George Bush Sr. slams Rumsfeld and Cheney

[kscarbel2]

The Guardian / November 5, 2015

Former president claims hawkish reaction to 9/11 attacks and desire to ‘get our way in the Middle East’ hurt his son’s administration, says new biography

Former US president George HW Bush has hit out at Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, two of the most senior figures in his son’s administration, labeling them too “hardline” and “arrogant” in their handling of the 11 September attacks.

A new biography of the 41st president – Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey Of George Herbert Walker Bush – reveals that Bush Sr held Cheney and Rumsfeld responsible for the hawkish stance that “hurt” his son’s administration, Fox News reported on Wednesday.

The book, by Jon Meacham, is based on audio diaries that Bush recorded during his time in the White House, as well as interviews with the former president and his wife, Barbara.

Cheney served as defence secretary during George HW Bush’s 1989-1993 presidency and later as vice-president under President George W Bush. After 9/11, Bush Sr told his biographer: “I don’t know, he just became very hardline and very different from the Dick Cheney I knew and worked with.

“The reaction [to 9/11], what to do about the Middle East. Just iron-ass. His seeming knuckling under to the real hard-charging guys who want to fight about everything, use force to get our way in the Middle East,” Bush told Meacham in the book, which is due to be published next week.

Of his son’s role, Bush Sr told his biographer: “He’s my son, he did his best and I’m for him. It’s that simple an equation.”

But he criticised Bush Jr for allowing Cheney to build “kind of his own state department” and for the inflammatory language that infused the US response to the 9/11 attacks.

“I do worry about some of the rhetoric that was out there – some of it his [bush Jr], maybe, and some of it the people around him. Hot rhetoric is pretty easy to get headlines, but it doesn’t necessarily solve the diplomatic problem.”

He added that George W Bush’s infamous state of the union address in 2002, in which the then president warned of an “axis of evil” of Iraq, Iran and North Korea, “might be historically proved to be not benefiting anything”.

Rumsfeld, who was Bush Jr’s secretary of defense for most of his two terms, has so far not commented on the criticisms directed at him by the 41st president, who in the book calls him “an arrogant fellow”, adding: “I don’t like what he did, and I think it hurt the president.

“I’ve never been that close to him anyway. There’s a lack of humility, a lack of seeing what the other guy thinks. He’s more kick-ass and take names, take numbers. I think he paid a price for that.”

But Cheney told Fox News he took the “iron-ass” jibe as a compliment.

“I took it as a mark of pride,” he says. “The attack on 9/11 was worse than Pearl Harbor, in terms of the number people killed, and the amount of damage done. I think a lot of people believed then, and still believe to this day that I was aggressive in defending, in carrying out what I thought were the right policies.”

Cheney insisted he had enjoyed reading Meacham’s book. “The diary’s fascinating, because you can see how he felt at various key moments of his life. So I’m enjoying the book. I recommend it to my friends. And [i’m] proud to be a part of it.”

But he dismissed claims leveled by the former president that Lynne Cheney, his wife, as well as his daughter Liz Cheney, had been the “eminence grises” behind his vice-presidency. “It’s his view, perhaps, of what happened, but my family was not conspiring to somehow turn me into a tougher, more hard-nosed individual.

“I got there all by myself.”

George W Bush said his father “would never say to me: ‘Hey, you need to rein in Cheney. He’s ruining your administration.’ It would be out of character for him to do that.

“I made the decisions. This was my philosophy.

“It is true that my rhetoric could get pretty strong and that may have bothered some people. Obviously it did, including Dad, though he never mentioned it.”

[kscarbel2]

George Bush Sr book reveals a more dangerous Dick Cheney than anyone knew

The Guardian / November 5, 2015

Destiny and Power shows a VP with more authority than almost all his predecessors, making plain Bush Jr’s administration could have been even worse.

