Listen To Your Father, Mr. President
This is a very scary time. In listening to the President speak the other night, I was struck with his constant stressing that we are going to Iraq to force a change of regime to save innocent lives. And yet, to do this, how many lives of our innocents will be lost?
This is a war like no other. The American Revolution was a fight for freedom. The Civil War was a fight against oppression. In World Wars I and II we fought with allies against the invasion of other countries. But this war will be the first unprovoked attack on another country in the nation�s history.
This is where Bush the Dad and Bush the Son part ways.
W�s calm resolve and demeanor has traces of family DNA all over it. His steely, eye-of-the-storm serenity has strong echoes of his father�s emphatic declaration that Saddam�s invasion of Kuwait �will not stand� 12 years ago. Think big, fight hard; the younger Bush is still following his dad�s framed marching orders from when the patriarch was in the Oval office.
Like his father, this President Bush has kept the decision-making within a tight group of loyal advisers, all of them except Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld part of the original �Team Bush� in 1991.
Like father, like son? Not quite.
The elder Bush remembered the first
rule of a strong foreign policy: Diplomacy, diplomacy, diplomacy.
Bush Senior has kept a pretty tight lip, but chances are he�s aghast at his son�s insistence to go it alone. While at times stiff on the domestic stage, the first President Bush was a master of global charm in the international arena, bonding with fellow world leaders and then using his carefully cultivated relationships to build unprecedented allied resolve against Hussein.
At first, in the way in which the present President Bush looked deeply into Russian President Vladimir Putin�s eyes and found the soul of a good man, it appeared that he�d learned well at his father�s knee. While pundits had a field day, this warm-and-fuzzy diplomatic move produced a glue that can hold nations together during tough times.
Yet what has happened since 9/11 is a possible disaster for American diplomacy, one that even Secretary of State Colin Powell, a pretty good diplomat in his own right, may not be able to fix.
The present President Bush has succeeded, by deriding traditional allies, in putting his one true partner, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, in grave political danger. Combine this with Rumsfeld�s public comment that France and Germany are the �Old Europe� and you have a situation in which, at every turn you�re alienating the people you need. The widening divisions at the United Nations threaten to alter U.S. relationships with friends and rivals alike for years to come.
Even Dad, who had remained silent throughout the buildup to war, can�t hold his tongue anymore. In a rare public speech at Tufts University in Medford, Mass-achusetts on February 26, he seemed to be telegraphing his son to recognize the importance of friends on the world stage: �You�ve got to reach out to the other person. You�ve got to convince them that long-term friendship should trump short-term adversity.�
Listen to your Father, Mr. President.
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