Bush vs. Bush family fight? Part I
Bush vs. Bush
The coming Iraq war represents the president's ultimate rebellion against his father.
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By Jake Tapper
March 11, 2003 | In his second presidential debate with Vice President Al Gore, on Oct. 11, 2000, Gov. George W. Bush faulted the Clinton-Gore team for not working hard enough multilaterally to keep the heat on Saddam Hussein.
"The coalition that was in place isn't as strong as it used to be," Bush said, calling the previous eight years a foreign policy failure. "It's going to be important to rebuild that coalition to keep the pressure on him." The fact that he was the son of the man who had built that coalition, the 41st president, George H.W. Bush, gave the Texas governor's argument added political credibility.
His statement was representative of Bush's approach to Iraq. Asked about his policy toward the rogue nation in a Dec. 2, 1999, Republican presidential debate in Manchester, N.H., Bush said simply: "I'd make darn sure that [Saddam Hussein] lived up to the agreements that he signed back in the early '90s," Bush said. "And if I found -- in any way, shape or form -- that he was developing weapons of mass destruction, I'd take 'em out."
Moderator Brit Hume of Fox News sought a clarification of the Texan's twangy pronunciation. "Take him out?" Hume asked.
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No, Bush explained; "take them out," as in, take out the "weapons of mass destruction," he said.
But that was three-plus years ago, and now President Bush has a completely different take on things. His father's views on Iraq, which once seemed to guide his own approach, have been drowned out by a chorus from a rival school of foreign policy. No longer does Bush say that the U.S. can't be "arrogant," that we "will not be able unilaterally to keep the peace," that the country needs to "be humble partners in coalitions," as he did to the Washington Post in December 1999. A month later, on ABC's "This Week," he talked about the need "to get the inspectors back into Iraq" and pushed the need for the U.S. to lead internationally, multilaterally. "One of the tests of a leader is to convince your allies what's right and what's wrong," Bush said. "And that's what a leader does. A leader builds up alliances."
That was then. Now the test of a leader seems to be his courage to go it alone. And no longer is mere disarmament -- "take them out" -- his demand. He now insists upon regime change: to "take him out."
What a difference one pronoun can make. The debate over whether we need to get "them" or "him" separates warring factions of Republican foreign policy makers, and it represents George W. Bush's break from the faction of his father. The elder Bush believed in multilateralism and international cooperation and containment. He spent generations fending off the more unilateral, preemptive beliefs of those who now run his son's foreign policy. An ambassador to the United Nations, he believed strongly in that body's importance.
The son, on the other hand, has sent mixed signals, and the result has been disastrous. Monday brought some of the worst news on the U.S. diplomatic front in years. The U.S. and United Kingdom postponed their plan to call for a vote on a second Iraq resolution at the United Nations Security Council because France and Russia threatened vetoes, and six Security Council members remained against the measure. Needing nine votes, the U.S. and U.K. have only two others: Spain and, ahem, Bulgaria. While the Bush administration is still pursuing votes, it is doing so poorly and has been for quite some time -- at least since last September, when Bush, largely because of his father's lobbying, agreed to go to the U.N. while making it clear that he didn't think he needed to.
Even as Bush did his father's bidding at the U.N., he did it with his own signature style. It is difficult to picture the former president Bush asking, as his son did in New York on Sept. 12, 2002, "Will the United Nations serve the purpose of its founding, or will it be irrelevant?" It is nearly impossible to imagine the elder Bush saying aloud, as his son did last Thursday, that "when it comes to our security, if we need to act, we will act, and we really don't need United Nations approval to do so."
But if Bush today sounds very little like his father, the ghost of his father's presidency lingers -- and his father remains very much alive. On Feb. 26, the elder Bush was the speaker at Tufts University's esteemed Issam M. Fares Lecture, where he discussed the Iraq situation during his presidency. In doing so, he illustrated that the priorities that mattered to him are, shall we say, a tad less important to his son, including maintaining an international coalition behind a move against a sovereign country.
The speech, combined with the thoughts of conservative foreign policy experts -- as well as interviews with the elder Bush's biographer and historian -- underline stark differences in the two men's worldviews, which can't be accounted for by the simple explanation that shifting events, most notably Sept. 11, have led to a change in policy. Neither the elder Bush nor the White House will comment on conversations between father and son, nor will the Bush administration acknowledge reversals in policy or discuss the influence of individual advisors.
Whether they're over the importance of international coalition building, the wisdom of sending American soldiers to control the inevitable postwar chaos, relations with Israel, or even the peace efforts of the Democrat whose presidency interrupted the Bush family reign, the disagreements between father and son are stark and paint a clear picture of two competing schools of conservative thought, ones that have been scrambling for the upper hand for generations. In any other family, the differences might result in Thanksgiving table arguments. In la famille Bush, however, they're a matter of life and death.
Critics of the pending war slam the president as on a personal crusade -- a "fixation," as Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., said last week, stopping short of comparing the president to the avenging Spanish fencer Inigo Montoya from the film "The Princess Bride." (President Bush didn't help matters by once describing Saddam as "the guy who tried to kill my dad.") And of course the loyal son has defended his father's decision to allow Saddam to remain in power, arguing on Feb. 27 that "the mission in early 1990s was to liberate Kuwait, and the United States achieved that mission." But this isn't about avenging a father. What's increasingly clear is that for the current president, a loving though unruly scion whose high-profile acts of disobedience have been well documented -- from the fraternity pranks and youthful scuffles with the law to a successful battle with the bottle at age 40 -- an Iraq invasion represents the ultimate act of rebellion. It is an intellectual, philosophical and political rejection of his father's way of looking at the world. And it's of more than psychological interest to the rest of us.
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