Bush-41 Finally Speaks on Iraq War
By Ray McGovern
November 08, 2015 "Information
Clearing House" - Media reports on Jon
Meacham’s biography of George H. W. Bush, the 41st President, have
brought me a painful flashback to the deceptive, destructive – yet
at the same time highly instructive – years 2002 and 2003, when his
son George W. Bush, the 43rd President, attacked Iraq.
Reality should trump rhetoric regarding that
godforsaken war – in my view the most unprincipled and consequential
foreign policy blunder in U.S. history. This may be reason enough to
renew focus on those years because, for many Americans, those events
remain cloaked in mystery and misunderstanding.
With his candor about his eldest son, the
91-year-old Bush patriarch also has sounded what may be the death
knell for the moribund campaign of his younger son Jeb to be
president #45. I do not suggest that #41 did that consciously. His
unusually unguarded remarks, though, will lead voters to be chary of
yet another Bush, if only on the “fool me once … fool me twice”
aphorism that Jeb’s big brother had trouble remembering.
Meacham’s Destiny and Power: The American
Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush will not be available to
the hoi polloi until next week. Details already reported
on the critical years of 2002 and 2003, however, permit – I think,
rather, dictate – some preliminary analysis, before the Karl Roves
of this world create still more “new history.”
The clear and present danger of getting sucked
into yet another quagmire or quicksand pool on false pretenses
persists. Thus, it seems fitting and proper to review the lead-up to
the unprovoked “shock and awe” on Iraq proudly launched in March
2003 by #43, egged on by Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and other white-collar thugs.
Despite the propaganda and more tangible signs of
incipient war in Iraq, my former intelligence analyst colleagues and
I – with considerable professional experience watching other
countries prepare for aggression against others – were finding it
difficult to believe that the United States of America would be
doing precisely that.
Still harder was it to digest the notion that
Washington would do so, absent credible evidence of any immediate
threat and would “fix” intelligence to “justify” it. But that,
sadly, is what happened. On March 19, 2003, U.S. “shock and awe” lit
the sky over Baghdad.
A Dozen Years Later
That was more than 12 ½ years ago. That not one
of the white-collar crooks responsible for the war and ensuing chaos
has been held accountable is an indelible blot not only on our
country, but also on international law and custom. After all, the
U.S./U.K. attack on Iraq fits snugly the definition given to a “war
of aggression” as defined by the post-World War II Nuremberg
Tribunal. Nuremberg labeled such a war “the supreme international
crime, differing from other war crimes only in that it contains
within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”
And the evil continued to accumulate: torture,
kidnapping, black prisons, extrajudicial killing, massive invasions
of privacy, and even the annulment of such basic human rights as the
great writ of habeas corpus that was wrested from England’s
King John 800 years ago. And, in the wake of this criminality,
bedlam now reigns across large swaths of the Middle East driving
millions of refugees into neighboring countries and Europe.
That the U.S. and U.K. leaders who launched the
Iraq war have so far escaped apprehension and prosecution might be
seen as a sad example of “victor’s justice.” But there are no
victors, only victims. The reality that President George W. Bush and
his co-conspirators remain unpunished makes a mockery of the
commitment to the transcendent importance of evenhanded justice as
expressed on Aug. 12, 1945, by Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson,
the chief U.S. representative at Nuremberg:
“We must make clear to the Germans that the wrong
for which their fallen leaders are on trial is not that they lost
the war, but that they started it.”
Maybe it is partly because I know the elder Bush
personally, but it does strike me that, since we are all human, some
degree of empathy might be in order. I simply cannot imagine what it
must be like to be a former President with a son, also a former
President, undeniably responsible for such trespass on law – for
such widespread killing, injury and abject misery.
It is something of a stretch, but I have tried to
put myself into the shoes of the elder Bush. In them I find myself
insecure and struggling – like Jacob – before his dream about
wrestling with God. The story in Genesis shows Jacob full
of anxiety, despite God’s promise that God would bless his dynasty.
He cannot overcome his fear and is powerless to control his fate.
