Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, February 15, 1991 TAG: 9102150652
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PAXTON DAVIS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
If that statement sounds frivolous, it is far from idly made - and made frequently in Washington these days by members of Congress as well as journalists and ordinary citizens who fear, but do not know how to state their fears acceptably in a war-feverish atmosphere, that the president of the United States may well be in the grip of a dangerous obsession.
That is the report, at any rate, of respected Washington correspondent Elizabeth Drew, who treats it at some length in her regular Washington letter in the Feb. 4 issue of The New Yorker.
Speculation about why Bush has pushed with such unremitting determination the vast military action now under way in the Persian Gulf area is rampant in Washington, Drew reports, though there is little agreement among the answers.
One school - evidently supported by the enormous majority of American citizens, to whom it was easily sold - holds that Bush has gone to war on principle, in this case the principle that Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait last August, and all that followed from it, must be resisted with military action lest Saddam prove another Hitler, Iraq another Nazi Germany bent on widespread conquest.
Drew does this theory justice, quoting a number of Washington and administration insiders close to Bush and his decision-makers. Among them is a White House aide who told Drew that on Iraq Bush "is unlike he is on any other issue."
"Usually," she quotes the aide as saying, "he sees the complexities, and doesn't care all that much. He didn't care all that much about capital gains. But this touches some deep inner core."
A corollary theory is that Bush's world view, and his view of the role of the United States in world affairs, is essentially influenced by the dicta of the late Henry L. Stimson, secretary of war under Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt, and secretary of state under Herbert Hoover. Stimson, a disciple of Elihu Root, was really the founding father of modern American globalism, spurning traditional isolationism in favor of a policy of strong intervention in world affairs. He was also a Yale man (like Bush) and the inspiration for many of the dominant figures in American diplomacy from the 1930s until now.
But there is also, Drew reports, a darker theory about Bush's passion for resisting Iraq.
Bush, by this view, is "proving something to himself and the world - showing what a tough guy he is. When he personalized the issue as one between him and Hussein, when he swaggered and did his Clint Eastwood routine, when he said that Hussein is `going to get his ass kicked,' he gave credence to the idea that he was proving something."
Members of Congress, not ordinarily prone to such theories, hold the view but are reluctant to discuss it openly, Drew says. An example is a senator who tells her, "We all know instinctively that this is not a strong man. It's greatly disturbing. I try not to think about it. I don't know anyone who's honest with himself who doesn't think this."
Another "important member of Congress"' told Drew that before the war began "a good many people" were concerned about Bush's behavior, about what he called Bush's "obsession" with Iraq, his "fixation" on it to the exclusion of everything else. A lot of people who met with him did get concerned." Perhaps, Drew suggests, "Bush was spoiling for a fight with Saddam Hussein."
These are, to be sure, speculations that may or may not prove founded in Bush's psychological state. A friend of mine argues that war in the gulf is simply Bush's "cynical" attempt to distract the attention of Americans from their real problems at home.
If my friend is right, Bush has surely succeeded, though at a cost in human well-being and destruction to Iraq and his own economy that is surely astonishing. America is gripped, as I do not remember seeing it gripped, by the same emotional imbalance.
But if my friend is wrong, if Elizabeth Drew and her contacts in Washington are right, then we are all in far deeper trouble than we seem able or willing to grasp. Nations have been ruined by the irrationality of their own rulers; Iraq is only the most conspicuous recent case. And the United States, despite popular views to the contrary, is not outside history.
by CNB