Thanksgiving with Bush, Cheney and war in Iraq

When I first saw Stephen Graubard's Mr. Bush's War: Adventures in the Politics of Illusion, I thought, "Oh, another book about Bush and the Iraq War". But actually, it was published in 1991 and is about Old Man Bush's Gulf War in 1992. Not only the title but the text as well provides a strong reminder that the temptation to contrast the supposedly less ideological, more pragmatic Reagan and Old Man Bush administrations to the radical and dogmatic Cheney-Bush administration can be very misleading. In fact, there are heavy continuities from the Iran-Contra affair during St. Reagan's administration to the Gulf War of Old Man Bush's to the overall disaster we are experiencing today.

Graubard is one of the leading historians of the American Presidency. So it's no surprise that he focuses on how events are seen from the perspective of the incumbent Presidents. But what very few of us knew in 1992, probably including Graubard, is what a potent and poisonous influence Dick Cheney would prove to be. Knowing what we know now, it's hard not to wonder if the Dark Lord's influence was underestimated in the past, as well.

Then-Congressman Cheney was the ranking minority member of the Joint Congressional Committee that investigated the Iran-Contra affair. His doctrine of the "unitary Executive" was first articulated publicly in the minority report on Iran-Contra, much of which was written by David Addington, now the Dark Lord's chief of staff.

Cheney was Secretary of Defense during the Gulf War of 1991 and during the buildup to it. As SecDef, Cheney stayed out of the limelight. Unlike his mentor Rummy during the Iraq War, SecDef Cheney let Generals Norman Schwarzkopf and Colin Powell be the stars of Pentagon press conferences on the war. Cheney has always preferred to operate on "the dark side".

One of the reasons Old Man Bush and his SecDef gave for the urgency of engaging Iraq militarily after their seizure of Kuwait was that Iraq was massing troops near the Saudi Arabian border. It was widely accepted in those days, even by the most "dovish" Democrats, that the US (for better or worse) had a national interest in the survival of the Saudi monarchy because of our dependence on Saudi oil. In those days before the Internet had become a mass product, the St. Petersburg Times down in Florida purchased photos taken at two different times from a commercial satellite and neither showed any sign of the alleged Iraqi buildup near the Saudi border. They published a story on it, but the Establishment media was already slavering over the profits to be had from jingoistic coverage. So the dissenting story didn't get much national attention. SecDef Cheney refused to release intelligence photos on which his claims were based. Last I heard, they had never been released. And I'm guessing never will be, if the Dark Lord has his way.

Graubard does discuss one incident in a way that focuses on the dark side of the SecDef, which we now know so well. In September, 1990, the chief of the Air Force, Gen. Michael Dugan, stated publicly that it would be a good idea to try to decapitate the Iraqi regime by targeting Saddam Hussein for pinpoint air strikes. SecDef Cheney fired him. The general assumption was that Cheney had done so because what Dugan suggested sounded like assassination of a head of state, which was against US policy and international law.

Today, just stating the assumption is enough to see how ridiculous an idea it is. It's always possible that Old Man Bush ordered Cheney to fire him. But we know today that the Dark Lord doesn't give a flying [Cheney] for American or international law. It's inconceivable to me that Cheney would have fired him for that reason.

Graubard suggests a more consistent explanation. Dugan's real sin, he thought, was that in his statement, Dugan said that the Iraqi Air Force "has very limited capability" and that its army was "incompetent". For reasons, I discuss below, this was seriously outside the bounds of the Bush-Cheney Party line on the situation facing the US in the Gulf. So Cheney fired him. Graubard's explanation rings true. Cheney has no compunction against breaking the law. But for violating the Party line in public, sure, Cheney would fire a general. He would even out an undercover CIA agent for that.

The Party line there had to do with the potential difficulty of the war. For political reasons, Old Man Bush and his administration preferred that the general public think that the Iraqi armed forces were ferocious, and that the upcoming war against them could be long and costly. Graubard argues that they knew very well that expelling Iraqi forces from Kuwait could be done relatively quickly and easily. But Old Man Bush wanted it to look like he was a far-seeing Churchill, bravely undertaking a huge military risk because of his determination to never let Saddam Hitler get away with aggression, or allow a timid-hearted West to appease him.

