George H. W. Bush

This is technically not an obituary.  As I write this Mr. Bush is still alive although his health is poor.  And his beloved wife of 73 years, Barbara, has recently passed away.  It is not uncommon for the surviving spouse of a couple who have been close and who have been together for a long time to follow shortly thereafter.  So that's the reason for this post but not the point of it.

A case can be made (and I'm going to make it) that Mr. Bush (unless otherwise indicated I am referring to George H. W. "Bush 41" Bush and not George W. "Bush 43" Bush) had a front row seat to two extremely important inflection points in society.  In one case I am talking about the evolution of the Republican Party.  In the other I am talking about the Middle East.  I will address the political inflection point first.

I did a post on the history of the two main political parties a couple of years ago (see "http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2016/05/a-brief-history-of-political-parites.html").  But that was a "30 thousand foot" overview and focused primarily on the pre-1960 era.  Here I am going to focus on the period from 1960 on and spend most of my time on the Republican party.  But let me start a little earlier.

Both FDR and Harry Truman were wartime Presidents during World War II.  They fought the war from the White House.  But Eisenhauer was a WW II vet and a war hero.  Kennedy was also a vet and a war hero.  Johnson was not a war hero but he too was in uniform during the war.  And so was Nixon. And so was Ford.  The streak was broken by Carter who was a Navy man but not a WW II veteran.

But it resumed with Reagan and continued with Bush.  None of the post-Kennedy occupants of the White House saw combat until we get to Mr. Bush.  He was a fighter pilot who flew from the decks of aircraft carriers in the Pacific theater.  He was also the last World War II generation President.  As a group the World War II generation Presidents racked up 28 years in office.  That's an inflection point but I am going to fold it into my larger discussion of political parties.

If you review the transcripts of the Kennedy/Nixon debates in 1960 you will find that the policy differences are modest.  Generally speaking the Republican party was more fiscally conservative but neither party could accurately be described as spendthrift.  There was a big discussion about which party was more anti-communist but again both parties were very anti-communist.  There was a bigger difference on social safety net issues like Social Security (Medicare and Medicaid did not exist at the time).  But the Republicans had given up on trying to repeal Social Security or even scale it back.  And the issue of civil rights is quite instructive to the modern eye.

A lot of Republicans of the era were very socially progressive.  A lot of Democrats hailed from the "Solid South" and were very reactionary.  Kennedy won and had solid Democratic majorities in both the House and Senate but was completely unsuccessful in advancing any civil rights legislation.  All that changed when he was assassinated.  Johnson was a southerner and a master political manipulator.  He decided he wanted to pass Civil Rights legislation so he did.  HIs key to success was in talking key southern Democrats into not blocking the legislation.  Then he joined other Democrats together with liberal Republicans to pass the legislation.  He used a similar coalition to pass Medicare and Medicaid.

Johnson was followed in 1968 by Nixon.  By modern lights his political agenda looks down right liberal.  He passed Clean Air and Clean Water legislation.  He created the Environmental Protection Agency.  Johnson was considered a spendthrift for passing budgets with deficits that look tiny to modern eyes.  Nixon balanced the budget in one year and ran very small deficits the rest of the time.  This fiscal conservatism may have led to "stagflation", a stagnant economy with a relatively high level of inflation.  The only President since to deliver a balanced budget is Clinton.  He put Federal spending into surplus but George W. Bush immediately reversed that.

Before Nixon got into office in 1968 the Republicans decided to try something new.  Instead or running a moderate like Nixon in '64 they went with the very conservative for the time, Berry Goldwater.  He got pasted.  That was supposed to kill the conservative movement.  As we now know, it didn't.  It just delayed things.  In 1976 the moderate Ford ran against the moderate Carter.  Carter won.  This caused Republicans to take another look at the whole "conservative" thing.  Reagan, a conservative standard bearer, did well in the '76 primaries against Ford.  This was surprising because technically Ford was an incumbent.  And this sets us up for the showdown of '80.

