Conservative Advocate: The case against Bush is weak
It’s a little hard to remember, now, that George H.W. Bush took a brutal 10-year beating from the American public for calling off our attack on Iraq after he had ousted its troops from Kuwait. He should have finished the job, many said, there and then, by occupying Baghdad and toppling Saddam Hussein from his throne. Now his son is being pounded for doing exactly that.
The Bush family’s critics are hard to please. Personally I always thought – and said – that the father’s reluctance to press on was understandable. Neither Congress nor the United Nations had given him any authority to invade Iraq and topple Saddam, and both would have condemned him mercilessly if he had gone ahead on his own and the coffins had started coming home to Dover Air Force Base.
But not even the congressional authorization for an invasion of Iraq demanded, and received, by George W. Bush has spared him the condemnation of his critics. As Election Day approaches, the denunciations are reaching a crescendo.
And yet, when the charges are studied calmly, it is remarkable how little they add up to. It’s all rather reminiscent of the old definition of philosophy: “Looking, in a dark room, for a black cat that isn’t there.”
Basically, the charges boil down to just two: First, that Bush was not sufficiently attentive in the months before Sept. 11 to signs that Al Qaeda was planning to launch on attack on the U.S. and therefore bears at least a degree of responsibility for the attacks that did occur. And second, that after Sept. 11 he neglected the war with Al Qaeda in favor of an irrelevant and unnecessary attack on Iraq, which he justified with false charges that it possessed weapons of mass destruction and then pursued with inadequate forces and poor post-war planning.
The trouble with the first charge is nobody has turned up the slightest evidence of any warning that the Bush administration ought to have acted upon. There was a rumor, duly reported, that Osama bin Laden was planning an attack on the U.S. But where and when the attack was to come was, unhappily, not specified. An order from the president to “Defend the United States!” would hardly have afforded us much protection.
The second charge requires more parsing. After Sept. 11, Bush promptly ordered our forces to invade Afghanistan, oust its Taliban rulers, and disperse Al Qaeda. Only when all three of these objectives had been achieved did he launch the attack on Iraq. No doubt Iraq, and the possibility of regime change there, had been on his mind for a long time (as it had also been on President Clinton’s). But no move was made until Afghanistan was secured.
As for the charge that Bush falsely declared that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, this would be fatal if it were not for one dismally inconvenient fact: The same assertion was made repeatedly, over the years, by the United Nations, the French, Germans and Russians, and by every major Democratic politician in the United States, including Clinton, Gore, Albright and Berger.
Finally, it is unquestionably true that post-war Iraq offers a painful demonstration of the possibilities of guerrilla warfare in the 21st century. But the idea that there is some uniquely Democratic way to cope with this would be laughable if it weren’t so sad. Only unflinching determination in battle — never the Democrats’ long suit — can see us through to victory.
William Rusher is a Distinguished Fellow of the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy.