Speaking for Hollywood, Humphrey Bogart once said of fellow actor Spencer Tracy, "Spence is the best we have, because you don't see the mechanism at work." Nobody speaking for Washington could say the same of George W. Bush or the people who manage his political fortunes. Mr. Bush's chief handler, Karl Rove, is a man who studies the annals of politics to see how things were managed before and then plans the most favorable track conditions for his horse. His horse is surely equal to any horse in breeding and spirit, and intelligence, but he lacks the great heart of a champion, not to mention the legs. Better put him on rails and run him around the track by means of the surest possible mechanism. In the annals of American politics, no mechanism has been surer than war.

It may be only natural that wartime tends to become a time of national solidarity. It's not a peculiarly American phenomenon. But in the United States, especially since the outbreak of World War II, wartime national solidarity has expressed itself as broad support for the incumbent President. Franklin D. Roosevelt's domestic policies made him both the most loved and the most hated President of the twentieth century, but war made him one of the world's three big Good Guys along with Churchill and, er, Stalin. In the election of 1944, it made him the horse that one does not change in midstream.

The Vietnam War was more complicated, but it was not the exception that it may seem in distant retrospect. Certainly the war brought Lyndon Johnson down. It was bound to bring that President down because it was especially withheld from him as a source of support and therefore could only work against him. The main reason was not that he was disliked for being unscrupulous; lack of scruples is something that people love to condemn in politicians without actually punishing it. It was that many liberal Democrats had been demoralized by the assassination of John F. Kennedy, if not positively disgusted to see the Presidency pass thereby from the hands of a suave Northern elitist liberal to those of a crude Southern populist liberal and an erstwhile antagonist of their favorite. It's hard to believe that Kennedy, had he lived, would have seen his Presidency damaged as decisively as Johnson's was by the Vietnam War: a war to which Kennedy had committed the country and for which his brother Robert, as Attorney General, had toured the world drumming up support. He at least would not have had that same brother dogging his footsteps as a charismatic peace candidate, and it's all but impossible to imagine America's college-bred youth chanting, "JFK, JFK, how many kids did you kill today?" in front of the White House. Long before 1968, the people who would normally have led the wartime rallying-round for Lyndon Johnson, a liberal Democrat, were instead looking ahead to a post-Johnson renewal. Yes, he was brought down by opposition to the war, but the opposition was more intensive than extensive. It's one of the little-remembered facts of that era that public opinion polls in the US continued to show majority support for successive Presidents' commitment to military involvement in Southeast Asia until the last American troops were removed. Not long afterward, when Gerald Ford ordered a military operation against Cambodia in response to the seizure of the American freighter Mayaguez, his critics thought it possible that he was motivated by a desire to raise his standing in the opinion polls. Such is the reliability of armed conflict as a booster of Presidents.

The salient point in all this for a student of American political forces is not that war's rallying effect has its limits, but that even a war of doubtful necessity may go badly for quite a long time before those limits are reached, if only the President can count on a normally disciplined party. When most people believe that war is necessary, it makes the President practically unassailable. Edward R. Murrow, in his audio documentary I Can Hear It Now, describes the reception that Roosevelt received in the US Capitol after the attack on Pearl Harbor:

" ... a joint session of Senators and Representatives, many of them bitter foes of the man on the rostrum, cheer him madly because, like most Americans, they are angry, frightened, and confused — and he is the President of the United States."

These lessons won't be lost on any President, but just how much do they mean to George W. Bush and his advisors? His determination to have a war in Iraq has been explained in so many different ways, before and during and after the fact, by insiders and by outsiders, by those who really want to explain it and by those who want to give it a certain appearance, that the subject has become a hall of mirrors. He was, or he wasn't, setting out to finish what his father had started. His main concern was, or wasn't, the danger that Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction. His aim was, or wasn't, regime change in Iraq. His policy was, or wasn't, driven by (1) a new fear of terrorism or (2) associates who had personally declared war on Saddam Hussein even before taking office or (3) an extemporaneous impulse to fight a winnable war against an enemy with a known address. And the Bush Administration was, or wasn't, every bit as cynical as it seemed: cynical enough to go to war for political gain.

If George W. Bush had a single conscious motive or rationale for sending Americans to war in Iraq, it probably was not a base one. He probably would not have allowed himself such a motive, consciously. But what about the motive for his more general will to establish himself as a wartime President?

