How the First Lady helped unleash Bush's dogs of war

Opponents of war with Iraq have accused George Bush of pursuing a personal vendetta against Saddam. But just how personal is it? JULIAN COMAN in Washington reports.

THE victory route through Kuwait City was scented with 100 bottles of perfume, donated by a grateful merchant. The blades of sword-dancers dazzled in the sunlight. Dozens of gifts were handed to the first President Bush as he made his progress through the crowds. Dancing girls swayed. The streets heaved. "Operation Love Storm" was proving a resounding success.

Two years on from the 1991 Gulf War, Kuwait was joyfully thanking its liberator, the man who had headed the coalition that drove Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. At his side - and this has only now come to light - was the woman George Sr refers to as "our Laura": the wife of his son, George Jr.

On that occasion, Dubya, who rarely travelled abroad, had stayed behind in Texas to find a new stadium for his Texas Rangers baseball team. But Laura had decided to go on the trip with her mother-in-law, Barbara, and brother-in-law, Neil.

It was only a week later, when the Bush clan was safely reunited in Texas, that the Kuwaiti authorities discovered Saddam had been planning his own welcome. The Iraqi leader's agents had recruited a crew of petty criminals who made a living smuggling whisky across the desert border between Kuwait and Iraq. On this occasion they had been given a deadlier cargo: 175lb of plastic explosive.

The plan had been to detonate the device in a Toyota Landcruiser, either when the Bush family arrived at Kuwait City airport, or when the president spoke at Kuwait University. The car bomb was big enough to kill every member of the Bush party, and many more besides. Humiliated and still enraged by his expulsion from Kuwait, the Butcher of Baghdad was desperate to settle scores.

It is said that Saddam's favourite films are 'The Godfather' saga, in which Michael Corleone warns his nephew: "When they come at you, they'll come at what you love." True enough. Saddam had come at what his enemy loved. And he failed.

Last September, at a Republican Party fundraiser, the current President referred to Saddam as "the guy that tried to kill my Dad". What has not been widely known until very recently is that Saddam is also the guy that tried to kill George Jr's wife.

Opponents of the coming war with Iraq have caricatured the President's confrontation with Saddam as dynastic score-settling. And they're right, up to a point. Beside the legitimate reasons for getting rid of Saddam, it is personal. What Mr Bush's critics didn't know is just how personal.

It now seems inevitable that, within a matter of days, bombs will rain down on Baghdad. But how did we get here? What brought us to the point where a president dismissed on his election as a weak-willed isolationist, an ignoramus without ideas or resolve, finally looked a murderous dictator in the eye and said: "Enough"?

The legal, moral and political case for war is familiar. But as the 17th century French author and moralist Francois de la Rochefoucauld said: "Great events which dazzle the beholder are represented by politicians as the outcome of grand designs, whereas they are usually the product of temperaments and passions."

So it has been with this President: a combination of chance, fate and - above all - personal evolution has led him to this moment.

When Laura Bush flew back from Kuwait in 1993, even she could not have predicted that such a moment would arise in less than a decade. No one in Texas considered George Jr a serious contender for the presidency: he was better known in Midland, the oil town in which he grew up, for the colourful, alcohol-soaked past for which he was still trying to make amends. There was the late-night gambling; the week-long drinking binge that left him staring at his vomit-stained reflection in the mirror, vowing to give up drink for good. There were the frat-house pranks at Yale and the Triumph convertible driven at speed around the streets of Houston. There were the drink-driving charges.

But what looked like the least auspicious CV for a future war leader was, in one sense, the best one. Through his closest friend, Don Evans - now Secretary of Commerce - Bush had started to attend a Bible-study group. In the words of an old friend of the President: "It was goodbye Jack Daniels and hello Jesus." Or, as Laura Bush put it at around the same time, George was "ready to be rescued".

On this side of the Atlantic, American religious life is too readily scorned as evidence of a lack of sophistication. British author and commentator Martin Amis last week went as far as to write: "Bush is more religious than Saddam: of the two presidents, he is, in this respect, the more psychologically primitive." This is to misunderstand the role that religious instruction of the sort the future president underwent plays in middle-class American life. It is the spiritual equivalent of personal training at the gym: giving practitioners - some, though not all, recovering addicts - a sense of order, focus and mental discipline.

