Elder Bush Questions whether Iraq has WMD's: Part II
The differences between father and son were on rare display at Tufts two weeks ago. The speech offered a unique window into the former president's own Iraq policy, as well as the ways it diverged -- and still diverges -- from the current president's. Bush the elder was asked to address "the difference between your policy of coalition building and respect for the United Nations, and that of the current administration," which some found "striking." Significantly, the former president essentially refused to answer whether or not he was "troubled by the willingness of the U.S. to act unilaterally without broad-based international support." No one expected Bush to denounce his son, but his support sounded a little weaker than some Bush watchers expected.
George H.W. Bush insisted that he and his son agree that "it would be much better to act with as much international support as possible." But remarkably, he seemed less than solidly supportive of the U.S.'s goals in attacking Iraq, as well as his son's assertion that Saddam has weapons of mass destruction. He spoke far more forcefully when defending his own decisions 12 years ago than in explaining his son's moves today.
"The difference between '91 and today is that the objective was clearer, in a way, back when I was president," the elder Bush said, because Iraqi soldiers had invaded Kuwait, committed atrocities against the Kuwaiti people, and seemed poised to attack Saudi Arabia. "Today it's less clear." While it's indisputable that Saddam Hussein has violated myriad U.N. resolutions, Bush said, "the question is, how much does he have in a way of weapons of mass destruction? That could be debated."
The former president acknowledged the peril of living in a post-9/11 world. "Now, I'm not saying that this is a big conspiracy between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, but the United States must do what it can to protect itself and its friends against the use of weapons of mass destruction."
It's worth looking at the way even those restrained comments stand in marked contrast to his son's view of Iraq. The current president has affirmed repeatedly that Hussein has myriad weapons of mass destruction, and insists it's not even an item for debate. During an Oct. 7, 2002, speech at the Cincinnati Museum Center, George W. Bush said unequivocally that Iraq "possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons. It is seeking nuclear weapons." During his Thursday night press conference, President Bush said that Hussein continues to manufacture missiles, "hide biological and chemical agents," and otherwise "harbor weapons of mass murder and terror."
Moreover, though the elder Bush somewhat flippantly said he wasn't "saying that this is a big conspiracy between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein," a big conspiracy is pretty much what his son has been charging. Last Thursday, he charged Saddam with having "trained and financed … al-Qaida and other terrorist organizations." In October he said that "Iraq and al-Qaida have had high-level contacts that go back a decade" and that "Iraq has trained al-Qaida members in bomb making and poisons and deadly gases." At the U.N. he mentioned Abu Musab "Al Zarqawi, who was in charge of the poison network … who was wounded in Afghanistan, received aid in Baghdad, ordered the killing of a U.S. citizen, USAID employee."
At Tufts, the elder Bush also passed up the opportunity to take the politically easy way out and say that with hindsight, he wishes he'd taken Saddam out when he had the chance. Even his former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger has said, post-9/11, that "while I thoroughly understand and totally supported President Bush's decision not to pursue Saddam personally, I am now prepared to admit that it was probably a mistake." But the former president is not prepared to make any such admission. "The mission was not to invade Iraq," he said at Tufts. "It wasn't to kill Saddam Hussein. It wasn't to free the Kurds in the north, or the Shiites in the south. The mission was to end the aggression." Once it was over, the U.S. withdrew from Kuwait, and thus "we kept our word to the United Nations, and to our coalition partners."
And finally, the elder Bush continued to emphasize the way he valued the coalition he had assembled to confront Iraq. If he'd told Norman Schwarzkopf to bring him Saddam's head, "the coalition would have instantly shattered," the former president recalled. "And the political capital that we had gained as a result of our principled restraint to jumpstart the peace process would have been lost." Coalition support for further international maneuvers would have been lost, he said, and "we would have lost all support from our coalition, with the possible exception of England." No one in the audience was rude enough to mention that his son has appeared to choose exactly that path, essentially standing alone with the U.K.
To gung-ho anti-Saddam neo-cons, of course, the elder Bush's Tufts speech was a reminder of everything that was wrong with his presidency. For those delighted with this President Bush's "moral clarity" and his post-9/11 preemptive doctrine, the spirit of the previous Bush lingers like the cheap perfume of a disappointing date. It's the stench of failure.
By not going into Baghdad to depose Saddam Hussein after the quick rout of the Iraqi army in February 1991, they think, the former president essentially left the world just as dangerous. Thus, his son is doing what needs to be done because his father was a fey anachronism with skewed priorities, a president who put too much stock in discredited ideals. The current deputy secretary of defense, Paul Wolfowitz, served under the elder Bush as undersecretary of defense for policy and is known for disapproving of the decision to allow Saddam to remain in power, what fellow neo-con Frank Gaffney Jr. -- President Reagan's assistant secretary of defense for international security policy --has called "a terrible mistake."
"It was a mistake of historic proportions," seconds Dr. Richard Pipes, a former national security advisor to Reagan. "The older Bush was always very hesitant about doing anything; he was indecisive and constantly vacillating. This one seems much more decisive," Pipes says, adding that he is glad it's the junior Bush in charge in this post-Sept. 11 world.
Danielle Pletka, a scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute and a GOP staffer on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during the 1990s, wants to avoid bashing the elder Bush, arguing that some of the difference between the two presidents is directly attributable to Sept. 11. "Bush's father lived in a different world than this president. The kinds of solutions that may have seemed attractive in 1990 or 1991 are no longer feasible, and Bush 43 understands that."
Such as what? "Worshipping at the foot of the god multilateralism," Pletka says, with a sneer in her voice. Like Pipes, she has clear disdain for what she says she saw during the Clinton administration, which placed "multilateralism as the goal above achievement of some foreign policy goal important to the United States." She sums up what could become Bush 43's foreign policy motto: "If it's important enough to do with others, it's important enough to do alone."
By contrast, admirers of Bush 41 think his son's approach endangers America. "The current administration has so much that it could learn from the administration of the first President Bush," says Cazenovia College history professor John Robert Greene, who has written "The Presidency of George Bush," the first scholarly text about the previous Bush administration. "It has mishandled the coalition building. It has mishandled it just as the first Bush administration was masterful at it."
"George Herbert Walker Bush would have finessed the diplomacy with the United Nations much better," agrees Herbert S. Parmet, a former professor at the City University of New York and the author of "George Bush: The Life of a Lone Star Yankee," the first complete biography of the 41st president. "There is no question how much more sophisticated he was in his approach to foreign policy than is his son."
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