Bush vs. Bush Iraq Redux:

Bush vs. Bush

Iraq redux: How the foreign policy aims of the two presidents compares

Immediately following President George W. Bush's first mention of the possibility of forcibly removing weapons of mass destruction from Iraq, the cry went up across America and the rest of the world: This new president was simply attempting to finish the job his father could not.

Whereas their last names are the same, President George Bush and President George W. Bush maintained different objectives in their individual Persian Gulf wars, with regard to strategy, policy, containment and regime change.

By examining "Groupthink" by Irving Janis, "American Foreign Policy and Process" by James McCormick and the Annual Editions of "American Foreign Policy," this study will compare the two Bushes' foreign policy goals, objectives, successes and failures in the Persian Gulf region, specifically on their two wars in Iraq against Saddam Hussein's regime.

President George Bush's Iraq War

At the outset of his administration, President Bush called for a "policy review."

Although this review dealt primarily with the Soviet Union and Europe, it and Bush's speeches after it shed a lot of light on the president's thinking with regard to the Persian Gulf war and crisis as well.

For instance, during a 1989 commencement address at Texas A& M. University, Bush spelled out his administration's approach to dealing with the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War: "We are approaching the conclusion of an historic postwar struggle between two visions: one of tyranny and conflict, and one of democracy and freedom. And now, it is time to move beyond containment to a new policy for the 1990s -- one that recognizes the full scope of changes taking place around the world and in the Soviet Union itself."

Here, Bush set up two different paradigms and admitted no gray area at all: tyranny and conflict vs. democracy and freedom. He continued from Reagan's philosophy of communism as an unnecessary evil and refused to brook any positive aspects to the Soviet Union's system of government.

Bush adopted a very cut-and-dried approach to international conflict, which was best expressed in a passage from the McCormick text: "In cases where the U.S. confronts much weaker enemies, our challenge will be not simply to defeat them, but to defeat them decisively and rapidly ... For small countries hostile to us, bleeding our forces in protracted or indecisive conflict or embarrassing us by inflicting damage on some conspicuous element of our forces may be victory enough, and could undercut political support for U.S. efforts against them."

This philosophy applied directly to Bush's actions before, during and after the first Persian Gulf War. In fact, the one event that sparked the Bush administration to tackle the new world order that had descended since the fall of the Soviet Union was Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait on August 2, 1990.

The Iraq war was the first test of the new Russian/American alliance, and the alliance passed the test.

But revisionist history dictates that the world expected Bush to take a hard-line stance towards Iraq's invasion. McCormick, however, demonstrates that this was not at all true. According to McCormick, "In some respects, the vigorous response of the Bush administration to Iraq's action may have been unexpected. ON the one hand, the United States had sought to better relations with Iraq during the 1980s: Diplomatic relations had been restored in 1984, after being ruptured since 1967, and the United States had "tilted" toward Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War from 1980-1988."

But a closer examination yields that Bush was completely true to his policy initiative: He refused to back down to a weaker power for fear that America's new hegemony would be questioned if the first post-Cold War conflict involved America being embarrassed. Rather than take that chance, Bush decided to prosecute a full-fledged war that America could not help but win, rather than a few select military operations which may expose America's possible vulnerabilities to other potential enemies.

However, Bush did not go at the war alone. Rather, he garnered support from the United Nations and drew a famous line in the sand. Almost as prevalent in the war as Patriot missiles and Scuds were United Nations Security Council resolutions. But ensuring a lasting peace within Iraq, and in the region generally, proved much more difficult than defeating Iraq in a war, McCormick notes.

Specifically, McCormick writes, "Almost immediately after the coalition victory, rebellions broke out in the north and south of Iraq. In the north, the Kurdish people, an ethnic minority, rebelled against the Iraqi government but failed."

Essentially, Bush stayed his course into the war: He proved America's military might in an era of single-superpower status. However, his foray into Persian Gulf military international relations proved a point that America is still learning even through today: Military defeat of a weaker enemy is only one part of the puzzle. The struggles of a war-torn land after one-sided conflict are another challenge, as is the public relations image of America in a part of the world that is so critical to the West because of its vast oil reserves, and now because of the added threat of state-supported terrorism.

President George W. Bush's Iraq War

More than a decade after the first Iraq war, George Bush's son George W. Bush found himself in a new conflict stemming from the middle east. Terrorists attacked the United States on September 11, 2001, and forever changed the new world order. Communism had been effectively defeated -- although recent conflicts with North Korea may indicate otherwise -- and America sat, partially as a result of the first Iraq war, as the world's only superpower.

When terrorists trained in Afghanistan attacked the United States, though, it became clear that the new threats emanated not from states, but from rogue groups that may or may not have state support.

The United States attacked Afghanistan and effected regime change, forcing out the Taliban who had sheltered Al Queda, the terrorist group most responsible.

