No More Years: Why George Must Go
The failed presidency of George Bush is deftly summarized by a bumper sticker seen in various places around the nation: “Saddam Hussein still has a job –— do you?” For most Americans, the question requires no explication. From the beginning, Bush styled himself as the warrior president who would dauntlessly lead the United States to various triumphs around the world. He wasn’t much interested in pedestrian domestic affairs, delegating their management to others. Now he is stuck with the fruits of his neglect: The bottom has fallen out at home, and his foreign-policy triumphs have proved to be dubious, or even fraudulent, achievements.
The nicest thing I can think to say in the president’s behalf is that he is a victim of bad timing —– an unimaginative politician caught in the changing tides of history. His career, in which he dutifully served under powerful figures like Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, did not prepare him for any of the upheavals he has had to confront in the White House. As CIA director, he embraced the Cold War view of the world. Then the Cold War suddenly ended. As a congressman and vice-president, he absorbed conventional business-conservative financial views. Then the economy collapsed. In both spheres, the old bromides failed him.
This explanation doesn’t provide much comfort to voters. After all, a leader’s mettle is tested by the unpredictable —– how he responds to new and contradictory realities. Some leaders grow in adversity, staking out new visions of what must be done. Despite his Southern origins, Lyndon Johnson led a revolution in civil-rights legislation. Despite a career of anticommunism, Nixon opened diplomatic relations with “Red China.”
Slow footed and out of touch, Bush has been stubbornly dense to the new facts facing him and the country. In foreign affairs, he was consistently behind the curve on the breakup of the Soviet Union and oblivious to the surge of democratic yearnings in China and elsewhere. In economic policy, he still doesn’t get it –— still does not grasp why Americans are so worried about their economic well-being or that the nation and the world are flirting with depression.
Bush has responded to all this with petulance, chiding citizens for not being more upbeat about his leadership. Four years ago, when I wrote a column appraising the Republican presidential candidate, an RS editor impishly headlined the piece “George Bush: Is Anybody Home?” I think it is fair to say the question has been answered.
The supposed high point of Bush’s first term —– the bloodless victory of Desert Storm —– actually contains the seeds of a great scandal. The president’s aides are working furiously to keep it from public view during the election —– and they may succeed —– but the broad outlines are already visible: The Bush administration cozied up to Saddam by guaranteeing $1.9 billion in agricultural loans that were diverted to high-tech military equipment. When Saddam invaded Kuwait, the administration buried the facts by altering documents or smothering criminal prosecutions that might have revealed the embarrassing truth.
Bush’s dealings with Iraq involve some of the same malodorous elements of the Iran-contra scandal –— third-country shipments of U.S. weapons to Iraq, illegal exports of military technology and, above all, a policy of wooing a treacherous dictator with money and arms.
The Bush-Saddam affair also poses the same question that brought down Nixon in Watergate: What did the president know, and when did he know it? So far, most of the path-breaking revelations have come from Congressman Henry B. Gonzalez of Texas. Among other disclosures, it has been established that the Commerce Department granted 771 export licenses to Iraq between 1985 and 1990 as the Bush administration curried favor with Saddam, despite the fact that U.S. intelligence knew Saddam had used poison gas in the Iran-Iraq war and used it against his own citizens in Kurdistan.
When Congress made inquiries, Commerce officials altered the information on sixty-eight export licenses to conceal the military nature of the equipment. Congressional investigators believe export-control laws on military technology may have been violated and that the coverup itself was illegal. They have evidence that White House officials —– presidential counsel C. Boyden Gray and Brent Scowcroft, head of the National Security Council —– were involved in preparing the Commerce Department responses to Congress. Was Bush?
Bush was certainly aware of the huge U.S. bank loans to Saddam, but did he also know they were systematically diverted to weaponry? Well, the CIA knew. It reported as much to the White House before the last $1 billion was sent to Saddam. The White House ignored the warning. In the same period, Saudi Arabia transferred U.S. bombs to Iraq. Was this a mistake, as the Saudis claim, or was it done at the behest of the United States?
The suspicions about all these and other transactions are heightened by the administration’s response: stonewalling as brazen as Nixon’s during Watergate. Despite the evident illegalities already disclosed and the heavy political overtones, the U.S. attorney general refused a request from Democrats to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate.
Further, the criminal prosecution of an Atlanta banker involved in the Iraqi loans was settled with a guilty plea that did not require the defendant to make a full disclosure of his dealings, even though he had volunteered to. It looks like a case of the Justice Department snuffing out an inquiry before it leads from the lower rungs of government to officials higher up. Maybe it is just an attempt to avoid embarrassment in an election year, but maybe it is about avoiding something worse.
The larger meaning, in any case, is that Bush’s bizarre courtship of Saddam —– and his subsequent war against him —– represents the Cold War reflex at its worst. First, the government makes secret alliance with a world-class thug, cementing the friendship with lots of military hardware (an immoral embrace that doubtless encouraged Saddam’s reckless aggression). Then, when things go awry, the government buries its mistakes by using military force. In the process, the president grossly deceives the public about why the nation must go to war.
In fact, the sequence of events with Iraq is exactly parallel to what Bush did in Panama. The CIA and the Reagan administration (with Vice-President Bush personally involved) played cozy with Manuel Noriega for years, despite his involvement in the drug market. When Noriega got uppity, Bush bombed the daylights out of him, then arrested him. In terms of producing real change, Panama turned out about as well as Iraq.
No More Years: Why George Must Go, Page 1 of 2