Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

Politics

Nemesis of father and son will haunt legacies

By Washington Post
Published December 31, 2006

WASHINGTON - The day after he ordered a cease-fire and brought the Persian Gulf War to a close, President George Bush ruminated about the status quo he had left behind in Iraq. "Still no feeling of euphoria," he dictated to his diary on Feb. 28, 1991. Saddam Hussein, he recognized, remained a threat. "He's got to go," Bush concluded.

It took nearly 16 years, but he's finally gone. And with Hussein's execution in Baghdad, so is the chief nemesis of the Bush family, a man who bedeviled father-and-son presidents. The arc of the Bush-Hussein relationship that shaped recent U.S. history finally came to a close with the snap of a noose.

If there is a feeling of euphoria, or satisfaction, or perhaps just relief, neither Bush is expressing it publicly this weekend. President Bush went to bed Friday night without waiting for the execution and left it to an aide to release a statement praising the Iraqi people for "bringing Saddam Hussein to justice." His father remained silent.

But Hussein's death removed only the man. The violent forces unleashed by the struggle to end his regime remain.

The execution comes as the president searches for a new strategy to turn around a war he says the United States is not winning. The cost of overthrowing Hussein and ending his reign of terror continues to mount, and few in Washington hold out faith that will change anytime soon.

"The sacrifice has been worth it," Bush said at a year-end news conference nine days before the execution. A few moments later, he added: "I haven't questioned whether or not it was right to take Saddam Hussein out." He stopped himself. "I mean, I've questioned it - I've come to the conclusion that it was the right decision."

Bush and other architects of the war have long maintained it was nothing personal. "I personally never thought of it that way nor did I think the president saw it that way," said Douglas Feith, the former undersecretary of defense, who was a key player in going to war. "When Saddam was talked about, he was talked about as a threat to the United States, not as a personal problem of the Bush family."

Ron Kaufman, a White House aide to the first President Bush, said his ex-boss does not dwell on Hussein. "I'm sure like most Americans he'll be glad the guy's gone," he said. "The world'll be a better place now, a safer place. But I don't think he'll spend any more time thinking about it than you or I."

Yet the history of animosity between the Bushes and Hussein is hard to ignore. The relationship began as one of pragmatic friendship in the 1980s, when Hussein was at war with the main U.S. enemy in the region, Iran, and the elder Bush was vice president in an administration that offered him help. A 1992 New Yorker article suggested that Bush, through Arab intermediaries, advised Hussein to intensify the bombing of Iran.

Hussein soon became too much to handle. "People came to understand him as someone who was much less stable and someone who could not be trusted," said Craig Fuller, chief of staff to the elder Bush when he was vice president. Hussein's invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 proved a strategic miscalculation that put him and the Bushes forever on opposite sides.

The elder Bush wrongly assumed that Iraqis would overthrow Hussein, and he decided not to march to Baghdad after freeing Kuwait. In April 1993, when Bush went to Kuwait for a hero's welcome, a group of Iraqis crossed the border in what was called a thwarted attempt to blow him up. President Bill Clinton launched 23 Tomahawk missiles against Iraqi targets in retaliation.

Among those on that trip who could have been killed were Barbara Bush and Laura Bush. The younger Bush had stayed in Texas, where he was running the Texas Rangers baseball team and preparing to run for governor. Some later questioned the seriousness of the assassination attempt or its connections to Baghdad.

By the time the younger Bush ran for president, he appeared determined not to repeat the mistake he believed his father made with Hussein. "No one envisioned him still standing," the candidate told BBC in November 1999. "It's time to finish the task."

At a debate a couple weeks later, Bush was more explicit. "If I found that in any way, shape, or form that he was developing weapons of mass destruction, I'd take him out," he said.

At Bush's first National Security Council meeting after taking office, he seemed to some aides ready to go. "From the very beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go," Paul O'Neill, Bush's first treasury secretary, later told CBS News.

In his White House study, the president keeps a memento - the pistol taken from Hussein when he was captured.

[Last modified December 31, 2006, 00:37:37]