Bush took to the strict Gospel regime and the emphasis on spiritual self-reliance. In particular, he developed a taste for the sermons of Oswald Chambers, the 19th-century Scottish Baptist, whose book 'My Utmost for His Highest' provides a strict calendar of daily devotional readings.

"Paul's idea of service was to pour our lives out to the last drop," reads one passage of the book, "and whether he received praise or blame made no difference." A well-thumbed copy still lies by the presidential bedside.

A year after the fateful Kuwait trip, George Jr ran for Governor of Texas and won. He trained his eyes on the presidency, inspired by a faith which, according to Evans, "gave him a desire to serve others and a very clear sense of what is good and what is evil". In December 2000, he was given that chance, becoming the first man since John Quincy Adams to follow his father into the White House.

It was then, rather than on September 11, 2001, that the countdown to the coming war on Saddam truly began. A myth has arisen that Bush is the gormless creature of a group of uncompromising hawks - Vice-President Dick Cheney, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz - who have steered him towards war like a mannequin. The better question would be to ask why Bush chose to surround himself with these people; why he appointed to such senior positions men known to believe that the principal threat to global security in the post-Cold War era lay in rogue states, their development of weapons of mass destruction, and the risk that such weapons would fall into the hands of terrorist groups.

The point is that Bush believed this, too. He had, after all, first-hand experience of the lengths to which America's enemies were willing to go. In his 1999 autobiography, 'A Charge to Keep', he wrote: "This is a unique moment in history. A generation after the sucessful struggle against an evil empire, a new generation of American leaders will determine how American power and influence are used. This is still a world of terror and missiles and madmen . . . Peace is not ordained, it is earned. It requires firmness with regimes like North Korea and Iraq, regimes that hate our values and resent out success."

This passage is fundamental to understanding the Bush of 2003, now engaged in a final, deadly stand-off with Saddam. It shows that the "axis of evil" was developing in his thoughts long before September 11 (and it quashes the rumour that North Korea was added to the "axis" at the last moment as a token non-Islamic state). It also shows that Bush had arrived at the same conclusions as Cheney et al long before he appointed them.

Above all, Bush's statement in the book shows that Iraq was firmly on his mind long before he became President: it was on the "to do" list. That said, his administration was split from the start on what, precisely, they had "to do". Secretary of State Colin Powell favoured a tougher sanctions regime. Wolfowitz favoured generous funding to Iraqi rebels, to foment an uprising.

"At that moment the President was like a missionary without a mission," says a senior Reagan administration official, who has close links with the Bush circle. "The zeal and the work ethic were there, but the focus wasn't."

All the disparate strands came together on September 11, 2001. The enemies of America had already attacked the President's family; now they had attacked the greater family of the American nation. Eight years after a murderous tyrant had tried to kill Bush's wife, an Islamic fanatic hiding in the mountains of Afghanistan was sending airliners ploughing into the great buildings of New York and Washington, with thousands of fatalities.

The personal and the public sides of Bush's life fused: the protector of a clan turned protector of a country.

The events of 9/11 spawned a cacophony of questions around the world, a global storm of anxiety and insecurity. But in the President the event brought only clarity and an unshakeable sense of purpose.

"Ever since the attacks he has only cared about one thing," a friend of Bush said. "George is a simple man and his one mission now is to protect the American people. And he's someone who is very good at concentrating on one thing, at keeping his focus. He's not profound, but a man like that can achieve a great deal because he's so single-minded."

This certainty has dictated his conduct with America's allies. It is a misapprehension to think of Bush as an irredeemable unilateralist: his State of the Union speech this year was peppered with tributes to "the strength of great alliances". What is true is that his commitment to protecting the American people is non-negotiable. In the summer of 2001, William Hague asked the President how he would deal with Europe's opposition to his Ballistic Missile Defence Programme. "I have a secret plan," he told the then leader of the Conservative Party, "I'm going to do it anyway."