In 1980 Mr. Bush had a resume to die for.  As mentioned before he was a "war hero" WW II vet.  He also had tons of experience both as an elected official and as a government bureaucrat.  So he had an extremely solid record to run on.  He had served in the House for two and a half terms.  He left his House seat early to become the Ambassador to the United Nations.  From there he moved on to chair the Republican National Committee, serve as Envoy to China before we had an Ambassador, and as director of the Central Intelligence Agency.  These are all high profile governmental positions with a substantial political component.  They showed him to be a committed Republican who knew how to win elections but who also had a high degree of bureaucratic and diplomatic skill.  What better resume could you ask for?

He ran as a moderate Republican and got trounced in the primaries by Reagan.  Reagan knew how to win elections.  But he was well known as a "hands off" administrator who was good at the big picture but poor with the details.  The primary season told Bush in no uncertain terms that he was out of step with the modern Republican voter.  He still had ambitions so he accepted the number two slot and was a loyal Vice President to Reagan for 8 years.  And his gamble paid off.  He secured the Republican nomination in '88 and went on to win the election.

But he had a big problem.  He was still a moderate and frankly didn't understand how conservatives thought.  So he brought in the former governor of New Hampshire and a doctrinaire conservative, John Sununu, to run the Whitehouse staff and did whatever Sununu told him to do.  But his heart wasn't in it.  This resulted in a presidency with a muddled agenda (something about "a thousand points of light" that to this day no one has ever been able to figure out).  And it was obvious to everyone he was faking it.  So conservatives didn't really trust him.  And that let a canny pol from Arkansas named Bill Clinton beat him in '92.  This defeat led Republicans to the conclusion that moderation was for losers.  Since then they have never looked back.

At about this time a canny operator named Newt Gingrich figured out there was a lot of money out there.  A lot of very rich people are very conservative and they are willing to spend a lot of money if they think they can get the results they desire.  So starting in the late '80s Gingrich made the rounds and raised a lot of money.  And he invested for the long run.  He put the money into political infrastructure.  He funded think tanks to come up with slogans and position papers.  He put together schools to teach people how to run campaigns.  He put together schools to teach candidates how to run and win.  He put together groups to find candidates who could front a modern campaign.  They had to look good on TV and know how to stay on message.

Democrats did well in '92 but Gingrich was ready in '94.  By then all this machinery he had put in place was up and running.  Republicans fielded good looking candidates with messages tailored for the TV era.  He even created a national theme, "the contract for America".  It consisted of a bunch of poll tested slogans.  Most of them (i.e. a "balanced budget" constitutional amendment) were bad ideas in reality.  But he didn't promise to implement them.  He just promised that his candidates supported them.  And it worked.  A lot of Republicans won off year elections.  They didn't actually implement anything but they talked about it a lot.

And at the same time conservative talk radio emerged.  This later morphed into the Fox News TV network, innumerable blog posts and web sites, etc.  All this provided a fan base that consistently supported conservative ideas and candidates.  And the whole thing was based on messaging and not actual results.  Mr. Bush was someone who was good at getting results but not so good at messaging.  He was also grounded in the real world with all the complexities, restrictions, frustrations, and inconveniences, that entails.  Catchy slogans win campaigns.  Nuanced arguments lose them.  Mr. Bush was not the last moderate Republican to be his party's standard bearer.  That honor goes to another World War II veteran and war hero Bob Dole.  But Dole also lost to Clinton in '96 and that was that.

Now let me move on to Mr. Bush and the Middle East.  One of the things that caused Carter to lose the '80 election was the Iranian revolution.  And specifically when the revolutionary government kidnapped all of our Embassy staff.  Carter made some bad moves (her should have immediately pushed back at Iran, hard) and had some bad luck (a rescue operation was botched).  Reagan capitalized on this.  So did Saddam Hussein.

