Bush and Camus

Albert Camus is my favorite author, and one of my two favorite philsophers (JS Mill being the other). So you can imagine my infuriation when, in an attempt to appear sophisticated, our president decided to pretend to read The Stranger. Presidential reading lists are a joke, of course, and I doubt that Bush would want to read a book with atheist undertones, in any case. But what infuriates me more than Bush himself is Andy Sullivan's response to all this:

Memo to Colbert: the threat is real. Even, er, existential.

(1) Why the hell are you talking to Stephen Colbert all of a sudden? (2) No, the "threat" isn't existential, and you're a severe hypochondriac if you think it is or even will be. (3) That's a totally different meaning of the word existential. And no, it doesn't work as a pun.

Memo to the president: a more appropriate Camus work for you right now might be: "The Myth of Sysiphus." Think Iraq.

Let me try to parse this: does Sully think that rebuilding Iraq is like Sisyphus' task of rolling a boulder up a hill? Funny; his references to Iraq as "winnable" seem to say the exact opposite. And in any case, the point of The Myth of Sisphus is that Sisyphus' task, and others like it, are the only reasonable response to an absurd world, as a rebellion against said absurdity. If Sully thinks we should stay in Iraq to protest the absurdity of the world, then that's pretty messed up.
The Camus book that Bush should be reading is The Rebel. Its thesis is that utopian ideologies (early French republicanism, Communism, maybe even neoconservatism) provide limitless justification for atrocities of the worst kind, and thus are to be avoided at all cost. The Jacobins presided over the Reign of Terror in pursuit of a utopian republic. The Bolsheviks collectivized agriculture and starved the Ukrainians in pursuit of a utopian socialist state. And Bush is presiding over the botched occupation of Iraq in pursuit of a utopian liberal democratic order in the Middle East. This is exactly what Camus warned against.