The Bush Center / YouTubeFormer President George W. Bush suffered a Freudian slip while delivering a speech from Dallas condemning Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The Russian president, said Bush, launched “a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq. I mean of Ukraine.” The audience fell silent as he realized the mistake. “Iraq too, anyway,” Bush muttered under his breath as awkward chuckles rippled through the room.
Rarely does the truth reveal itself so spectacularly and unintentionally.
Bush’s war was a mistake based on lies that resulted in many American and Iraqi lives lost, the virtual annihilation of the region’s Christian population, and the creation of an environment that allowed the murderous Islamic State to rise. Lieutenant General Michael Flynn admitted as much in an interview with Der Spiegel. “The historic lesson is that it was a strategic failure to go into Iraq,” he said. “History will not be and should not be kind with that decision.”
But Bush’s litany of foreign policy blunders extends beyond the East. He also helped make the war in Ukraine inevitable and subverted the efforts of those who attempted to avoid the tragedy that is now pressing its weight upon the world. This is an important but forgotten aspect at the root of the conflict.
Maurice Gourdault-Montagne, a former top foreign policy aide to late French President Jacques Chirac, recently revealed in an interview with Europe 1 how the Bush administration undermined its less belligerent European allies.
“(Chirac) was used to saying, since the end of the Soviet Union that ‘Russia is not a doormat on which you can wipe your feet,’” Gourdault-Montagne said. “And that was the way he looked at our partners which mistreated Russia.” With the Iraq disaster fresh in mind, Chirac was preoccupied with the balance of power in Europe and specifically with preventing tensions between Russia and Ukraine from escalating to blows. Chirac understood the Russian position but also cared about Ukrainian independence. In 2006, he sent Gourdault-Montagne to Moscow to meet with Sergei Prikhodko, a top Russian advisor on international issues. Ukraine was among the main topics of discussion.
Gourdault-Montagne helped sketch a plan for peace and stability to ensure Ukraine’s territorial integrity and sovereignty. It entailed “a reciprocal protection of Ukraine, by Russia on one hand, and NATO on the other; this would have been overseen by the Russia-NATO Council, which had been created in the early 2000s.” Chirac thought it reasonable because there were already neutral countries in Europe. Why not add Ukraine to that list? Gourdault-Montagne’s Russian counterpart was likewise intrigued by the proposal.
“‘It’s very interesting for us, because it solves the question of Crimea for us,’” Gourdault-Montagne recalled him saying. “He asked me: ‘Did you talk to the Americans?’ I told him: ‘Not yet, we wanted to feel you out first.’” But D.C. had different designs. According to Gourdault-Montagne:
Then I went to the Americans, to Condoleezza Rice in Washington, who was Secretary of State at the time, and who had been my counterpart during the Iraq War—I knew she was, I would say, hardline, but also sometimes pragmatic. Well, she told me, this was completely unexpected for me, she looked at my piece of paper, and she said: “You, the French, for a long time you held up the first wave of East European countries joining NATO, you will not hold up the second wave.” That is when we understood that the American plan was to, in the fullness of time, bring Ukraine into NATO, and in 2008 there was the notorious Bucharest Summit.
It’s important to note that peace was not merely a pacifist’s delusion. No less a hardened enemy of totalitarianism than Russian writer and Nobel laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn warned in 2006 that NATO was “preparing to completely encircle Russia and deprive if of its sovereignty.” He added: “Although it is clear that Russia, as it exists, represents no threat to NATO, the latter is methodically developing its military deployment in Eastern Europe and on Russia’s southern flank.” Even former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger cautioned against NATO expansion into Georgia and Ukraine in 2007, a point he bluntly reiterated later: “Ukraine should not join NATO.”
But caution was thrown to the wind at Bucharest in 2008, where the Bush administration meddled once more.
Just before the summit, Putin told then-Undersecretary for Political Affairs William Burns, now director of the CIA, about Russia’s concerns. “No Russian leader could stand idly by in the face of steps toward NATO membership for Ukraine,” he said. “That would be a hostile act toward Russia.”
Nevertheless, in a move that Putin called a “direct threat” to Russian security, the summit affirmed the NATO aspirations of the two at the behest of Washington and against the concerns of its European partners. The Bush administration had actually requested that NATO immediately begin the formal process of integrating the two countries, but Germany and France were opposed because they didn’t want to poke the bear. Indeed, Robert Gates, who served as secretary of defense in the administrations of Bush II and Barack Obama, later admitted in his memoir that “trying to bring Georgia and Ukraine into NATO was truly overreaching . . . that was an especially monumental provocation.”
Shortly after the Bucharest Summit, then-Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, emboldened by the support of NATO and his friends in the Bush administration, picked a fight with Russia over the breakaway region of South Ossetia. Though it has been memory-holed, an independent report commissioned by the European Union blamed Georgia for starting the war. “In the Mission’s view, it was Georgia which triggered off the war when it attacked Tskhinvali [in South Ossetia] with heavy artillery on the night of 7 to 8 August 2008,” said the Swiss diplomat who led the investigation.
Bush gave the world a taste of proxy war with Russia. Or, more precisely, as Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Herbert P. Bix put it, “the Russo-Georgian War exhibited the features of a proxy war pitting US-NATO imperialism against Russian nationalism.” Bix also came to the same conclusion as the report about who was to blame.
“When we try to clarify the basic facts of the war, we discover that virtually everything about it is contested, especially the question of who started it,” he wrote in the October 2008 issue of The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus. “But an abundance of published evidence disconfirms Georgian propaganda and indicates that Georgia’s President Mikheil Saakashvili provoked the war with encouragement and material support from the Bush administration.” Hundreds of civilians were killed in the fighting.
Neoconservatives like Bush are not known for their ability to reflect or feel shame. Before his slip in Texas, when asked whether invading a sovereign country is a war crime in the context of Russia and Ukraine, Condoleezza Rice said that it “is certainly against every principle of international law and international order.” While Rice remains blissfully ignorant of how hypocritical those words are in her mouth, there seems to be some guilt weighing on Bush’s conscience, like the pressing of God’s finger on his psyche. As it should, because he shares in the blame for the bloodshed unfolding in Europe.