In an attempt to make Iraq the preeminent Arab power he invaded Iran.  (Iran is Persian, not Arab.)  This resulted in a war that lasted nearly a decade and did great harm to both countries.  Iran was by far the larger country.  It had substantially more land area, a much greater population, and a much larger economy.  It should have rolled over Iraq with little trouble.  But the revolution had wiped out the Iranian military leadership.  The "human wave" and other extremely primitive tactics employed by Iranian religious leaders allowed Iraq to just barely hang on while costing Iran dearly.  Eventually both sides gave the enterprise up as a bad idea and signed a UN brokered truce.

But this left Iraq in bad shape.  It had essentially bankrupted itself in it's ill fated war with Iran.  In 1990 Saddam decided the solution to this problem was to invade Kuwait.  Kuwait was the opposite of Iran.  It was a small country in size and population but it had a whole lot of oil.  Militarily, this worked out very well in the short run.  The Iraqi army, now battle tested from the Iran war, rolled in and rolled over Kuwait in the blink of an eye.  Bush's initial response was "not our problem".  But he was quickly convinced that he had to act decisively.  And to his credit once the decision was made he did a bang up job.

He first assembled a coalition.  It included the U.S. and its traditional allies.  But it also included a substantial number of Arab countries.  Outside of Iraq, this was one of the least controversial wars.  Everybody was on board with the idea that we were the good guys and that Iraq was the bad guy.  The military offensive was well planned and a large careful buildup took place.  When combat commenced it was a smashing success.  It is generally referred to as "Operation Desert Storm" but it could also be called "the hundred hour war" because that's how long the active phase of the war lasted.

This event has almost completely disappeared from view so let me spend a little more time with it.  It featured some singular characteristics.  The first one is the one I have already noted.  It was a coalition effort.  An extremely wide assortment of countries signed up.  Efforts have been made to duplicate this since in Afghanistan (modest success), Iraq (failure), Libya (again, modest success) and elsewhere.  But Bush is the last US President to actually pull it off.

During the run up to the war I got a map of the region.  To my untutored eye the obvious strategy was what is called a flanking maneuver.  This is where you go around one or the other end of the other guy's army.  To the west of Kuwait is this giant desert.  It seemed obvious to use it to get around to the back of the Iraqi army (which by then was in Kuwait), cut them off from resupply from Iraq, and then attack them from the rear.

The US and allied forces achieved tactical surprise by conning the Iraqis into believing they would do something else, something quite a bit harder militarily to pull off.  The Iraqis fell for it and were completely surprised when the sweep through the desert to their rear took place.  Of course it almost didn't matter.  The US and allied forces were so effective that they almost completely destroyed the Iraqi forces arrayed in front of them even though this was technically a feint.

The other very impressive achievement was how happy all the allies were.  Every force from each part of the world was given a role in the war.  This let them shine.  Each country had no problem making their own forces look good.  So at the end of the war all of the allies were happy with how things came out and how they had been treated.  It was a masterful diplomatic performance.

Unfortunately, there were other not so positive outcomes.  This war featured some very large tank battles.  And what these battled did was what Pearl Harbor did to battleships.  It made it very apparent that the day of the tank was past.  The US and allied tanks did fine but that was because they had all this support from other units.  Pretty much every tank the Iraqis had, and they had a lot, was destroyed.

But only a few of them were destroyed by tank on tank combat.  Airplanes dropping smart bombs turned out to be extremely effective.  As did various shoulder mounted anti-tank weapons.  As did several other weapons.  A Predator drone mounting a Hellfire missile is a great anti-tank weapon.  And the drone/missile combination is much cheaper.  And the tank is ineffective at dealing with drones and missiles.  Nothing has happened in the more than 25 years that have now passed to change this calculus.  But US taxpayers are still buying new tanks for fantastic amounts of money because of pork barrel politics.

