cannot seriously debate its opponents’ arguments.

Instead, Graubard merely dismisses them with stinging causticity: putting quotation marks around the term “freedom fighters,” for instance, rather than showing why the Contras may not have fought in freedom’s best interest; dismissing Bush’s education program as a “fraud” without suggesting alternatives; and constantly deriding Bush’s “abysmal ignorance of the world’s complexities” without ever describing these “complexities.” Like a Scud missile, “Mr. Bush’s War” is full of fire and fury, but so sloppily targeted that it usually ends up exploding in barren political deserts.

This is not to say that Graubard doesn’t persuasively debunk some popular notions about the Gulf War: It was as dangerous as Vietnam (a more fitting analogy, he explains, would be Britain’s war in the Falklands); Bush was like Churchill standing up to Hitler (Churchill’s lone voice warned, very early, “what Hitler was compassing,” while Bush supported Saddam well after it was clearly foolish to do so); the war was a triumph (“It resolved nothing and settled nothing”). But Graubard is so full of contempt for Bush’s need to believe in these “fictions” that he does not understand that many of us, demoralized by past military failures, needed to believe in them too.