President Bush delivers a statement after a meeting with the interagency team on Iraq Monday, June 12, 2006 in Camp David, Md. outside Washington. From left is Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
Source: The Atlantic
Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld can’t be blamed for the policies the president authorized.
Great news for Jeb Bush! Jon Meacham’s new book has just set off several more days of debate about his brother’s decision to invade Iraq.
In Meacham’s forthcoming biography of George H.W. Bush, the old man unloads on Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld for having wrecked his son’s foreign policy. The elder Bush says Cheney joined forces with the “real hard-charging guys who want to fight about everything, use force to get our way in the Middle East.” He accuses Rumsfeld of having an “iron-ass view of everything,” the kind of Bushism that makes no sense linguistically but conveys a mood: Rumsfeld was a foreign-policy militant and a jerk.
The elder Bush isn’t trying to let George W. off the hook. But that’s how many will interpret his comments. Which is a shame, because seeing him as an empty vessel into which Cheney and Rumsfeld poured their imperial militarism is wrong. Cheney and Rumsfeld may have provided the ideology that drove the United States to invade Iraq. But Bush provided the temperament. And that mattered even more.
In Meacham’s book, Bush 41 accuses Rumsfeld of “a lack of humility, a lack of seeing what the other guy thinks. He’s more kick ass and take names.” But those same qualities describe Bush 43.