Mr. Bush himself, and not only his staff, began soon after the September 11 attacks to talk as if an open-ended age of war had begun. Before the attacks he had been a common object of ridicule for his ignorance, his clumsy way of talking, his lack of focus and careless detachment (remember that month-long vacation in the summer of 2001?), and his dubious legitimacy as President of the United States. He'd had little to recommend him as a leader except to those who wished to see mediocrity vindicated. Then came the national crisis, and a wave of patriotism lifted his boat high above the rocks of normal consequences for a mediocre President. How could he help but wish to ride the wave as far as possible? It's an understandable impulse, but one that has to be resisted. If the President won't resist the impulse, the American people have to resist the President. George W. Bush has shown no sign of resisting the impulse since his first chance to preside over a nation unified, or psychologically controlled, by patriotism and anxiety.

1. Gaining extraordinary powers for the Chief Executive and his Attorney General.

2. Waging war and establishing premises for war.

3. Fostering a sense of domestic crisis, and giving an impression of crisis management, by means of institutionalized terror alerts and conspicuous law-enforcement activity.

4. Making it taboo in such extraordinary, war-torn, crisis-ridden times to criticize the Administration.

The classic definition of chutzpa is an anecdote in which a man murders both his parents and then, at his trial, pleads for leniency on the grounds that he's an orphan. A good topical variation would be the one about the President who contrives to lead America to war and then stigmatizes anyone who would challenge a President's leadership while American troops are in harm's way. Talk about human shields.

Underlying the political phenomenon of rallying around Presidents in wartime, there has usually been an assumption that the President was not going out of his way to bring on a war. The enemy in question had attacked American interests or had committed some act of aggression somewhere that defied the United States to ignore it. Whatever doubt there may have been about the rightness of going to war, it did not seem that the establishment of a wartime Presidency was central to the Administration's political strategy. Now it does. The President may be less to blame than his advisors, since he's probably less alive to his need for war points in the opinion polls. But if so, he's apparently not above making their strategy his own. He did understand his need to gull the American public by misrepresenting his reason for sending Americans off to Iraq to kill and die. His secrecy in all things, not only his war policy, shows a lack of genuine confidence in his own ability to lead a democracy. Self-confident leaders don't shrink from the public eye. They don't abhor press conferences or face-to-face meetings with the leaders of other countries. They don't avoid the necessity of organizing and explaining their thoughts, and then standing by their explanation.

George W. Bush is a man desperately in need of compensation for his deficiencies as a leader. He's really no leader at all, but only a headstrong individual who aims to have his way without leading. His publicists have put out a line about his having been transformed by September 11, but his detachment and lack of focus really haven't changed. He's not even focused on fighting terrorism as most leaders would be. After all, he wages war in Afghanistan and then walks away, leaving the country's friendly new government without the vital economic support that he had promised. He starts a war in Iraq, and toward the end it becomes public knowledge that neither he nor his staff had given much thought to what would become of that country afterward. Now Iraq is in a state of near-anarchy, Shiite holy men are winning hearts and minds while secular democratic nation-building goes nowhere, and the Bush Administration has just made it known that Iraqi self-government is not coming soon, after all. Mr. Bush once said that he thought God had wanted him to run for President. He must have thought God's will was all it took to be a competent leader, because his behavior in every field from fiscal policy to international affairs shows a clear tendency to smash what exists and then wait for Providence to make something out of the pieces. He lacks the mental discipline to think his way past the bold-stroke phase of a project.

Mr. Bush needs his secrecy, his extraordinary powers, his Karl Rove, and his war points as no President has needed such an array of equalizers in modern times. At present, many Americans seem content to give him the war points regardless of the news from Iraq or even the news from inside his own government. US specialists in ferreting out weapons of mass destruction have given up trying to find any in Iraq. Giving up made sense when official sources had recently explained to ABC News, "the administration emphasized the danger of Saddam's weapons to gain the legal justification for war from the United Nations and to stress the danger at home to Americans," while the real reason for the war was that the Bush Administration wanted to be seen doing something about terrorism. "We were not lying," ABC quotes an official as saying. "But it was just a matter of emphasis." Still, the latest opinion polls show that most Americans don't mind the deception and do continue to give their deceiver a high approval rating. It's too early to say whether they mind the consequences of carelessly throwing Iraq wide open to the intrigues of Arabs, Persians, and Turks: all past masters of an ancient power game that the Bushes and Bremers of the world — put together — have only studied at second hand. Well, it's an unparalleled chance to witness the will of God.

For now, the mechanism of wartime support for the President is working smoothly and the horse is zipping around the track like a winner. Those who think he'll go down in history as a winner are probably wrong. Others may hope to see the mechanism break up in a sudden shower of springs and gears, but that's as reckless an impulse as any of George W. Bush's. Let's hope instead that millions of American voters will firmly pull those levers that can bring the mechanical Man o' War to a safe stop. •