Not Like His Father
Bush I and II each launched a war with Iraq. That's where the similarities end
Bush has said the terrorist attacks of 9/11 gave him his mission as president--to protect the nation from what he sees as a global network of "evildoers." The day after 9/11, he called advisers to the White House residence and urged them to prepare for a long struggle. Communicating the facts about the war would be difficult, the president said, partly because it might be impossible to reveal successes, lest such announcements expose U.S. counterterrorism methods and endanger American operatives. One of the biggest challenges, he cautioned, would be to stay the course. "The further we get from this day," he warned, "people are going to forget." He promised never to do that.
Bush believes he must keep up his campaign to convince the nation that the war is going well. "People see so much of the war on cable TV that the president needs to provide context,"says a senior administration official. That means countering news of casualties and war costs by emphasizing that America cannot abandon its new client state.
Bush's father, by contrast, saw the 1991 war with Iraq as a conventional conflict to be won by conventional means. And he had a strong sense of limits. George Herbert Walker Bush called off the ground battle after only 100 hours because Saddam's forces had been crushed. His refusal to take over Iraq and occupy Baghdad was widely criticized, but Bush argued that the United Nations never approved an occupation. He also insisted that occupying Iraq would have been vastly expensive in lives and money. His predictions have proved true--on his son's watch.
George H. W. Bush felt another constraint--what historians call "Vietnam syndrome," a reluctance by Americans to commit troops to potentially lengthy wars without a guarantee of success and a certainty of moral justification. "After the mess in Vietnam, many Americans didn't trust their leaders to send troops anywhere," says a former adviser. "So we developed a vast public outreach program." At one point, Bush even gave a speech justifying the coming conflict in theological terms, using the philosophies of Aquinas and Augustine to define what was a "just war."
Self-reliant. The senior Bush felt equipped--from his experience as vice president, former director of central intelligence, and U.S. envoy to the United Nations and to China--to challenge both the military and his advisers. George W. Bush seems more accepting of the advice of his in-house "experts." He went along with recommendations of Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to minimize the number of troops needed in Iraq, which some military analysts and many Democrats have branded a mistake. Bush also accepted his advisers' claims that the occupation would be relatively easy and that the Iraqis would welcome U.S. soldiers as liberators. "We built a policy based on practicalities," says a former national security adviser to the father. "They built a policy based on assumptions."
In running the war, the elder Bush didn't micromanage the Pentagon, but he did pay close attention to certain tactics. He reviewed plans for bombing areas where civilian casualties were likely, for instance, and tried to select targets and ways of attack to minimize harm to noncombatants. If his son pays heed to such details, he has not disclosed it. In fact, he says he almost always leaves operational details to the military.
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