2004 Year in Review

The Stuff of History II

Article Two in a Series

It’s no secret Saddam Hussein harbored a deep hatred for President Bush the Elder, a hate so vehement that he was inspired to build a mosaic of the 41st president's face into the floor of the Rashid Hotel in Baghdad so that hundreds of visitors would have to walk across it every day in one of Arab culture’s worst insults.

It’s no secret Bush the Elder despised the Iraqi leader In a CNN interview just before the coalition advance into Iraq, the former president acknowledged: "I hate Saddam. I don't hate a lot of people. I don't hate easily, but I think he's… no good and he's a brute."

Saddam’s unbounded dislike devolved to Bush the Younger whom he labeled as the “son of a viper.” Bush the Elder’s hatred for Saddam passed to Bush the Younger who on the campaign trail in 2000 referred to Saddam as “the guy that tried to kill my Dad at one time.” Here Bush the Younger was referring to an incident that took place after his father had left office.

Bush the Younger was a managing partner of the Texas Rangers baseball team when his father traveled to Kuwait in April 1993 to take part in a three-day celebration marking the end of the victorious U.S.-led invasion that had expelled the Iraqi occupation forces two years earlier. The elder Bush had pulled together a multinational coalition to wage the Persian Gulf War that ended the seven-month Iraqi occupation of Kuwait.

Before Bush's scheduled arrival for the festivities, Kuwaiti authorities arrested several people, including two Iraqis, and accused them of plotting an attack on Bush at several locations along the parade route or during the ceremony at Kuwait University. Saddam was believed to have been behind this plot to assassinate the elder Bush, and Bush the Younger knew when he was elected president that "[t]here's no doubt he can't stand [the Bushes].”

But was this mutual hatred between the Bushes and Saddam so “acutely personal for President Bush” that he put “that very personal interest ahead of the interest of the nation and the world,” as one Iraqi war dissenter alleges? True, President Bush did refer to the 1993 assassination attempt when he went to the United Nations to urge action against Iraq in September 2002, but he did so in the context of several other allegations against the character of the Iraqi leader and his violations of UN mandates and international law.

Several writers have tried to make the present Iraqi campaign into a personal vendetta of President Bush against Saddam Hussein, a personal reckoning to avenge the failed assassination attempt of 1993.

Stewart M. Powell of the Washington bureau of the Albany Times Union postulates in November 2002, that the move towards war “makes the planned U.S. crackdown on Saddam Hussein acutely personal for President Bush.” More recently, Todd S. Purdum heads an article on December 16, 2003: After 12 Years, Sweet Victory: The Bushes’ Pursuit of Hussein. While Purdum tempers his argument in the body of his article, he nevertheless, like Powell, wants to leave the impression that base revenge was a motivating factor in President Bush’s push for the Iraqi war of 2003.

To be sure, to seek revenge for a past wrong, to avenge even the merest slight is a strong emotion even within the strongest of men. But it beggars the imagination to suppose that Bush the Younger waited patiently for ten years until he became president of the United States, then jumped at the pretext of a war against terror and terrorists to unleash the world’s greatest military power against Saddam Hussein.

Yet there are those critics of President Bush who would have us believe just that – the war against Saddam was nothing more than a culmination of a personal feud between the Bushes and the Husseins – in a vein similar to the Hatfields and McCoys or the Earps and the Clantons, except on an international scale.

Such a belief supposes as well that Bush the Younger somehow made willing dupes of the national security staff, the diplomatic corps, and the war-making machinery of the United States. Secretary of State Colin Powell, National Security Adviser Condeleezza Rice, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld all signed on to the program to eliminate Saddam the assassin from the ranks of the terrorists who threaten world stability.

Not only did he wheedle his staff to his petty personal aim, but he intrigued through the halls of the Capitol and garnered the support of Representatives and Senators to his side.

Wisely bundling Iraq with two other despotic states into an “axis of evil,” he made straightway to his real target – Saddam and Iraq – while he abandoned for all intents and purposes the struggle in Afghanistan.

Bush’s critics find it hard to deal with this image of the President. Those who accept this script as a motivating factor in the 2003 war against Iraq must face the fact that Bush acted patiently and surreptitiously, with malice of forethought over a period of years, in contrast to the bumbling “shoot from the hip” cowboy image his language often elicits from his critical press.

No doubt the Bushes took pleasure in the capture of Saddam in December 2003, but it’s hardly likely that either Bush plotted to bring the nation to war – with its horrors – for the sole purpose of revenge for a failed assassination attempt. As one friend of the Bushes said, “It’s a psychologically nice moment… [But] they understand the bigger picture. This has moved beyond this one individual.”

by William Driver, Guest Columnist
January 7, 2004