The main problem with this war is that it didn't actually settle much of anything.  The old government went back into power in Kuwait and returned to its old ways.  Saddam hung on in Iraq and stuck to his old ways.  And pretty much nothing changed anywhere else in the Arab world as a result of this war.  And one reason for this is something that Bush botched.  And it's something that is often distorted by partisans who discuss it.

As I said, the US and its allies succeeded in flanking the Iraqis.  That means that at hour 100 US forces were in control of the border between Kuwait and Iraq.  From there they could have pivoted and gone into Bagdad, the capital of Iraq.  This is the alternative that is repeatedly brought up and discussed ad nauseum.  Doing so would have made our Arab partners very angry as we promised that our mission was to eject Iraq from Kuwait and not regime change in Iraq.  And we now know what happened when we did go to Bagdad later.  The problem with only discussing this alternative is that it ignores other alternatives.

Once the US military was established and secure in the Iraqi army's rear a decision was made.  That decision was to allow unarmed Iraqi soldiers to return to Iraq unmolested.  They had to leave their equipment behand but they did not risk death or internment by heading for home.  This meant that Saddam lost a lot of equipment but his personnel losses were far smaller than they could have been.  Iraqi soldiers retuned in numbers sufficient to reconstitute the Iraqi military, a key component in Saddam's power structure.  We could have instead rounded up all of those Iraqi soldiers and put them in POW camps for six months or a year but we didn't.

The other decision Bush botched was his failure to institute a no-fly zone over Iraq after the ceasefire.  Saddam's grasp on the reins of power was very fragile in the immediate aftermath of the Kuwait fiasco.  But with his soldiers and his ability to overfly Iraq with jet planes and helicopters he was able to put down the resistance to his regime and retain power.

It is important to understand that there are three major sub-populations in Iraq.  There are Kurds in the North.  There are Shiites in the East (along the Iranian border) and there are Sunnis in the West (along the Syrian border).  Saddam was a Sunni but the largest sub-population were the Shiites.  So he represented a minority government.

As soon as the outcome was obvious the Kurds and the Shiites rose up in revolt.  (They did this in part because we encouraged them to do so in the run up to active combat.)  Saddam was able to put both down using air power.  The US could have bottled the Iraqi army up in Kuwait and enforced a no-fly zone.  If it had it is unlikely that Saddam would have been able to put both factions down.  Most likely he would have been able to put neither down.  Meanwhile, we could have maintained a position of neutrality.  "These revolts are an internal Iraqi matter."

The situation in Iraq quickly fell apart after the end of active combat and this substantially weakened Bush in a manner similar to what had happened to Carter a decade earlier.  And we are living with the international consequences if Bush's actions internationally just as we are dealing with Bush's political failure domestically.  The Republican party has continued to move further and further to the right.  It has also moved further and further away from facts and reality.  But the machine Gingrich created is so effective at delivering political victories anyhow that there is literally no pressure within the GOP to move to more moderate and reasoned positions.

Similarly, the Middle East has continued to deteriorate.  We don't know what would have happened if Saddam's regime had tumbled in 1990.  We certainly wouldn't have had the disastrous war in Iraq that started in 2003 and continues to this day.  Many people believe that the real reason George W. Bush went into Iraq was to prove he could fix what his father had screwed up more than a decade earlier.  Certainly no one has succeeded in assembling and managing a coalition like the one Mr. Bush assembled.  Every subsequent coalition is measured against it and inevitably found wanting.

The 2003 Iraq war has cost the US fantastic amounts of blood and treasure directly.  But our continued involvement has also meant that other options and initiatives have either been impossible or far more costly than they otherwise would have been.  So the Middle East continues to be an extremely unstable part of the world that seems most effective at destroying the dreams of those who live there, those who engage with it, and those who would like to have nothing to do with it but find they can't.  There is an old story from the world of business that ends with "the promotion of the uninvolved".  The big winners in the Middle East seem to be countries like China who have been for the most part uninvolved.  Everybody else has to a greater or lesser extent been a loser.