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Invasion aggravates feuds at home

April 3 2003
By Maureen Dowd

President George Bush and his war council did not expect so much heavy guerilla resistance in Iraq. And they really did not expect so much heavy guerilla resistance at home.

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 pre-emptive Bush doctrine's neo-conservative brain trust, Bill Kristol and Lawrence Kaplan, argue: "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 Bush Administration and Republican Party.

A dozen days of real war in the desert have turned the usually disciplined Bush crowd into a bunch of schismatics: there is internecine warfare between the Bush senior team and the Bush junior team. There's a feud between Donald Rumsfeld and some of his generals, and animosity between the Pentagon - where Rummy and friends spin schemes for intimidating the world and remodelling 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 on Monday that moderate Republicans were trying to convince the President that the hawks had been giving him "bum advice" that could "result in further US estrangement from allies and international institutions". The article was clearly referring to the Bush senior realpolitik crowd. These pals of Poppy Bush are alarmed that the belligerent Rummy and the crusading neo-cons have mesmerised the President with their macho schemes.

The Oedipal struggle of the Bushes - a father who was an ambassador to the UN, an envoy to China 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 UN.

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 neo-cons 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 he had urged Iraqi Shiites and Kurds to revolt and then, afraid that Iraq would break up, turned "a blind eye" when they did and were slaughtered by Saddam.

When the Iraqi Shiites did not greet US soldiers with flowers and hugs last week, the stung hawks once more blamed Bush senior.

"We bear a certain responsibility for what we didn't do in 1991," a senior US military commander told reporters. "We let them down once. We're not going to do it again."




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