By Michael F. Duggan
There was a time not long ago when American foreign policy was based on the pursuit of national interests. During the period 1989-1992 the United States was led by a man who was perhaps the most well-qualified candidate for the office in its history—a man who had known combat, who knew diplomacy, intelligence, legislation and the legislative branch, party politics, the practicalities of business and organizational administration, and how the executive and its departments functioned. For those of us in middle life, it seems like only yesterday, and yet in light of what has happened since in politics and policy, it might as well be a lifetime and a world away. The question is whether his administration was a genuine realist anomaly or merely a preface to what the nation has become.
Regardless, here’s to Old Man Bush: a good one-term statesman and public servant who was both preceded and followed by two-term mediocrities and mere politicians. A Commander-in-Chief who oversaw what was arguably the most well-executed large-scale military campaign in United States history (followed by poll numbers that might have been the highest in modern times) only to lose the next election. A moderate in politics and a good man personally who famously broke with the NRA, gave the nation a necessary income tax hike on the rich (for which his own party never forgave him), but against his better instincts adopted the knee-to-groin campaign tactics of party torpedoes and handlers in what became one of the dirtiest presidential campaigns in US history (1988) and ushered-in the modern period of “gotcha” politics.
Some critics at the time observed that Bush arose on the coattails of others, a loyal subordinate, a second-place careerist and credentialist who silver-medaled his way to the top, a New England blue blood carpetbagger who (along with his sons) ran for office in states far from Connecticut and Maine. Such interpretations do violence to the dignity, nuance, diversity, and sheer volume of the man’s life. Bush was the real thing: a public servant—an aristocrat who dedicated most his life to serving the country. Prior to becoming President of the United States, Bush served in such diverse roles as torpedo bomber pilot, wildcat oilman, Member of the House of Representatives, Liaison to a newly-reopened China, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Chairman of the RNC, Director of the CIA, and Vice President of the United States. He was not, however, a spotless hero.
Foreign Affairs
The presidency of George Herbert Walker Bush (or just plain “George Bush” prior to the late 1990s) was a brief moment, in some respects an echo of the realism that served the nation so well in the years immediately following WWII.
A foreign policy realist in the best sense of the term, Bush was the perfect man to preside over the end of the Cold War, and my sense is that the most notable foreign policy achievements of the Regan presidency probably belong even more to his more knowledgeable vice president with whom he consulted over Thursday lunches. As president in his own right, it was Bush who, with the help of a first team of pros that included the likes of Brent Scowcroft, James Baker, and Colin Powell, let up Russia gently after the implosion of the USSR (he knew that great nations do not take victory laps), only to be followed by amateurs and zealots who arrogantly pushed NATO right up to Russia’s western border and ushered-in what looks increasingly like a dangerous new Cold War. If a great statesman/woman is one who has successfully managed at least one momentous world event, than his handling of the end of the Cold War alone puts him into this category.
Desert Storm
Interpreted as a singular U.S. and international coalition response to a violation to territorial sovereignty of one nation by another—and in spite of later unintended consequences—Desert Shield/Storm was a strategic, operational, and tactical work of art: President Bush gave fair warning (admittedly risky) to allow the aggressor a chance to pull back and reverse course, masterfully sought and got an international mandate and then congressional approval, built a coalition, amassed his forces, went in with overwhelming force and firepower, achieved the goals of the mandate, got the hell out. But the success or failure of the “Hundred-Hour War” depends on whether it is weighed as a geopolitical “police action” or as just another episode of U.S. adventurism in the Near East (that led to much greater involvement and disasters), or as some kind of hybrid.
As a stand-alone event then, the campaign was “textbook,” but then in history there is no such thing as a completely discrete event. Can the operational success of Desert Storm be separated from what others see as a more checkered geopolitical legacy? Can the success of the felt necessities of the times of a theater of combat be tarnished by later, unseen developments? Was the “overwhelming force” and overkill of the Powell Doctrine (which could equally be called the Napoleon, Grant, MacArthur, or LeMay Doctrine) a preface to the “Shock and Awe” of his son’s war in the region? Was his calculated restriction of press access in a war zone a precursor to later and even more propagandistic wars with even less independent press coverage?