Jacob is aware that he is at a pivotal juncture
but he is physically spent. Alone in the wilderness facing death, he
collapses into a deep sleep, only to find himself wrestling all
night with God. At daybreak he awakes with an injured hip; he is
disabled but his life is spared. He had come to grips with God and,
in the end, receives God’s blessing of peace.
What author Meacham has written suggests to me the
possibility that the sins of the son are being visited on the
father, to reverse one familiar Biblical expression.
In these circumstances, the tendency to require
that thugs like Cheney and Rumsfeld bear their share of the blame
seems quite human. And, to his credit, Bush-41 concedes “the buck
stops” at the President. But I sense him thinking – correctly, in my
view – that without those two “iron-ass” advisers, things would have
been quite different. The son might even have paid more heed to the
experienced cautions of the father and his associates.
Sins of Omission
As the senior Bush knows, sins of omission can be
as consequential as those of commission. Judging from what he is
quoted as saying in Meacham’s book, it appears he decided to make a
(sort-of) clean breast of things – okay, call it a Watergate-style
“modified, limited hangout,” if you will. But, clearly, Bush has to
be painfully aware that he was one of only a handful of people who
might have been able to stop the chaos and carnage, had he spoken
out publicly in real time.
He does hedge, saying for example that he still
believes the attack on Iraq was the right thing to do. But this is a
position he staked out years ago and, especially at 91, it may be
too much to expect of him that he acknowledge the full implications
of what he says elsewhere in the book about the misguided advice of
“hardline” Cheney and “arrogant” Rumsfeld together with where, after
all, the buck does stop.
My take is that Bush-41 has not completed his
wrestle with the truth and with the guilt he may feel for failing to
warn the rest of us what to expect from George, Cheney and Rumsfeld
as he watched it happen. The elder Bush did use surrogates –
including two of his closest and most prominent friends, James
Baker, his secretary of state, and Brent Scowcroft, his national
security adviser, to speak out against the war.
But here the mainstream media was of no help.
Instead of weighing the merits of the strong arguments of Baker,
Scowcroft and other experienced foreign policy professionals made
against attacking Iraq, the media gave inordinate attention to
incessant debates as to whether the seeming surrogates were actually
speaking for the elder Bush.
In effect, the media was demanding what they knew
Bush senior would almost certainly not do, “Speak for yourself,
George H. W. Bush.” He refused to do it; he would not even comment
on the critical views expressed by Baker and Scowcroft on Bush-43’s
plan to attack Iraq.
Sure, it would have been hard, but at the time
Bush senior was only in his late 70s, as he watched his son fall in
with bad companions the dishonesty and foolishness leading up to the
attack on Iraq.
With his current modified, limited hangout –
especially (his richly deserved) criticism of Cheney and Rumsfeld –
Bush the elder may be able to live more comfortably with himself and
to get past what I believe must be his regret now over having made
no public effort to stop the madness back then.
The chronology below includes some of the more
important events and may help inform those who have not had the time
or inclination to follow the play-by-play as Cheney and Rumsfeld
played on the younger Bush’s unabashed preening as “the first war
president of the 21st century.”
Keeping a Watching Brief
The elder Bush knew all too well what was
happening. He also knew what his son George was capable of – not to
mention the inclinations of Cheney, Rumsfeld and other white-collar
criminals. To be brutally candid, it is a little late for the family
patriarch to be telling us all this – while blaming the Iraq debacle
mostly on Cheney and Rumsfeld, quintessentially blameworthy though
they are.
Worst still, if Bush-43 is to be believed, Bush
senior had guilty foreknowledge of the war-crime attack on Iraq.
George W. Bush divulges this in his 2014 Virgil-style paean to his
father, “41: A Portrait of My Father,” in which he arrogates to
himself Aeneas-like filial devotion. (Friends more cynical than me
suggest that 43’s panegyric should be construed as a benign
pre-emptive move to prevent the father from blabbing to his
biographer.)
In any event, Bush-43 includes the following
sentences about informing his father about plans to attack Iraq:
”We both knew that this was a decision that only the president can
make. We did talk about the issue, however. Over Christmas 2002, at
Camp David, I did give Dad an update on our strategy.”
