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FROM THE
May 6, 2004
COVER
STORY | IN THE NEWS | THE HUM | CALENDAR
Dad
was right
by KEITH EASTHOUSE
On Feb. 24, 1991, after six
weeks of intense bombardment from the air, directed at targets
inside Iraq and at Iraqi positions in Kuwait, President Bush
ordered a ground attack aimed at driving Saddam Hussein from
the country he had invaded the previous August. Four days later,
with Iraqi forces either decimated or in full retreat, the president
found himself at a Rubicon. The path to Baghdad lay open, the
prospect of smashing Hussein's brutal regime once and for all
was within easy reach. All the president had to do was give the
word.
Though thin-skinned like his
son, the first President Bush had a quality the current occupant
of the White House lacks: Cool detachment. While that may have
reduced his popular appeal, in this crisis it served him well,
for it enabled him to ask a key question: Sure, I can beat Saddam,
but what am I going to do then? He had told his countrymen that
the purpose of the war was to push Hussein out of Kuwait, and
he wasn't about to change that purpose now. His many years of
experience -- as president, as Ronald Reagan's vice-president,
as head of the Central Intelligence Agency -- all told him that
Iraq was a trap. He ordered a cease-fire, and just like that,
the Gulf War was history.
On Sept. 12, 2001, with the
World Trade Center towers reduced to smoking rubble, with the
Pentagon damaged, with a field in Pittsburgh scarred by airplane
and body parts, the second President Bush saw in the catastrophe
an opportunity. Though all the signs pointed toward Osama bin
Laden and his Al Qaeda terrorist network as the culprits, the
president, we now know, asked his advisers a question: Was Saddam
Hussein involved?
The question must have seemed
wildly off-base. Saddam, after all, was a secular ruler while
Osama bin Laden was an Islamic fundamentalist. They had nothing
in common besides a hatred of the United States, and were likely
indifferent to one another if not outright enemies. Moreover,
they didn't need each other: Bin Laden's focus was international
terrorism, Hussein's, since his failed Kuwaiti adventure, was
domestic repression.
But the question makes sense
if you believe that one of the reasons -- perhaps the main reason
-- George W. Bush sought the White House was to restore family
honor by doing what he thought his dad should have done in 1991:
Bring Hussein down. He would soon learn -- he may have been told
as soon as he asked the question -- that it was extremely unlikely
Hussein was involved. But it probably didn't take him long to
realize that that didn't matter much. The shock of Sept. 11 had
so changed the domestic political landscape that the hurdle he
needed to clear to get the American people behind taking Saddam's
regime out was relatively low. All he needed was an excuse. He
would soon find one in weapons of mass destruction.
That they have yet to be found
hasn't hurt Bush much -- Saddam was a villain whether he had
WMDs or not. But the American people like to back a winner, and
that's why support for the president on Iraq is finally beginning
to slip. The very thing that Sept. 11 banished, the very thing
that stayed his father's hand in February 1991 -- the specter
of another Vietnam -- is now returning as the situation in Iraq
deteriorates. The somber sight of soldiers' flag-draped coffins,
televised images of terrorized civilians, even a My Lai of sorts
in the recent revelations about abuse of Iraqi POWs -- they all
threaten to undo the war's justification.
Things may turn around. Or things
may get worse. But even if the situation in Iraq improves, even
if this country recovers from the damage done to its moral authority
abroad, there's the gut-level sense that somehow, some way, a
price is going to be paid on American soil -- either through
another terrorist attack, or perhaps a terrorist-backed assassination
attempt.
Of course, we were hated in
the Middle East long before George W. Bush became president.
But it's becoming harder to make the case that his unprovoked
invasion of Iraq and the bloody insurgency it has spawned have
made the American people safer. And it's becoming clearer that
Bush didn't give a lot of thought to the invasion's aftermath.
He was too intent on fixing Dad's screw-up for that.
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