The same philosophy has underpinned the journey that has led the President to the brink of war with Saddam. Knowing that the American people, scarred by Vietnam, are deeply wary of fighting such conflicts alone, he has tried, with the conspicuous help of British Prime Minister Tony Blair, to construct a "coalition of the willing". He has spelt out the doctrine of pre-emptive attack. He has gone to the UN. He has spent hours on the phone to his foreign counterparts. But he has done nothing to disguise his fundamental intention: He is "going to do it anyway".

Today, Bush must be feeling the loneliness of leadership as never before. But as his former speechwriter David Frum says: "There's a fatalistic element (to Bush). You do your best and accept that everything is in God's hands. If you are confident that there is a God that rules the world, you do your best and hope things will work out."

Those who believe in providence will say that Saddam's fate was sealed 10 years ago when he sent gangsters to assassinate his future enemy's wife, father and mother. "If I find, in any way or shape or form," Bush said on the campaign trail in January 2000, "that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction, I'll take him out." The candidate could scarcely have made himself more clear. What the world is about to find out is that this man is that rarest of breeds: a politician who means what he says.

In the summer of 2001, William Hague asked the President how he would deal with Europe's opposition to his Ballistic Missile Defence Programme. "I have a secret plan," he told the then leader of the Conservative Party, "I'm going to do it anyway."

Good for him, and good for America. I like Bush's style. I'm sure after he said that, he let loose with that goofy laugh of his. LOL.

And if there is a personal element to this, so what? Let's think about this as objectively as possible: an absolute dictator who has tens of billions per year in oil revenues, has tried (and probably still is) to develop atomic weapons, has developed and used chemical weapons against not only enemies, but his own citizens, is known to have weaponized biological agents, and then was so brazen that he tried to kill a former US President and part of his family.

I defy anyone to tell me that this SOB isn't one of the most dangerous people on Planet Earth. Take atomic weapons and combine them with what happened on 9/11, and you've got a recipe for not "merely" the murder of a few hundred thousand or a few million Americans, but the very destruction of this country, due to the effect that one or several such incidents would have on our economy and on confidence. Bush is doing exactly what any sane and rational leader would do: destroying Hussein's power, no matter whether it is popular or agrees with the position of various former allies of this country.

BTW, I will never forget the look and complexion of Laura Bush when GWB gave that speech in front of Congress on 9/20/01: she looked like she had seen a ghost - her own. She looked like she had been told what we're up against, by someone who needed to share his burden with the person closest to him. I have often wondered what, exactly, Mrs. Bush was so scared of that night.

Saddam delenda est!

unleash Bush's dogs of war

The statement, "Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war" doesn't have anything to do with animals or leashes.

The allusion is in reference to a catch or pawl on the spring of a catapult.

I know I'm being picky, but I have a hard time concentrating on the rest of the article, when the title reveals the author's carelessness.

"If I find, in any way or shape or form," Bush said on the campaign trail in January 2000, "that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction, I'll take him out."

Any one who who asks why we are going after Saddam now, or that is is blood for oil, certainly didn't pay attention during the election campaign. This quote should receive much more publicity in the media.

I liked this article a great deal, it disspells some important myths on GWB's motivations, and shows a clear consistent stance.

I wonder if Carl Rove was taking polls before announcing this plan over a year ago to see how it made people feel?

I wonder if the protester can relate to a man who doesn't make his decisions based on focus groups.

Eight years after a murderous tyrant had tried to kill Bush's wife, an Islamic fanatic hiding in the mountains of Afghanistan was sending airliners ploughing into the great buildings of New York and Washington, with thousands of fatalities.

Laura was a target AGAIN on 9/11, she was on Capitol Hill for meetings with Ted Kennedy, and many believe Flight 93 was headed to DC to hit the Capitol.

I know I'm being picky, but I have a hard time concentrating on the rest of the article, when the title reveals the author's carelessness.

Normally I would agree, especially since research and correlation of the facts of a news article seems to be a lost art. But, I think it important to realize that there are many phrases like that one, that have a specific reference that has been lost.

For instance (try your hand at these):

Raining Cats and Dogs.

Carry the bride across the threshold.

Where did the name TANK come from for the Military Tanks?

Where did the term 'cold war' come from?

Most people do not know the original 'meaning' of these terms.

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