The lessons of St. Reagan

Graubard argues that the Reagan and Bush administrations suffered from a real lack of political sophistication in foreign affairs. This not only contradicts the Republican adulation of St. Reagan. It also violates the enduring conventional wisdom that Old Man Bush and his staunch Secretary of State and Bush family consigliere James Baker were skilled operators in foreign policy.

He sees Old Man Bush as copying heavily the lessons he learned from St. Reagan, including Reagan's faults. Reagan and his advisers were largely clueless about the changes that the Soviet Union was undergoing during the Gorbachev era. But his focus was above all on the US-Soviet relationship, because the core importance of that relationship was a central assumption of Cold War diplomacy. Obviously, there were some good reasons for that. But one of the implications was that St. Reagan and his administration paid even less attention to what was going in the rest of the world and so remained clueless about a lot of what they were doing, not least in the Middle East.

Graubard certainly understands the Iran-Contra affair for the criminal and un-Constitutional operation is was. But he mainly focuses on it as a prime example of the complete disarray of Reagan's Middle East policies. Iran was presumed to be a terrible menace because of the experiences of the 1979 Revolution and the subsequent hostage crisis. His administration backed Saddam's Iraq in the Iran-Iraq War with little actual understanding of the issues involved and the implications of such active US involvement. (Oddly, though he gives a big emphasis to the fact that the US backed Iraq during that war, he doesn't even mention that Reagan's administration briefly entered the war as an active naval belligerent on Iraq's side.)

But Reagan's own attention was particularly focused on new hostage situations in the Middle East. The newly-formed Hizbullah in Lebanon had taken some American hostages. Arms-for-hostages swaps were the core of the US-Iranian arrangement in the Iran-Contra affair. In those days, Iran did have a greater influence on Lebanese Hizbullah than it is likely to have today, though they are still closely allied.

But Reagan was good at political theater. I'm not one to mock acting as a background for the American Presidency, because communicating effectively through the mass media is a vitally necessary skill for the President. And, as Graubard explains, Reagan realized that there was real political advantage to be found in small wars that could be done for little visible cost to Americans. So he intervened to quash the devilish Marxist menace from mighty Grenada, populartion circa 30,000 at the time. He bombed Libya, which was also considered an Islamic bogeyman country at the time. He backed Iraq against Iran (and Iran against Iraq in the arms-for-hostages swap), he supported the freedom fighters (aka, murderous terrorists) known as the Contras in Nicaragua, and provided substantial support to the brave mujahadeen (aka, Muslim terrorists) in Afghanistan against the Evil Empire (the USSR). Most of those proved popular, though Nicaragua was an exception. Amazingly enough, in those days, which really weren't that long ago, Congress was actually willing to challenge the President on an important foreign policy issue. Congress even prohibited aid to the Contras. Though some Republicans thought Reagan had the power to disregard that law, like Congressman Dick Cheney. (Funny how that name keeps popping up.)

Old Man Bush, the student of St. Reagan

Old Man Bush was much impressed with the notion that the President could rally the country around a foreign war. So when opportunity presented itself, he jumped at it. (Did I mention that Dick Cheney was his SecDef?) First, in an intervention with only the thinnest of legal justifications, he sent troops into Panama to capture the Panamanian head of state, Gen. Manuel Noriega, which he did successfully, shooting up a few thousand Panamanians in the process. But Panamanians don't vote in American elections.

His great moment, though, came when Saddam Hussein invaded and occupied Kuwait in August, 1990. He organized an international coalition to drive Saddam out, with the requisite comparisons to Hitler and warnings of a new "Munich". While this is celebrated today as a "good war", Graubard makes some important points about Bush's motivations in undertaking it, in addition to his cynical political calculations.