George Bush the elder is not the first father to blame his son’s mistakes on the bad crowd he fell in with, and the counter to such paternal indulgence is always the same: the son has an important say on the friends he chooses, especially when he happens to be the US president.

The personal quotes in the new biography of George HW Bush, Destiny and Power: the American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush by Jon Meacham, show he has neither given up his long struggle with English syntax, nor abandoned his protective feelings towards his son and successor in the White House.

It is another public window into a family wrestling with the most toxic legacies of the junior Bush’s presidency, the Iraq invasion and torture, and it comes after a series of episodes on the Republican primary trail in which Jeb Bush has tried to dodge a definitive verdict on his elder brother’s exploits. Both father and brother have sought to create distance without appearing to throw a close family member under a bus.

For Bush Sr, the dilemma is all the more agonising as some of the White House advisers he now criticises are former employees he bequeathed to his son. Dick Cheney had been his defence secretary, and Condoleezza Rice was a Russian specialist in the first Bush White House and protege of Brent Scowcroft, the elder Bush’s national security adviser and friend.

The two were part of a group of foreign and security policy advisers that Bush Jr gathered around him during the 2000 election campaign. They called themselves “the Vulcans”, not as a tribute to Spock, but to demonstrate they were as tough (or as Bush Sr might say, “iron-ass”) as the Roman god of fire. The Vulcans who huddled at Bush’s Texas ranch at Crawford also included the former and future defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and the man who would become his deputy at the Pentagon, leading neoconservative ideologue Paul Wolfowitz, as well as former top general Colin Powell, together with his close confidant, Richard Armitage.

The latter two would emerge as the doves in the Bush administration, but at the time, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice were also seen as embodiments of continuity, steady hands at the side of a presidential candidate vulnerable to allegations of inexperience. However, beneath the surface lay plans for radical change from the very beginning.

Even before 9/11, the younger Bush led his administration in a quite different direction from his father. While Bush Sr and Scowcroft cherished multilateralism and diplomacy, George W’s White House raised American exceptionalism to new heights, enthusiastically tossing US entanglements with the international community on the bonfire. The administration walked away from the Kyoto talks on climate change, and withdrew US support for the Rome statute establishing the international criminal court, going so far as to declare that it would “unsign” the treaty.

This unilateralist inclination was clearly the younger Bush’s choice. It was how he intended from the outset to make his foreign policy distinctive from his father’s. And it was this characteristic that made for such a dangerously volatile and over-reaching US response when the 9/11 attacks came.

There is no doubt that Cheney and Rumsfeld were given more licence and authority than almost all their predecessors once the “war on terror” began. Cheney was certainly the most powerful vice-president of modern times, with a large and assertive staff, something that Bush Sr draws particular attention to.

Cheney and Rumsfeld used their enhanced power to poison the flow of information to the president’s desk about Iraq and its supposed weapons of mass destruction. The vice-president even made repeated trips to CIA headquarters in Langley to bully analysts into producing more hawkish reports, while Rumsfeld’s Pentagon sucked up highly dubious “evidence” from Iraqi exiles and ideological freelancers. But, as even as the ever-forgiving father admits in Meacham’s book, it was President Bush who allowed Cheney to grow his own empire.

“I think they overdid that. But it’s not Cheney’s fault. It’s the president’s fault,” Bush Sr says.

“The buck stops there,” he adds, in a riposte to his own efforts to spread the blame for the fiascos of his son’s presidency.

Perhaps the most alarming revelation to emerge from the new Bush biography is the elder man’s recollection that while Cheney had been his defence secretary, he had commissioned a study on how many tactical nuclear weapons would be needed to eliminate a division of Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard.

Apparently the answer was 17, though a more profound conclusion is that Cheney was a more dangerous figure than anyone knew. It adds weight to reporting by Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker that Cheney also contemplated the use of low-yield nuclear bunker-busters against Iran’s underground uranium enrichment facilities. The more we hear about the George W Bush administration, the clearer it becomes that the global damage it wrought could have been even worse.