Just as history never happens for a single reason, nor is any victory truly singular, pure, and unalloyed. Twenty-six years on, I realize that my rosy construction of what has since become known as the First Gulf War (or the Second Iraq War in the sequence proffered by Andrew Bacevich) is not shared by all historians. Questions remain: was Saddam able to invade Kuwait because Bush and his team were distracted by momentous events in Europe? Was the Iraqi invasion merely a temporary punitive expedition that could have been prevented if Kuwait hadn’t aggressively undercut Iraqi oil profits? Would Hussein have withdrawn his forces on his own after sufficiently making his point? Was April Glaspie speaking directly for the President Bush or Secretary Baker when she met with the Iraqi leader on July 25, 1990? War is a failure of policy, and could the events leading up to the invasion (including public comments made by Baker’s spokesperson, Margaret Tutwiler) have been seen by the Iraqis as a green light in a similar way that the North Koreans could have construed Acheson’s “Defensive Perimeter” speech to the National Press Club in early 1950 as such? (See Bartholomew Sparrow, The Strategist, Brent Scowcroft and the Call of National Security. 420-421).
Some historians have been more critical in their “big picture” assessments of Desert Storm, claiming that when placed in the broader context of an almost four-decade long American war for the greater Middle East, this was just another chapter in a series of misled escalations (See generally Bacevich, America’s War for the Greater Middle East, A Military History). In this construction too, the war planners had not decapitated the serpent and had left Hussein’s most valuable asset—the Republican Guard—mostly intact to fight another day against an unsupported American ally who Mr. Bush had encouraged to rise up, the Iraqi Kurds (as well as Shiites).
While some of these points are still open questions, the mandate of the U.N. Security Council resolution did not include taking out Hussein. In light of what happened after 2003, when the U.S. military did topple the regime, Bush I and his planners seemed all the more sensible. Moreover the “Highway of Death” was beginning to look like just that—a traffic jam of gratuitous murder—laser-guided target practice, a precision-guided turkey shoot against a foe unable defend himself, much less fight back. With the Korean War as historical example, Scowcroft was cognizant of the dangers implicit in changing or exceeding the purely military goals of a limited mandate in the face of apparent easy victory. Having met the stated war aims, Powell and Scowcroft both advocated ceasing the attack as did Dick Cheney. (See Sparrow, The Strategist, Brent Scowcroft and the Call of National Security. 414-415).
When second-guessed about why the U.S. did not “finish the job,” advisors to the elder Bush answered with now haunting and even prophetic rhetorical questions about the wisdom of putting U.S. servicemen between Sunnis and Shiites (James Baker’s later observation about the war in the Balkans that “We don’t have a dog in that fight” seems to have applied equally to internal Iraqi affairs). Besides, it would have made no sense to remove a powerful secular counterbalance to Iran, thus making them the de facto regional hegemon. Did the U.S. “abandon” Iraq while on the verge of “saving” it? Should the U.S. have “stayed” (whatever that means) in Iraq in 1991? My takeaway from the history of outsiders in the Middle East is that the only thing more perilous than “abandoning” a fight in the region once apparent victory is secured, is to continue fighting, and that once in, there is no better time to get out than the soonest possible moment. The history of U.S. adventures in Iraq since 2003—the Neocon legacy of occupation and nation-building—speaks for itself.
Bush’s humanitarian commitment of American forces to the chaos of Somalia in the waning days of his administration still baffles realists and seems to have honored Bush’s own principles in the breach. It makes no sense. One can claim that it was purely a temporary measure that grew under the new administrations, but it is still hard to square with the rest of Bush’s foreign policy.
Of course there were other successes and failures of a lesser nature: high-handedness in Central America that included a justified but excessive invasion of Panama. The careful realist must also weigh his masterful handling of the demise of the Soviet Union with what looks like a modest and principled kind of economic globalization and what appears to be a kind of self-consciously benevolent imperialism: the United States as the good cop on the world beat. The subsequent catastrophic history of neoliberal globalization and interventionism have cast these budding tendencies in a more sobering light.
