Bush Has Nothing To Lose

Watch out, this 'lame duck' president has nothing to lose

By Niall Ferguson

Teaching the history of revolutions has been easy at Harvard this semester. As if to illustrate exactly how these strange historical upheavals work, the university has obligingly staged a revolution of its own. Last month, after more than a year of academic acrimony, the President of the University, former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, was forced to announce his resignation. The alternative would have been to face a vote of no confidence by my professorial colleagues, which would have gone overwhelmingly against him.

The outside world is under the impression that one of two things has happened at Harvard. Either a reactionary despot has been deposed by faculty freedom-fighters, or a bold reformer has been thwarted by vested interests. Most revolutions get written up in these contrary ways. Readers of Rousseau romanticise the revolutionaries; readers of Burke suspect their motives.

In reality, revolutions usually begin with rather obscure disputes - how to pay for a standing army in the American colonies, say, or how to sort out the insolvency of the French monarchy. They burst out of the existing political channels only when the number of grievances against the monarch reaches a critical mass and the monarch himself alienates one too many of his own supporters. Thus it was at Harvard. The question I found myself pondering last week was whether or not the same thing is now happening in Washington DC. Is real politics about to imitate academic politics? Could the next president to fall victim to an unruly representative body be George W Bush?

Harvard professors are, on the whole, politically Left of centre. Frustrated since 2000 by their exclusion from the corridors of political power, a number of them came to regard Larry Summers as a kind of Bush substitute - a conservative leader on whom they could actually land some punches. There is, in fact, very little about Summers that could be described as conservative. Never-theless, he gave his foes an opening with a less than tactful rumination about the possible reasons why so few top scientists are women.

As president, Summers had many aims, none of them conservative. He wanted to expand the campus across the River Charles, to devote more of the university's unrivalled resources to the sciences, and to increase the proportion of students from lower-income families. The revolution against him was about none of these things. It was nearly all about his style of leadership. What I saw (and liked) was a man with an allergy to the complacency that bedevils all great universities and an addiction to the dialectical method that propels scientific inquiry forward.

But to colleagues more involved than I in the day-to-day running of the university, precisely that love of adversarial debate was a source of irritation. The fatal development - the real crux of the revolution - was not the vociferous campaign by the firebrands at faculty meetings but the quiet machinations of the department chairs in their informal caucus. Whoever succeeds Larry Summers will find herself (and everyone assumes it will be a woman) having to govern with that caucus, just as William III had to govern with the Whigs in parliament when he accepted the crown they had taken from James II.

Cut to Washington. Another president with a bold (and not wholly conservative) agenda: to wage and win a "long war" against terrorism, to spread freedom around the world, to keep taxes low and to reform social security. Another president with a style problem: not the contrariness of Larry Summers but a reserve verging on introversion - a preference for his own trusted inner circle that has cut him off from his own party in Congress.

Ten days ago I paid a visit to the imposing Russell Building on Capitol Hill where senators have their offices. What I saw there was a timely reminder of just how much power the US constitution vests in the legislature. The senators I spoke to made it abundantly clear that President Bush's "political capital" - about which he boasted after securing re-election 16 months ago - is all used up. The phrase I kept hearing was "lame duck".

It's not hard to see why. With his approval ratings as low as 34 per cent, Bush is now as unpopular a president as his father was in the year before his defeat by Bill Clinton. According to the polls, four out of five Americans expect Iraq - the transformation of which has become the Bush administration's flagship policy - to descend into civil war. As midterm elections near, the political hunting season has begun. Rep-ublicans and Democrats alike are taking pot shots at the president as if merely having a lame duck is not enough. They want this duck dead.

Last week they got him with both barrels. The House Appropriations Committee stunned the Beltway by voting 62-2 to block the acquisition by Dubai Ports World of the US operations of Peninsular & Oriental, a deal backed by the president. Before Bush could even reach for the presidential veto - a weapon he has never had to use thanks to his own party's dominance in Congress - DP World folded, announcing that it would "transfer fully" P&O Ports to "a US entity". This is the biggest humiliation Bush has suffered since entering the White House. It is unlikely to be the last.

As Larry Summers discovered with the Harvard Faculty, grievances in an assembly have a way of multiplying. There was already unease among Republican lawmakers on a number of issues, notably the administration's insistence that torture, detention without charge and phone-tapping without warrants are all legitimate weapons in the war on terror. The idea of Arabs running American ports was the last straw.

But there is a difference between Harvard and Washington. This time last year I listened aghast as Larry Summers abased himself before the faculty with the most abject apology (for his remarks about women scientists) I think I have ever heard. He had forgotten Admiral Jacky Fisher's words of wisdom: "Never apologise, never explain." Saying sorry was like dripping blood into a pool full of sharks; it only made them hungrier.

This is not a mistake I expect President Bush to make. On the contrary, he is more likely to be cussed than contrite in the face of this Congressional revolt. After all, it makes no sense to cast aspersions on the reliability of a Middle Eastern ally such as the United Arab Emirates - especially at a time when America needs all the foreign investment it can get to finance its yawning budget and trade deficits.

Congressmen should beware of underestimating this president as others have done in the past. They should remember that a second-term president is not necessarily a lame duck. He is also a man with nothing to lose.

So my guess is that Bush is going to bite back. And the obvious way for him to do this is over Iran. Last Tuesday Vice-President Dick Cheney gave a speech in which he bluntly declared: "We will not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon." Remind you of anything? It was Cheney who set the pace four years ago, as the administration prepared to confront Iraq, insisting that Saddam already possessed weapons of mass destruction. And the same sequence of events now looks set to replay itself.

The United States is going to ask the UN Security Council to impose sanctions if Iran does not halt its programme of uranium enrichment. The other permanent members won't agree. And then… Well, when those missiles slam into the Iranian nuclear facilities, don't say I didn't warn you.

Harvard's revolution was a reminder that in academic politics the stakes are relatively low. Larry Summers may even find he is happier back in the classroom, teaching the subject he loves. But where the stakes are high - and they don't get any higher than American national security - the presidents are harder to roll over. The next time you hear the word "duck" in Washington, my advice would be to do just that.

• Niall Ferguson is Laurence A Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University www.niallferguson.org