Old Man Bush's first year as President, 1989, was the year the Eastern bloc of Communist nations clearly started coming apart. The Berlin Wall was officially opened in November, 1989. It was clearly a new era. But what kind of new era? Graubard argues that Old Man Bush and his advisers really had no grand conception of what the "new world order" that Bush rhetorically invoked should look like. They were still focused on the centrality of the US-Soviet relationship and failed to see how weak Gorbachev's government had become until the coup attempt in August, 1991, which essentially set in motion the final collapse of the Soviet Union itself.

Old Man Bush, consigliere James Baker and SecDef Cheney saw the Gulf War as an opportunity to assert a new status of worldwide hegemony for the United States. And, more specifically, to demonstrate to the world that the USSR no longer had any significant power to influence events in the Middle East in opposition to the US.

But Graubard also points out that their administration had no more of an overall Middle East policy than St. Reagan's had. They gave little real thought to the various effects of the United States making war on a Muslim country, or of the long-term involvements and problems that were likely to result from their consciously limited goal of driving Iraq out of Kuwait. From what we now know, it appears that Old Man Bush expected an internal uprising to overthrow Saddam after his defeat in Kuwait.

Graubard's book was evidently completed sometime around the end of 1991. So he had no way of knowing how rapidly Bush's war-related popularity would decline. But he makes a number of valuable observations, a number of which suggest that the conventional view today of the Gulf War is quite distorted.

One thing that is a major continuity between Old Man Bush's administration with Dick Cheney and Shrub Bush's administration with Dick Cheney is that Old Man Bush wanted to build up the Gulf War as an historic victory, far beyond what it actually was, in order to pose politically as a mighty military leader. His pitiful son obviously had something similar in mind, as we saw with his now-infamous appearance on the USS Abraham Lincoln in his flight suit and manly codpiece.

Their blundering ignorance about the Middle East and their grossly exaggerated sense of the ability of US military power to drive political events there are also notable continuities.

And we should never forget what is likely the most important continuity of all: Dick Cheney.

Graubard's book also reminds us that the good-vs.-evil dualism that the Cheney-Bush administration of today has made so prominent didn't begin on 9/11/2001, in a passage that also reminds us of the hopeless shallowness of the ways in which the Bushes have used Second World War imagery:

The same Manichaean idiom, to distinguish between the "evil empire" of the Soviet Union and the democratic republic across the Atlantic, was increasingly used to describe the population at home, divided between an industrious and virtuous majority and a reckless, indolent, and vice-ridden minority, who caused all the trouble. An older American style of political debate went out of fashion; the new style, created for use on television, depended on code words, especially significant at those crucial four-year intervals when the future of the nation was being decided. Melodrama became the staple of politics; humor was banished. To suggest that the White House had been recently used as a retirement home [for St. Reagan], that a minor tyrant [Saddam Hussein] was elevated to appear as a new Hitler, that a make-believe war [the Gulf War], which could have had only one result militarily, was given more cosmic importance - and that these were the characteristic features of the new American politics - these were fairly serious charges, legitimated only by the fact that they were true, that they described a country governed by an executive increasingly given to staging media events, incapable of coping with serious revolutionary issues.

Roosevelt was courted by Churchill and Stalin because he was prepared to mobilize and share the produce of a self-confident society, recently emerged from a traumatic depression, but still unscathed by war. In his willingness to conscript, deploy, and risk armies and navies - asking for sacrifice from millions - Roosevelt recognized the importance of engaging the public. He had no interest in their mouthing popular patriotic sentiments, though he had no objection to them. Neither he nor his allies ever doubted that the margin between victory and defeat lay substantially in what the United States agreed to do, what the Congress and the people were to accept. The Second World War was dangerous for all who fought it, and not simply because Allied leaders announced that fact publicly. (my emphasis)

No, today's authoritarian Republican Party didn't begin with the Scalia Five's appointment of George W. Bush as President in 2000. But Dick Cheney has had a major role in the process for decades.

Tags: cheney, dick cheney, george h. w. bush, gulf war, iraq war, james baker, mr. bush's war, stephen graubard