By that time, the die had been cast. Frankly, it
is as painful as it is instructive to review the flow of key events
in the summer and early fall of 2002. But I believe it may be
necessary, not only to outline what Bush senior was watching, but
also to pre-empt the creation of false history. Here are some
selected benchmarks:
July 23, 2002:
Tony Blair and his principal national security advisers are briefed
at 10 Downing Street by MI-6 chief Richard Dearlove, CIA Director
George Tenet’s British counterpart, three days after Dearlove met
with Tenet at CIA Headquarters. A participant in the July 23
briefing prepares minutes of the meeting that same day. They are
eventually leaked and published in the London Times on May
1, 2005.
The minutes quote Dearlove, Foreign Minister Jack
Straw, and Attorney-General Peter Goldsmith. First Dearlove:
“Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove
Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of
terrorism and WMD.” [Translation: Saddam Hussein will be accused of
having weapons of mass destruction that he could give to
terrorists.]
“But the intelligence and facts were being fixed
around the policy. … The Foreign Secretary said the case [for war]
was thin. … The Attorney-General said that the desire for regime
change was not a legal base for military action.”
August 2002:
President George W. Bush spends from August 6 to 31 clearing brush
at his ranch in Crawford, Texas. White House Chief of Staff Andrew
Card sets up a White House Iraq Group (WHIG) to “educate the public”
on the alleged threat from Iraq. The group includes heavy hitters
like political adviser Karl Rove, national security adviser
Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s communications director Karen Hughes, and
two officials from Dick Cheney’s entourage – Irving Lewis “Scooter”
Libby, and Mary Matalin. In his memoir, Cheney notes that both
Matalin and Libby “wore two hats” – serving as assistants to both
Cheney and the President.
August 2002:
With Bush in Crawford, there is trouble brewing for Cheney, Rumsfeld
and others pushing for war on Iraq. Close associates of the elder
Bush and other senior foreign policy mavens begin to speak out
strongly against an attack on Iraq.
Brent Scowcroft leads off the campaign on Aug. 4
at CBS’s Face the Nation. Next up is former Secretary of
State Henry Kissinger with an Aug. 12 Washington Post op-ed
titled “Unilateral Attack Will Set Dangerous Precedent.” On Aug. 15,
Scowcroft publishes an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal
with the non-subtle title: “Don’t Attack Saddam.”
Also on Aug. 15, Lawrence Eagleburger, who served
the elder Bush briefly as secretary of state, tells ABC News that
unless Saddam Hussein “has his hand on a trigger that is for a
weapon of mass destruction, and our intelligence is clear, I don’t
know why we have to do it [attack Iraq] now.”
Then on Aug. 25, in a New York Times
op-ed, Bush-41’s Secretary of State James Baker adduces, in a
lawyerly but compelling way, virtually all the reasons that what
Bush-43, Cheney, Rumsfeld et al. had already decided on regarding
Iraq would bring disaster.
Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Nebraska, also says openly in
August that Secretary of State Colin Powell and his deputy Richard
Armitage had earlier advised President George W. Bush of their
concerns about the risks and complexities of a military strike on
Iraq.
More trouble for hawks like Cheney was brewing in
the House. Republican Majority Leader Dick Armey publicly warned
that an “unprovoked attack” on Iraq would be illegal, adding, “It
would not be consistent with what we have been as a nation or what
we should be as a nation.”
(Armey later told Michael Isikoff, during an
on-the-record interview for Isikoff’s book Hubris, that he
had warned President George W. Bush that war on Iraq might result in
a “quagmire.” He added that, while he found questionable the
intelligence presented to him in support of such a war, he would
give Bush the benefit of the doubt. According to Barton Gellman,
author of Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency, Cheney told
Armey that Saddam Hussein’s family had direct ties to Al Qaeda and
that Saddam was developing miniature nuclear weapons. Armey then
voted for the war, but bitterly complained later that he had been
“bullshitted” by Cheney.)
