ELDER BUSH ON IRAQ WAR & A BIBLE ‘QUOTE’ IN REVERSE . . .
by Selvam Canagaratna
(Cartoons googled and added by TW)
“The Christian Bible is a drug store. Its contents remain the same, but the medical practice changes.”– Mark Twain, Bible Teaching and Religious Practice, 1923.
It is truly hard to disagree with the claim that the horribly destructive quagmire the Middle East has become today is unarguably the handiwork of just one man, George W. Bush – the 43rd President of the United States – who assumed office on January 20, 2001. If memory serves, he preferred [at the time] to be better known as ‘The Decider’, although he was in truth under the constant tutelage of two warmongers who formed his charmed ‘inner circle’ – his Vice Prez. Dick Cheney and his Secretrary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld.
Writing on the Consortium news website, Ray McGovern, who served at the CIA from the administration of John F. Kennedy to that of George H. W. Bush – the father of ‘The Decider’ – says the release in December last year of Jon Meacham’s biography of the elder Bush, Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush, was “a painful flashback to the deceptive, destructive – yet at the same time highly instructive – years 2002 and 2003, when son George W. Bush, the 43rd President, attacked Iraq.”
[For the record, the elder Bush was the 41st President of the US, after serving as President Ronald Reagan’s VP for two terms, losing his bid for a second term to Bill Clinton.]
The clear and present danger of getting sucked into yet another quagmire or quicksand pool on false pretenses persists, wrote McGovern. “Thus, it seems fitting and proper to review the lead-up to the unprovoked ‘Shock and Awe’ on Iraq proudly launched in March 2003 by GWB, egged on by Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and other white-collar thugs.”
McGovern says that he and his former intelligence analyst colleagues with considerable professional experience of watching other countries prepare for aggression against others, found it difficuclt to believe that the US too would be doing precisely that. “Still harder was it to digest the notion that Washington would do so, absent credible evidence of any immediate threat and would ‘fix’ intelligence to justify it. But that, sadly, is what happened.”
That not one of the white-collar crooks responsible for the war and ensuing chaos has been held accountable is an indelible blot not only on our country, but also on international law and custom, wrote McGovern. “After all, the US-UK attack on Iraq fits snugly the definition given to a ‘war of aggression’ as defined by the Nuremberg Tribunal, which labeled such a war “the supreme international crime, differing from other war crimes only in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”
And the evil has continued to accumulate; bedlam now reigns across large swaths of the Middle East driving millions of refugees into neighboring countries and Europe.
“That the US and UK leaders who launched the Iraq war have so far escaped apprehension and prosecution might be seen as a sad example of ‘victor’s justice’. But there are no victors, only victims. The reality that President George W. Bush and his co-conspirators remain unpunished makes a mockery of the commitment to the transcendent importance of evenhanded justice as expressed on Aug. 12, 1945, by Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, the chief US representative at Nuremberg: “We must make clear to the Germans that the wrong for which their fallen leaders are on trial is not that they lost the war, but that they started it.”
Added McGovern: “Maybe it is partly because I know the elder Bush personally, but it does strike me that, since we are all human, some degree of empathy might be in order. I simply cannot imagine what it must be like to be a former President with a son, also a former President, undeniably responsible for such trespass on law – for such widespread killing, injury and abject misery.
“It is something of a stretch, but I have tried to put myself into the shoes of the elder Bush. In them I find myself insecure and struggling – like Jacob – before his dream about wrestling with God. The story in Genesis shows Jacob is aware that he is at a pivotal juncture but is physically spent. Alone in the wilderness facing death, he collapses into a deep sleep, only to find himself wrestling all night with God. At daybreak he awakes with an injured hip; he is disabled but his life is spared. He had come to grips with God and, in the end, receives God’s blessing of peace. What author Meacham has written suggests to me the possibility that ‘the sins of the son are being visited on the father’, to reverse one familiar Biblical expression.
“In these circumstances, the tendency to require that thugs like Cheney and Rumsfeld bear their share of the blame seems quite human. And, to his credit, the elder Bush concedes ‘the buck stops’ at the President. But I sense him thinking – correctly, in my view – that without those two ‘iron-ass’ advisers, things would have been quite different. The son might even have paid more heed to the experienced cautions of the father and his associates.”
As the senior Bush knows, sins of omission can be as consequential as those of commission. Judging from what he is quoted as saying in Meacham’s book, it appears he decided to make a (sort-of) clean breast of things – okay, call it a Watergate-style ‘modified, limited hangout’, if you will. But, clearly, Bush has to be painfully aware that he was one of only a handful of people who might have been able to stop the chaos and carnage, had he spoken out publicly in real time.
He does hedge, saying, for example, that he still believes the attack on Iraq was the right thing to do. But this is a position he staked out years ago and, especially at 91, it may be too much to expect of him that he acknowledge the full implications of what he says elsewhere in the book about the misguided advice of ‘hardline’ Cheney and ‘arrogant’ Rumsfeld together with where, after all, the buck does stop.
This cartoon is from Guardian (john major and h w bush: The message is obvious)
“My take is that Bush Senior has not completed his wrestle with the truth and with the guilt he may feel for failing to warn the rest of us what to expect from George, Cheney and Rumsfeld as he watched it happen. The elder Bush did use surrogates – including two of his closest and most prominent friends, James Baker, his Secretary of State, and Brent Scowcroft, his National Security Adviser, to speak out against the war.
“To be brutally candid, it is a little late for the family patriarch to be telling us all this – while blaming the Iraq debacle mostly on Cheney and Rumsfeld, quintessentially blameworthy though they are.
“Worst still, if is to be believed, Bush senior had guilty foreknowledge of the war-crime attack on Iraq. George W. Bush divulges this in his 2014 paean to his father, 41: A Portrait of My Father. (More cynical friends suggest that his panegyric should be construed as a benign pre-emptive move to prevent the father from blabbing to his biographer.)
“GWB includes the following about plans to attack Iraq: ‘We both knew that this was a decision that only the President can make. We did talk about the issue, however. Over Christmas 2002, at Camp David, I did give Dad an update on our strategy’.”
By then the die had been cast.
ThinkWorth 