ABSTRACT
Greek tragedy offers a useful framework for analyzing the Bush administration's failure in Iraq. It focuses our attention on the hubris of the powerful, and the bad judgment and risk-taking it spawns. Tragedy also emphasizes the ways in which well-intentioned initiatives often produce outcomes diametrically opposed to those that were envisaged. The tragic poets attribute such outcomes to competing, and often irreconcilable, ethical perspectives, and to the inherent complexity of social relations, which makes it impossible to foresee with confidence the implications of one's behavior. Sophocles and Thucydides — who wrote history, but from a tragic perspective — warn that efforts to use power and knowledge to ward off disaster often make it more likely. 1 George Bush has neither the intelligence nor political skills of Oedipus or Pericles. But a man of limited ability with great power, readily manipulated by more clever advisors, can set in motion a tragedy of Greek proportions.