Stopping the Peace Juggernaut
With the President clearing brush and Andrew Card
proceeding at what must have seemed to Cheney a dilatory pace, given
the mounting opposition to war on Iraq, Cheney seized the bull by
the horns, so to speak. Without a word to Secretary of State Powell
or CIA Director Tenet, and not wanting to interrupt the President’s
vacation, Cheney set the parameters for using “fixed” intelligence
to reverse the alarming efforts toward peace.
With the apparent endorsement of Bush junior, when
the President got back in town on Sept. 1, the juggernaut was
redirected toward war. (One stands in awe of the unchallenged power
Cheney was able to exert – even if it was, technically speaking,
ad referendum the President.)
Cheney chose to include in an Aug. 26 speech to
the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Nashville extreme, unsubstantiated
charges about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq that set the terms
of reference for virtually all that was to follow, including, I
regret to say, the National Intelligence Estimate that my former
colleagues were suborned into “fixing” around the policy.
In his Aug. 26, 2002 speech, Cheney broadly warned
that Saddam Hussein intends to “subject the United States to nuclear
blackmail.” He continued:
“Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam
Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction [and] is amassing them
to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us. …
What he wants is … more time to husband his resources to invest in
his ongoing chemical and biological weapons program, and to gain
possession of nuclear weapons.…
“Deliverable weapons of mass destruction in the
hands of a terror network, or a murderous dictator, or the two
working together constitutes as grave a threat as can be imagined.
The risks of inaction are far greater than the risk of action. … The
Iraqi regime has in fact been very busy enhancing its capabilities
in the field of chemical and biological agents, and they continue to
pursue the nuclear program they began so many years ago.
“Against that background, a person would be right
to question any suggestion that we should just get inspectors back
into Iraq, and then our worries will be over. Saddam has perfected
the game of shoot and retreat, and is very skilled in the art of
denial and deception. A return of inspectors would provide no
assurance whatsoever of his compliance with UN resolutions.”
Colin Powell, George Tenet and others had five
days, before Bush got back in town, to regain their composure after
being blindsided by Cheney – time enough, apparently, to remind
themselves about who it was that really had the President’s ear.
There is no sign that either Powell or Tenet chose to make a federal
case out of it, so to speak. Also choosing to remain silent was
former the CENTCOM commander, Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni, who was
right there at the VFW convention.
Hear No Evil — Speak No Truth
Zinni later said he was shocked to hear Cheney’s
depiction of intelligence (Iraq has WMD and is amassing them to use
against us) that did not square with what he knew. Although Zinni
had retired two years before, his role as consultant had enabled him
to stay up to date on key intelligence findings.
“There was no solid proof that Saddam had WMD. … I
heard a case being made to go to war,” Zinni told “Meet the Press” 3
½ years later.
The question lingers: why did Zinni not go public
when he first heard Cheney lie? After all, he was one of the very
few credible senior officials who might have prevented a war he knew
was unnecessary. A tough, widely respected Marine intimidated by a
Vice President with five draft deferments? It happens. It happened.
Secretary of State Powell was also blindsided, but
there is no sign he summoned the courage to voice any objections
directly to the President about Cheney’s version of the threat from
Iraq and what had to be done about it.
CIA Director Tenet has written that he, too, was
taken completely by surprise by what Cheney said. In his memoir,
Tenet added, “I had the impression that the president wasn’t any
more aware than we were of what his number-two was going to say to
the VFW until he said it.” But Tenet, as noted above, knew only too
well that the intelligence was being “fixed,” because he was in
charge of fixing it.
So for Tenet the surprise was simply one of timing
– that Cheney would go out on so long a limb before Bush got back
from vacation.
From Cheney’s perspective the timing was perfect.
With Bush out of town, it was even easier to avoid messy fights with
what Cheney considered a troublesome, unnecessary bureaucracy (he
had built up his own). And with UK Prime Minister Blair coming to
Camp David six days after Bush got back, it would be cumbersome
enough to fine-tune and coordinate the appropriate talking points
for Bush to use with Blair on Sept. 7.
