Haltickling
2nd Level Green Feather
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This is from International Herald Tribune, 04/03/03, written by Maureen Dowd (New York Times). I found it quite interesting as it reveals a bit of the not-so-well known internal struggle within the Republican party.
Going schismatic
WASHINGTON The president and his war council did not expect so much heavy guerrilla resistance in Iraq. And they really did not expect so much heavy guerrilla resistance at home. But you can't have transformation without provocation.
.
This was a war designed to change the nature of American foreign policy, military policy and even the national character - flushing out ambivalence and embracing absolutism.
.
As two members of the preemptive Bush doctrine's neoconservative brain trust, Bill Kristol and Lawrence Kaplan, argued in a book-length call for battle, "The War Over Iraq": "Well, what is wrong with dominance, in the service of sound principles and high ideals?"
.
So it should not be a surprise that the troubled opening phase of the war has exacerbated territorial and ideological fissures in the administration and the Republican Party.
.
Democrats are muter than mute. But a dozen days of real war in the desert has turned the usually disciplined Bush crowd into a bunch of schismatics: There is internecine warfare between the "hold out a hand" Bush I team and the "back of the hand" Bush II team. There's a feud between Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and some of his generals and former generals, and animosity between the Pentagon - where Rummy, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Douglas Feith spin schemes for intimidating the world and remodeling the Middle East - and the State Department. Colin Powell and his deputies wince as old alliances shatter and the Arab world seethes, and mutter that there had to be a way to get rid of Saddam without making everyone on the planet despise America.
.
The Washington Post reported Monday that moderate Republicans were trying to show the president that hawks were giving him "bum advice."
.
The article was clearly referring to the Bush I realpolitik crowd of James Baker, Brent Scowcroft, Lawrence Eagleburger and Powell and his acolytes at State. These pals of Poppy Bush are alarmed that the Hobbesian Dick Cheney - who has been down in his undisclosed locations reading books about how war is the natural state of mankind - the flamboyantly belligerent Rummy and the crusading neocons have mesmerized the president with their macho schemes.
.
"There is a behind-the-scenes effort by former senior Republican government officials and party leaders to convince President Bush that the advice he has received from Vice President Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz … has been wrong and even dangerous to long-term U.S. national interests," The Post said.
.
One former senior Republican official noted: "The only one who can reach the president is his father. But it is not timely yet to talk to him." This raised the odd specter of the president's being dragged off from running a war and taken to Kennebunkport for a Metternichian outing in the family cigarette boat. Scowcroft and Eagleburger could pin W. down while Baker steered and Poppy explained the facts of international life.
.
The Oedipal struggle of the Bushes - a father who was an ambassador to the United Nations and an envoy to China, a globe-trotting vice president and an internationalist president, and a son who was a Texas governor with little knowledge of the world - was bound to be aggravated by an invasion of Iraq not sanctioned by the United Nations.
.
Here was a son acting to correct his father's "mistakes" in the first Gulf War, when his father did not think he had made a mistake, but rather a great contribution to history.
.
The neocons egged on Bush junior to war in Iraq by writing, as Kristol and Kaplan did, that Bush senior's foreign policy was "defective" and that Bush senior had urged Iraqi Shiites and Kurds to revolt and then, afraid that Iraq would break up, turned "a blind eye" when they did that and were slaughtered by Saddam.
.
When the Iraqi Shiites did not greet U.S. soldiers with flowers last week, as the hawks had promised, the stung warriors again blamed Bush senior.
.
"We bear a certain responsibility for what we didn't do in 1991," a senior American military commander at Central Command in Qatar told reporters.
.
Bush junior is busy trying to do something his dad thought he'd done. The title of Bush senior's book: "A World Transformed."
.
E-mail: [email protected]
Going schismatic
WASHINGTON The president and his war council did not expect so much heavy guerrilla resistance in Iraq. And they really did not expect so much heavy guerrilla resistance at home. But you can't have transformation without provocation.
.
This was a war designed to change the nature of American foreign policy, military policy and even the national character - flushing out ambivalence and embracing absolutism.
.
As two members of the preemptive Bush doctrine's neoconservative brain trust, Bill Kristol and Lawrence Kaplan, argued in a book-length call for battle, "The War Over Iraq": "Well, what is wrong with dominance, in the service of sound principles and high ideals?"
.
So it should not be a surprise that the troubled opening phase of the war has exacerbated territorial and ideological fissures in the administration and the Republican Party.
.
Democrats are muter than mute. But a dozen days of real war in the desert has turned the usually disciplined Bush crowd into a bunch of schismatics: There is internecine warfare between the "hold out a hand" Bush I team and the "back of the hand" Bush II team. There's a feud between Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and some of his generals and former generals, and animosity between the Pentagon - where Rummy, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Douglas Feith spin schemes for intimidating the world and remodeling the Middle East - and the State Department. Colin Powell and his deputies wince as old alliances shatter and the Arab world seethes, and mutter that there had to be a way to get rid of Saddam without making everyone on the planet despise America.
.
The Washington Post reported Monday that moderate Republicans were trying to show the president that hawks were giving him "bum advice."
.
The article was clearly referring to the Bush I realpolitik crowd of James Baker, Brent Scowcroft, Lawrence Eagleburger and Powell and his acolytes at State. These pals of Poppy Bush are alarmed that the Hobbesian Dick Cheney - who has been down in his undisclosed locations reading books about how war is the natural state of mankind - the flamboyantly belligerent Rummy and the crusading neocons have mesmerized the president with their macho schemes.
.
"There is a behind-the-scenes effort by former senior Republican government officials and party leaders to convince President Bush that the advice he has received from Vice President Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz … has been wrong and even dangerous to long-term U.S. national interests," The Post said.
.
One former senior Republican official noted: "The only one who can reach the president is his father. But it is not timely yet to talk to him." This raised the odd specter of the president's being dragged off from running a war and taken to Kennebunkport for a Metternichian outing in the family cigarette boat. Scowcroft and Eagleburger could pin W. down while Baker steered and Poppy explained the facts of international life.
.
The Oedipal struggle of the Bushes - a father who was an ambassador to the United Nations and an envoy to China, a globe-trotting vice president and an internationalist president, and a son who was a Texas governor with little knowledge of the world - was bound to be aggravated by an invasion of Iraq not sanctioned by the United Nations.
.
Here was a son acting to correct his father's "mistakes" in the first Gulf War, when his father did not think he had made a mistake, but rather a great contribution to history.
.
The neocons egged on Bush junior to war in Iraq by writing, as Kristol and Kaplan did, that Bush senior's foreign policy was "defective" and that Bush senior had urged Iraqi Shiites and Kurds to revolt and then, afraid that Iraq would break up, turned "a blind eye" when they did that and were slaughtered by Saddam.
.
When the Iraqi Shiites did not greet U.S. soldiers with flowers last week, as the hawks had promised, the stung warriors again blamed Bush senior.
.
"We bear a certain responsibility for what we didn't do in 1991," a senior American military commander at Central Command in Qatar told reporters.
.
Bush junior is busy trying to do something his dad thought he'd done. The title of Bush senior's book: "A World Transformed."
.
E-mail: [email protected]
We agree on something political? 
