wrbones
02-02-03, 12:49 PM
Myth III
Bush Wants War With Iraq Because of a Family Vendetta
By David Frum
Posted: Oct 23, 2002
ARTICLES
Daily Telegraph (London)
Published: Oct 23, 2002
Is the President out to avenge his father for Saddam's assassination attempt? In the third of a special series on common misconceptions about America, George W. Bush's former speechwriter David Frum examines the evidence.
In this security-conscious era, a visit to Number 10 is a shock to a White House alumnus. You stroll right up to a guardhouse barely 50 yards away from the famous black door, show a photograph of yourself, go through a metal detector, walk to the house and simply press the doorbell. Then, you are shown to a chair in the same lobby through which the Prime Minister himself must pass on his way in and out of the building.
Even the Governor of the State of New York is surrounded with more pomp than the elected leader of the world's fourth-largest economy.
Office space isn't everything, of course. An American president has grander premises, bigger motorcades and a snazzier plane than a prime minister. But compare the two leaders' legal powers, and it is the prime minister who is the Titan. A prime minister can, for instance, theoretically take Britain into war without either a vote in the House of Commons or a meeting of the Cabinet. Perhaps that is why it is possible for so many people in Britain to accept myth number three: that George W. Bush is recklessly leading America into one confrontation after another for weird personal or family reasons of his own.
When you ask certain senior British Civil Servants what they think of President Bush, they respond with a smile. It took me a while to learn how to translate that smile, but I think I understand it now. It says: "I am a professional and, while that notebook of yours is open, nothing you can say could possibly induce me to reveal my true opinion of that moron the Americans call their president."
This personal disdain for Mr Bush undergirds some very basic illusions about how the American political system works--and why it fights, when it fights.
In the media, the president is often described as "the most powerful man in the world". But that's not how it feels to him. His cabinet officers and judicial nominees must all be approved by the Senate, and any one senator can delay an appointment almost indefinitely. The president's budget is a mere suggestion that Congress rewrites at its pleasure.
Nor do presidents control their political organisations: four of the past seven presidents--George Bush Snr, Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford and Lyndon Johnson--failed to win re-election after a primary challenge from within their own parties.
Presidents have to worry about holding their cabinets together. If Jack Straw were to resign tomorrow--say, to protest about some action of Tony Blair's--it would be a 24-hour news story that would end with most journalists shrugging their shoulders and saying: "Poor guy gave up a good job."
If Colin Powell or Donald Rumsfeld resigned, however, they would tear the Bush Administration apart, as Cyrus Vance tore apart the Carter administration when he resigned to protest at the rescue mission in Iraq in 1980.
One clever British observer said to me: "Your system works the way ours did 150 years ago." What he meant was that the American cabinet--made up from the president's party and from people with strong independent power-bases in the country--looks a lot more like one of Disraeli's or Gladstone's cabinets than it does like the party council that surrounds the contemporary all-powerful prime minister. My informant may have overstated the case a little, but only a little.
Keep those facts in mind the next time somebody suggests, as so many British journalists suggested to me, that America's confrontation with Saddam Hussein is nothing more than the working out of a Bush family vendetta.
I'll concede that, like the others, this myth also contains its particle of truth. It is true that Saddam attempted to assassinate the first President Bush in 1993. It is true, too, that many Republicans criticised President Clinton for his weak response to the murder plot (he fired cruise missiles at the headquarters of the Iraqi secret police after regular working hours, so fewer people would be hurt).
continued
Bush Wants War With Iraq Because of a Family Vendetta
By David Frum
Posted: Oct 23, 2002
ARTICLES
Daily Telegraph (London)
Published: Oct 23, 2002
Is the President out to avenge his father for Saddam's assassination attempt? In the third of a special series on common misconceptions about America, George W. Bush's former speechwriter David Frum examines the evidence.
In this security-conscious era, a visit to Number 10 is a shock to a White House alumnus. You stroll right up to a guardhouse barely 50 yards away from the famous black door, show a photograph of yourself, go through a metal detector, walk to the house and simply press the doorbell. Then, you are shown to a chair in the same lobby through which the Prime Minister himself must pass on his way in and out of the building.
Even the Governor of the State of New York is surrounded with more pomp than the elected leader of the world's fourth-largest economy.
Office space isn't everything, of course. An American president has grander premises, bigger motorcades and a snazzier plane than a prime minister. But compare the two leaders' legal powers, and it is the prime minister who is the Titan. A prime minister can, for instance, theoretically take Britain into war without either a vote in the House of Commons or a meeting of the Cabinet. Perhaps that is why it is possible for so many people in Britain to accept myth number three: that George W. Bush is recklessly leading America into one confrontation after another for weird personal or family reasons of his own.
When you ask certain senior British Civil Servants what they think of President Bush, they respond with a smile. It took me a while to learn how to translate that smile, but I think I understand it now. It says: "I am a professional and, while that notebook of yours is open, nothing you can say could possibly induce me to reveal my true opinion of that moron the Americans call their president."
This personal disdain for Mr Bush undergirds some very basic illusions about how the American political system works--and why it fights, when it fights.
In the media, the president is often described as "the most powerful man in the world". But that's not how it feels to him. His cabinet officers and judicial nominees must all be approved by the Senate, and any one senator can delay an appointment almost indefinitely. The president's budget is a mere suggestion that Congress rewrites at its pleasure.
Nor do presidents control their political organisations: four of the past seven presidents--George Bush Snr, Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford and Lyndon Johnson--failed to win re-election after a primary challenge from within their own parties.
Presidents have to worry about holding their cabinets together. If Jack Straw were to resign tomorrow--say, to protest about some action of Tony Blair's--it would be a 24-hour news story that would end with most journalists shrugging their shoulders and saying: "Poor guy gave up a good job."
If Colin Powell or Donald Rumsfeld resigned, however, they would tear the Bush Administration apart, as Cyrus Vance tore apart the Carter administration when he resigned to protest at the rescue mission in Iraq in 1980.
One clever British observer said to me: "Your system works the way ours did 150 years ago." What he meant was that the American cabinet--made up from the president's party and from people with strong independent power-bases in the country--looks a lot more like one of Disraeli's or Gladstone's cabinets than it does like the party council that surrounds the contemporary all-powerful prime minister. My informant may have overstated the case a little, but only a little.
Keep those facts in mind the next time somebody suggests, as so many British journalists suggested to me, that America's confrontation with Saddam Hussein is nothing more than the working out of a Bush family vendetta.
I'll concede that, like the others, this myth also contains its particle of truth. It is true that Saddam attempted to assassinate the first President Bush in 1993. It is true, too, that many Republicans criticised President Clinton for his weak response to the murder plot (he fired cruise missiles at the headquarters of the Iraqi secret police after regular working hours, so fewer people would be hurt).
continued