Domestic Policy and Politics
Domestically, Bush’s generous instincts came to the fore early on and were foreshadowed in the Emersonian “Thousand Points of Light” of his nomination acceptance address, and he did more at home than most people realize. He gave us the Americans with Disability Act (ADA)—one of the most successful pieces of social legislation of recent decades—the modest Civil Rights Act of 1991, the 1990 amendment to the Clean Air Act, a semiautomatic rifle ban, successfully handled the consequences of the Savings and Loan Crisis, and of course he put David Souter on the High Court. Perhaps he did not know how to deal with the recession of 1991. My reading is that the recession was an ominous initial rumbling of things to come, as American workers increasingly became victims of economic globalization. Some historians believe that the good years of the 1990s owe a fair amount to Bush’s economic polices, including the budget agreement of 1990, which reduced the deficit. Bush fatefully underestimated the rise of the far right in his own party, making his plea for a “kinder, gentler” nation and political milieu a tragic nonstarter. His catch phrase from the 1980 campaign characterizing the absurdity of supply-side economics as “voodoo economics” was spot-on, but was another apostasy that true-believers in his own party were unlikely to forget or forgive. Certainly he did not do enough to address the AIDS crisis.
It is shocking that a man of Bush’s sensibilities and personal qualities conducted the presidential campaign of 1988 the way he (or rather his handlers, like Lee Atwater) did. Against a second-rater like Michael Dukakis, the “go low,” approach now seems like gross overkill—a kind of political “Highway of Death”—that was beneath the dignity of an honorable man. On a similar note, it is hard to understand his occasional hardball tactics, like the bogus fight he picked with Dan Rather on live television at the urging of handlers. Perhaps it was to counter the charges of his being a “wimp.”
Again, this approach seems to have been completely unnecessary—overreaction urged by politicos and consultants from the darker reaches of the campaign arts. How is it even possible that a playground epithet like wimp would even find traction against a man of Bush’s demonstrated courage and service to country? All anybody had to do was remind people that he youngest navy pilot in the Second World War who had enlisted on the first day he legally could, and that he was fished out of the Pacific after being shot down in a Grumman TBF Avenger torpedo bomber (but then Bush embodied an ethos of aristocratic modesty and the idea that one did not talk about oneself, much less brag). By comparison, the rugged Ronald Reagan never went anywhere near a combat zone (as a documentary on The American Experience observed, “Bush was everything Regan pretended to be”: a war hero, college athlete, and a family man whose children loved unconditionally). I’m not sure if Clinton ever made any pretense of fortitude.
We ask our presidents to succeed in two antithetical roles: that of politician and of statesmen, and in recent years, the later has triumphed seemingly at the expense of the former. Style has mostly trumped substance, something that underscores a flaw in our system and what is has become. As casualties of reelection campaigns against charismatic opponents, Gerald Ford and “Bush 41” might be metaphors for this flaw and of our time and a lesson emphasizing the fine distinction that a single-term statesman is generally superior and preferable to a more popular two two-term politician. Reagan, Clinton, Bush 43, and Obama were all truly great politicians and unless you were specifically against them or their policies, there was a reasonable chance that they could win you over on one point or another with style, communication skills, and magnetic charm. That said, and unlike the senior Bush, I would contend that there is not a genuine statesman in that group.
It is difficult for any president to achieve greatness in either foreign or domestic affairs, much less in both (as a latter day New Dealer, I would say that FDR may have been the last to master both). George Herbert Walker Bush was a good foreign policy president and not bad overall—a leader at the heart of a competent administration. By all accounts, he was good man overall and the people who knew him are heaping adjectives on is memory: dignity, humility, honor, courage, class—a good president and a notable American public servant. But ultimately personal goodness has little to do with the benevolence or harm of policy, to paraphrase Forrest Gump, good is what good does (some policy monsters are personally charming and even decent while some insufferable leaders produce great and high-minded policy), and as aging news transforms with greater circumspect into history, the jury is still out on much of the complex legacy of Bush I.
Subsequent events have cast doubt on what seemed at the time to be spotless successes, and realistic gestures now seem more like preface to less restrained economic internationalism and military adventurism. Still, I am willing to give the first President Bush the benefit of the doubt on interpretations of events still in flux. Just in writing this, and given what has happened in American politics and policy ever since, I have the sinking feeling that we not see his like again for a long time, if ever again.