President Machiavelli Bush
President Machiavelli Bush
George W. Bush, our current President, must keep a copy of Machiavelli’s most celebrated work, “The Prince “(1513), on his desk in the Oval Office. In my opinion, Bush and his administration’s actions mimic Machiavelli’s advice to the Prince on the tactics that he should use to stay in power. I am going to discuss how President Bush uses Machiavellian principles.
My first example is of Bush’s “War on Terror”. In 2001, the President stated that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and Saddam was going to use them against the U.S. and other nations even though he did not have concrete proof . He also said Iraq had ties to Al Quaida and this was a threat to our security and the security of other nations. In justification of his war plans, Bush sold the idea of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction to the American public to gain it’s support. After a few years of war, in 2005, the White House confirmed that the search for weapons of mass destruction was officially over. NOTHING was found and Americans had been duped. In all reality, George Bush had intended on invading Iraq from the moment he walked into the White House. He wanted to remove Saddam and his regime through military action. This self- proclaimed “War President’s” administration had manipulated the facts and made falsehoods to build a case for his war. Many innocent American and Middle Eastern lives were taken.
Machiavelli would have been proud and would have felt Bush used the cunning of the fox. He said that it was necessary to know how to disguise the nature of the beast and to be a great hypocrite and a liar and men are so simpleminded and so controlled by their present necessities that one who deceives will always find another who will allow himself to be deceived (Machiavelli, page 46). Bush was a very deceiptful fox.
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