United States Vice-President Dick Cheney’s combative speech advocating a pre-emptive strike against Iraq was intended to settle the most serious rift in US public life right now, a conflict simmering not only within the Republican Party, but inside the Bush dynasty itself.
One by one, Cheney refuted objections to an invasion raised in public by a succession of senior figures who represent the first president George Bush’s foreign policy establishment — former secretaries of state James Baker and Lawrence Eagleburger and former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft.
While Scowcroft warned that a war in Iraq would wreck the coalition against terror and possibly trigger an ”Armageddon” in the Middle East, and Baker urged Washington to seek another United Nations resolution demanding intrusive weapons inspections, Cheney countered that ”the risks of inaction are far greater than the risks of action” and argued that the return of UN inspectors would be useless.
It appears to be a family row conducted by proxy. Baker and Scowcroft both hold foreign policy views that have historically been near identical to those of Bush Snr. In fact Bush Snr and Scowcroft co-wrote a memoir on their shared vision of the post-Cold War world.
Cheney rejected the two old consiglieris’ appeals for caution and UN consultations out of hand, and he did so with the White House’s authority.
As Maureen Dowd, a New York Times columnist, tartly observed: ”Who needs a war plan? We need family therapy.”
In broad ideological terms, the second Bush administration is built on a negation of the first that verges on the Oedipal. In Republican circles, the father is remembered for raising taxes after promising not to, while Bush Jnr has made tax cuts the keystone of his domestic policy. And while Bush Snr could scarcely hide his contempt for the party’s conservative right wing, the younger man has made it his job to woo the Christian conservative heartland. Even Bush Jnr’s Texan ”good ol’ boy” twang seems a self-conscious rejection of his father’s New England preppiness.
But the one aspect of the first Bush administration the current president most wants to exorcise is the fact that it served just one term and went down to humiliating defeat at the hands of Bill Clinton, then a little-known governor from Arkansas. As the putative Bush family therapist might point out, the son has to scorn his father’s legacy in order to avenge him.
It is a Shakespearean drama being played out on the world stage. It lies at the heart of the current administration’s fulsome support of the Sharon government in Israel, in sharp contrast to the policy pursued by Bush Snr and Baker, which was to attempt to subjugate Israel policy to what they saw as the US’s broader interests.
So too with Iraq. In the eyes of the elder Bush crowd, the Gulf War was an extraordinary success and a triumph of coalition-building. The radicals now making policy in the White House and the Pentagon portray it principally as a failure, a pitiful loss of nerve that stopped the coalition advance on the Iraqi border and allowed Saddam Hussein to stay in power.
In personnel terms, the distinction between the two Bush administrations is blurred. Secretary of State Colin Powell, Cheney and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice all served under Bush Snr. But the centre of gravity has shifted. Cheney and Rice have renounced the multi- lateralist instincts of Bush Snr. Powell has not and has been left out of the loop. He was not even invited to last week’s meeting of national security aides at the president’s ranch in Texas.
Both in terms of staff and ideas, the second Bush administration has embraced the foreign policy legacy of Ronald Reagan that the first Bush White House cold-shouldered. Reagan-era Cold War warriors such as Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith and Richard Perle, all outsiders in the court of Bush Snr, now have influence in the Pentagon, which in turn is the most powerful department in the administration.
”What happened is that under Bush [Jnr], the Reaganauts came back. They’re not only in the ascendancy, they’re in control,” said Ivo Daalder, a foreign policy expert at the Brookings Institution. ”The real debate is not between Bush [Snr] and Bush [Jnr] but between Bush [Snr] and Reagan.”
Daalder questions to what extent the younger Bush was aware he was making a clear break with his father when he brought these people into his administration. ”It’s not clear that the man knows what he was buying,” he said.
Robert Beisner, a history professor at American University, agrees that the current president appears less in control of the foreign policy debate than Bush Snr. ”Bush [Snr] knew a lot more and knew what he wanted,” he said.
Throughout the election campaign Bush Jnr said he would compensate for his lack of foreign policy experience by surrounding himself with trusted old hands. Republican loyalists also comforted themselves with the thought that the president’s father and his faithful counsels would be there to whisper guidance in his son’s ear.
But now the House of Bush is divided and the courtiers are squabbling, while the hapless president in the middle has very little to say. — (c) Guardian Newspapers 2002