And so, with the month of August seeing a phalanx
of senior Bush foreign policy advisers and other experts, as well as
key Congressional leaders, speaking out in a troubling way against
the war, an ever decisive Cheney decided he could not abide by the
proverbial maxim that Andrew Card actually let drop publicly in
early September: ”From a marketing point of view, you don’t
introduce new products in August.” Just to be clear, the White House
chief of staff was talking about marketing war.
By the time George W. Bush got back to the Oval
Office, the White House Iraq Group (WHIG) had gotten its
instructions from Cheney on the strategy with which to approach Tony
Blair to keep him harnessed onto the commander’s Jeep for war – with
particular attention to the joint U.S.-U.K. “marketing” campaign to
be launched, big time, the day after the Bush and Blair met at Camp
David.
The media did a little warm-up, with the BBC
reporting that President Bush had shared with Prime Minister Blair
satellite photographs released by a UN agency that allegedly showed
clear evidence that Iraq was developing weapons of mass
destruction. “I don’t know what more evidence we need,” said Mr.
Bush. (There were no such photos.)
On Sunday, Sept. 8, came the opening salvo of the
marketing campaign – a major propaganda blitz with all hands on
deck. The WHIG had been doing its homework and was working with very
accommodating media. Cheney, Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, Colin
Powell and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Richard Meyers fanned out
to the talk shows right after Bush gave Blair the word at Camp
David.
The hot topic was new information, apparently made
available by the administration to the New York Times a day
or two before, concerning “aluminum tubes,” sought by Iraq,
supposedly for use in refining uranium for a nuclear weapon.
Rice
claimed that the tubes were “really are only suited to —
high-quality aluminum tools that are only really suited for nuclear
weapons programs, centrifuge programs.” Rice acknowledged that
“there will always be some uncertainty” in determining how close
Iraq may be to obtaining a nuclear weapon but warned, “We don’t want
the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” (It turned out the tubes
were actually for artillery known to be in Iraq’s inventory.)
Upon her return to the White House from CNN, she
must have been awarded WHIG’s first Oscar. Cheney should have been
runner-up for his Meet the Press performance accusing
Saddam Hussein of moving aggressively to develop nuclear weapons to
add to his stockpile of chemical and biological arms. The Vice
President actually let slip the White House strategy, expressing
hope that Congress would vote for war before it recessed in October
(mid-term elections coming the following month).
With members fearing accusations of “softness” if
they resisted President Bush’s authorization to use force, Congress
voted for war. The war was on.
Also, on Sunday, Sept. 8, 2002, Rumsfeld on
Face the Nation warned that inspections in Iraq would have to
be intrusive enough to ensure that Saddam Hussein is disarmed.
Powell told Fox News that the Bush administration believes that the
best way to disarm Iraq “is with a regime change.” And Joint Chiefs
of Staff Chairman Myers on ABC’s This Week added, “We have
the forces, we have the readiness. U.S. armed forces will prevail,
if called upon to strike Iraq.”
Six Months Later
A half-year later on Feb. 15, 2003, as the elder
Bush watched 30 million demonstrators in 800 cities around the world
marching against the war for which Bush-43 was so keen, I suspect
there may have been a tinge of regret at having pulled strings to
ensure young George would not have to experience war by serving in
Vietnam.
Unlike his father, George W. had not the foggiest
notion of what war is like, and Bush-41 can be thought to have been
painfully aware of that. It may have occurred to him to belatedly
apply some tough-love to 43 or to even go public in a last-ditch
effort to prevent the coming catastrophe. He probably knew that it
was unrealistic to expect that the likes of Scowcroft and Baker
could influence 43 to change course.
But George H. W. Bush continued to say and do
nothing, waiting until now – more than a dozen years after the
catastrophic Iraq War was launched – to voice his objections. An
unhappy ending for the patriarch of a would-be dynasty.
Ray McGovern
works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church
of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He worked for George H. W.
Bush when he was director of the CIA and again during the first
Reagan administration when he briefed him mornings, one-on-one, with
the President’s Daily Brief.