America's attentions quickly turned to Iraq though, and the nation stood on the precipice of getting involved in the only war that has the dubious distinction of having been less popular domestically than Vietnam.

Part of understanding America's concern with the Persian Gulf is admitting that oil plays a role, according to Kenneth Pollack: "America's primary interest in the Persian Gulf is ensuring the free and stable flow o the region's oil to the world at large. The issue is not whether Americans pay $2 or $3 a gallon for gas at the pump or whether Exxon gets contracts instead of Lukoil or even how much oil the United States imports from the Persian Gulf. The Global economy built over the past 50 years rests on a foundation of inexpensive, plentiful oil. If that foundation were removed, the global economy would collapse."

Here immediately a new factor is thrown into the equation of American hegemony: namely, that America is simply no longer hegemonious in the way that, with the global economy, no country can truly exist as a superpower. Oil creeps up as a large motivating factor, with Washington's aim being not simply to keep oil flowing out of the Persian Gulf, but also to prevent any potentially hostile state from gaining control over the region's resources.

But, post-9/11, a new reason to be militarily involved in the middle east emerged as well: to prevent state-sponsored and state-supported terrorism. Bush accused Iraq as not only supporting terrorism but of developing weapons of mass destruction too. These weapons, Bush claimed, could fall into terrorists' hands and create situations in the West far worse than 9/11.

But Bush endured much criticism for his move. First, the United States located absolutely no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, nor could anyone outside the Bush administration point convincingly to a viable link between Al Queda and Iraq. As a result, arguments to continue with weapons inspectors and sanctions raged before the war, and continue today.

Lopez and Cortright argue that the sanctions placed on Iraq were working: "The United Nations sanctions that began in August 1990 were the longest running, most comprehensive, and most controversial in the history of the world body. Most analysts argued prior to the Iraq war -- and, in many cases, continue to argue -- that sanctions were a failure. In reality, however, the system of containment that sanctions cemented did much to erode Iraqi military capabilities. Sanctions compelled Iraq to accept inspections and monitoring and won concessions from Baghdad on political issues such as the border dispute with Kuwait. They also drastically reduced the revenue available to Saddam, prevented the rebuilding of Iraqi defenses after the Persian Gulf War, and blocked the import of vital materials and technologies for producing WMD."

These are damning allegations indeed, as these two critics essentially destroy in this one passage Bush's primary reasons for warring with Iraq.

However, here, George W. Bush's foreign policy measures exhibit many similarities with his father's. Primarily, both Bushes wanted to show the world that America is a powerful force with which to be reckoned -- even if not a single or sole superpower, a force that can at least militarily have its way in the world, especially with regard to rogue, weaker states.

Also, both Bushes believed in cut-and-dried reactions. Communism and Saddam Hussein are simply "bad" without complicating factors such as reasons or motivations for their actions. Going hand in hand with that assessment, communism and Saddam Hussein must be defeated thoroughly, recognizing that even small victories on the part of Iraq, for instance, could draw support to Hussein's ranks and erode America foreign policy world opinion.

However, that is where the similarities ended. For George Bush, the homeland in the United States was never under a serious threat. The most perilous years of the Cold War were behind America when Bush took the helm, so he could focus on American interests abroad and foreign countries' impact on the power of Americans to do business abroad.

His son, George W. Bush, does not have this leisure. The second Bush took to disarming Iraq with a fervor bordering on fanaticism: Lopez and Cortright write, "In Washington during the 1990s, each new weapons report was taken as confirmation of Saddam's perfidy rather than as a measure of success. There was a lingering belief that behind each new discovery lay more hidden contraband. Especially after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the achievements of UN disarmament were ignored, and Saddam's defiance was taken as confirmation that deadly stockpiles remained."

No, George W. Bush's foreign policy in the second Persian Gulf War was more an extension of fervent homeland defense. Indeed, this represented a theme. America attacked Iraq to protect its own borders, and most of America's foreign policy initiatives today perform the same function, or at leas purport to.

And George W. Bush has much support for this all-encompassing homeland security fervor. Even though none of Bush's reasons to enter the war with Iraq has been evinced, there is still significant popular support for the war and Bush's own administration has been unfaltering in its unwavering support for the conflict and its aftermath.

Janis asks whether defective decision making as a part of group-think might have played a role in such ostensible fiascos: " ... An essential step is to ascertain whether the failure of the in-group's policy was at least partly attributable to errors in decision-making rather than to other causes, such as unforeseeable accidents. In the case of the Watergate cover-up policy, practically all knowledgeable commentators, as well as the participants themselves, agree that Nixon and his in-group did a very poor job of decision-making. Nixon himself has acknowledged that the so-called containment policy was not carefully thought out."

That is where George W. Bush differs critically from Nixon, and even from his father. Throughout the Iraq crisis, no one in the Bush administration has admitted to a single error in decision making; indeed, their policy is likened by liberals and those generally against the war in Iraq to Nixon's containment without the responsibility and the culpability.