President Without a Game Plan
By William Raspberry
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A20668-2003Nov10.htmlMonday, November 10, 2003; Page A25
George Bush is not a dumb man. But before he decided to seek the presidency, he was willfully ignorant of international affairs -- or at least strangely incurious. How many Americans of his age, opportunity, means and family connection hadn't visited even London, Rome or Paris? His mind became a blank slate for a set of neocon ideologues, whose audacious goal was to reshape the geography of the Middle East, and the 9/11 attacks gave them their opening.
Someone has dug out and put on the Internet a fascinating passage from the first President Bush's memoir, "A World Transformed." The senior Bush is explaining why he didn't pursue and kill Saddam Hussein at the end of the Gulf War (the elisions are for space only and in no way change the meaning of the passage):
"Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq, would have violated our guideline about not changing objectives in midstream . . . and would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. . . . We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect rule Iraq. . . . There was no viable 'exit strategy' we could see. . . . Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations' mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression that we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different -- and perhaps barren -- outcome."
Yet for all the logic that says we shouldn't have launched this war, the fact is we did, and the problem now is how to get out before an unfortunate and deadly mess becomes a full-blown catastrophe. The last best hope seemed to have been to get the rest of the world to help us out -- with troops, money and an internationalizing of the occupation. But the president chose to behave like a headstrong owner, jealous of his power and irrationally committed to a losing coach.