Sullivan's travels

Openly gay pundit Andrew Sullivan maps his transformation from Bush disciple to harsh critic of the administration.

By Alex Koppelman

Read more: Politics, News, Iraq, Andrew Sullivan, Alex Koppelman

Oct. 16, 2006 | Once a fervent supporter of George W. Bush and the "war on terror," Andrew Sullivan, over the past several years, has been one of the president's most passionate detractors. Sullivan, an openly gay Republican, focuses his ire on the debacle in Iraq and the Bush administration's hostility to gay rights, what he sees as a wholesale betrayal of conservatism.

Formerly a New Republic editor, and Salon columnist, Sullivan now writes a popular blog for Time magazine. In his new book, "The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It, How to Get It Back," Sullivan writes, "If conservatism had begun as a political philosophy designed to check power, to ensure individual liberty, to protect individuals from lawless government authority, it ended in a dark room, with a defenseless detainee strapped to a board, terrified beyond most of our imagining."

Sullivan recently spoke with Salon about the Mark Foley sex scandal, the betrayal of conservatives, and his checkered past of backing Bush and the Iraq war.

You write that "even to recognize the existence of gay citizens was too much for the fundamentalists." Now that the Foley scandal has forced them to recognize openly not just that gay citizens exist, but that they're at high levels of the Republican Party, how does that affect the Republicans?

Well, there have always been gays at high levels in the party. Many of them started before the Republican Party got quite this bad, and I find the temptation to demonize all of them a little much of a broad brush, because I know -- like anybody knows in Washington -- that some of them are very good people, and they've done their best. But I think the time now is fully over when the closet can operate in Republican politics. And second, I think the time is coming when the possibility of openly gay people serving in the Republican Party is becoming impossible.

But again, we see these separate signs. We now have Mark Dyble being sworn in by Condi Rice as the new global AIDS coordinator, with his partner right there, with the families of both men there, and Condi Rice referring to Dyble's partner's mother as his "mother-in-law," and Laura Bush standing between them. Now, at what point can a party that does that also send out fliers in the Bible Belt saying that gay people are trying to ban the Bible and force heterosexuals into gay marriage? There's such a discrepancy between the closeted tolerance of the elite and the naked bigotry of the base that this Foley affair has sort of indirectly outed, that I really think it's becoming an untenable situation for a lot of people in the party.

There are some people who already quit, like Jeff Trandahl a year ago, and other openly gay Republicans I know have quit the administration. As you know, the Log Cabin Republicans did not endorse Bush. It's a horrible end, really, to this attempt to make it work -- and maybe the future will lead to better things -- but right now I don't know how you can be an openly gay person and work for this administration and look at yourself in the mirror every morning.

A fair amount of your book is about Iraq. You continue to blame the Bush administration, and Bush's ideology, for the failures there. Do you believe if we had a different administration in power that the war would have been the right thing to do?

You're asking me a question that obviously can't have an answer, because we can't rerun history and look at it the other way. But I know this: This question that you put your finger on is going to be the critical historical debate. Was this adventure so conceptually flawed that there was no way it could win, or was it so fantastically screwed up in its execution that it was a good idea just wrecked?

I don't want to be wishy-washy about this. I certainly think that the way Rumsfeld and Cheney ran it made it impossible for it to succeed, because they refuse to provide the manpower and resources for what needed to be serious nation-building. I think they essentially sabotaged the war out of their own arrogance, because they'd rather lose a war than concede a point. That's the pettiness of these people.

I don't know why, by the way, the angriest people in this country are not those who opposed the war but those of us who supported it. I mean, we were completely deceived. It never occurred to me that they would not send enough troops to keep the peace or establish order, or, when presented with the evidence that they needed to do so, would simply refuse to entertain the argument. It's still incredible to me. So I'm afraid my answer to you is that I can't know. I think that it's something I'm still struggling with in that sense. I do believe that the case many of us made for the Iraq war -- those of us who didn't have access to inside intelligence -- was made in good faith, based on what we were told. Obviously, I feel differently now. And I feel a deep sense of responsibility for not being more skeptical about the Bush people and what they were telling us before the war. I think I was way too gullible. I wanted, in a time of war, to give the president every benefit of the doubt. I was dumb to do so. And I certainly also feel, as a supporter of the war, extreme anguish about the lives that are currently being lost in that country by innocent people, as well as the horrible betrayal of American values.

All I can do -- part of what this book is about -- it was really prompted partly by my own frustration at the Republican Party, but it was also directed at a criticism of my own certainty before the war. It really shook me, that I had bought hook, line and sinker this entire certain ideology. I realized if I had stuck to my principles I would have been more skeptical, and I regret that. I think, and the only way I can explain that, and it's not excusing it, is the shock of 9/11 and the fear of the unknown. If you look back, it's easy to say that we shouldn't have been afraid of a possible attack with WMDs, but that distorted my judgment. This book is an attempt to atone for that and to ask the deeper questions about why I made the wrong judgment.

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