Moral capital and the American presidency - Denouement

10 Denouement
The truth is rarely pure, and never simple.
Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
Reagan’s popularity was such that George Bush, a man of small political
proWle and experience, had little choice but to run on the promise of
continuity with the great communicator (though upon election he pro-
ceeded, as steadily as he could, to distance himself from his predecessor).
The dominant public sentiment in 1988 seemed no longer one of injured
national pride, but fear of recession and unemployment,
1
and in the end it
would be Bush’s perceived inability to handle the economy that would
cost him a second term. Continuity meant, for Bush, reaping some of the
economic problems sewn but not ripened in the Reagan years, the budget
deWcit in particular. A Democrat-dominated Congress did not ease his
task, and he was saddled with his own campaign promise of ‘‘no new
taxes.’’
2
Continuity also meant that Bush’s own central commitments
remained something of a mystery. Earnest and hard-working rather than
inspiring, he seemed to have no clearly articulated moral purpose, no
vision of America, to which to harness his undoubted political ambition
and, consequently, he was often accused of ‘‘wimpish’’ indecisiveness.
This was part of the reason that Bush’s apparently brilliant foreign
policy successes failed to translate into votes at home. The larger story
was that the Bush presidency marked the deWnite end of the era that had
produced America’s moral crisis. With the collapse of the communist
governments of Eastern Europe and the fragmentation of the Soviet
Union itself, the old enemy simply disappeared, and with it the con-
solidating eVects that enmity had had, not only on America but on all the
nations of the First World. So much of the internal and international

political structures of these nations had been premised, blatantly or
… See Michael DuVy and Dan Goodgame, Marching in Place: The Status Quo Presidency of
George Bush (New York, Simon & Schuster, 1992), pp. 18–19.
  Bush had the lowest success rate with Congress of any post-war president; see Charles O.
Jones, The Presidency in a Separated System (Washington, DC, Brookings Institution,
1994), pp. 114–115.
235
subtly, on the presumption of Cold War opposition that its disappearance
was bound to have profound, often unanticipated, eVects. America now
stood alone as the world’s only superpower in a swiftly changing world,
and the question was what, if any, sort of leadership it was going to give
that world.
Bush and American leadership
The complexity of the problems facing post-Cold War presidents, start-
ing with Bush, can be seen by comparing them with the previous era.
Given that foreign strategy must always involve some calculation of
power, interests and responsibilities (with particular actions, omissions or
interventions usually based on an estimate of likely consequences), it is
apparent that Cold War containment, whatever its shortcomings, had at
least the advantage of radically simplifying policy problems by fusing
interests and responsibilities: America’s interest in defending itself and
the West from communism was identical with its responsibility for doing
so, and the necessary application of its power was the guarantee of both.
Moreover, this outlook settled policy on a global basis, for there was no
corner of the world where ideological competition might not activate the
strategic imperative. But absent a rival superpower to be contained or
balanced, it became unclear whether America’s interests were involved at
all in many of the world’s trouble spots or what responsibilities it should
accept even if immediate interests were lacking. The proximity of places
like Haiti and Cuba meant that problems there had immediate relevance

to America, while historical and/or cultural alliances inevitably engaged
the US in North Korea, Taiwan, Ireland and Israel. A policy of mini-
containment persisted with nations identiWed as ‘‘rogue’’ – Libya, Cuba,
Iran and later Iraq – and in the Caucasus countries of the former Soviet
Union there were important new oil interests to be safeguarded. But what
of Bosnia, Rwanda, Somalia, Serbia/Kosovo and East Timor? Against
humanitarian responsibilities, a president had to balance his responsibil-
ity to an electorate that showed small enthusiasm for sacriWcing American
lives where American interests were not directly involved. America was
not willing to be, no doubt could not be, the world’s policeman.
Yet Americans could not simply turn inwardly isolationist once the
larger threat of nuclear rivalry had disappeared, for the United States was
now locked deeply and irreversibly into the world politico-economic
system. Moreover, its economic and military dominance automatically
gave it a leadership role that it would have to fulWll, albeit under condi-
tions that made leadership more diYcult than formerly. The developed
nations of the West that had relied on America’s aid, trade and nuclear
umbrella – while often simultaneously resenting the preponderant and
236 Moral capital and the American presidency
occasionally overbearing inXuence their dependency gave that nation –
were now in the process of establishing diVerent kinds of relationship
both with the United States and with one another. American power
though still preponderant was less hegemonic. Old allies became much
more recalcitrant about doing America’s bidding while still, nevertheless,
expecting America to show traditional leadership. Presidents had necess-
arily to devise more subtle, complex, Xexible (and indeed tactful) re-
sponses to cope with the demands for leadership that their power still
inevitably invoked.
Bush, who in his career had been an ambassador to the United Na-
tions, head liaison oYcer to communist China, and director of the CIA,

was something of a practiced expert in such relationships. Strategically,
however, he had no deWnite program to oVer. ‘‘Vision’’ was not his thing,
as he said, and his foreign policy tended to be conducted as elite diplo-
macy on a pragmatic problem-by-problem basis.
3
Given the splintering
eVect of the Eastern bloc’s collapse, and the inevitable uncertainty about
how the now scattered pieces of the jigsaw might be reordered, this was
perhaps a prudent way of proceeding.
4
Yet Bush, though not given to
Reaganite Xights of rhetorical fancy, shared with the former president
certain gut ideological instincts about America’s superpower status and
the need to counter with a Wrm hand aggressive acts against American
interests. America would not be kicked around on Bush’s watch any more
than on Reagan’s. Bush even Wnished some unWnished business of the
Reagan administration when, in December 1989, he ordered troops into
Panama to take down the troublesome drug-traYcking General and local
strong-man Manuel Noriega. This, however, proved to be little more
than a dress-rehearsal for the much larger show in the Arabian Gulf, the
most dramatic episode of Bush’s term of oYce and the most signiWcant
for the moral history being traced here.
Catharsis: the Gulf War
The Gulf War of 1990–91 was truly Bush’s war. It was he who made the
decision to resist Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein with military force if
diplomacy failed, he who began the deployment of American troops in
À His style was described as ‘‘patrician pragmatism’’ by Cecil V. Crabb and Kevin V.
Mulcahy in ‘‘The Elitist Presidency: George Bush and the Management of Operation
Desert Storm,’’ in Richard W. Waterman (ed.), The Presidency Reconsidered (Itasca, IL,
F. E. Peacock, 1993), pp. 275–330,atp.281. Bush himself and his national security

adviser Brent Scowcroft used the term ‘‘practical intelligence’’; George Bush and Brent
Scowcroft, A World Transformed (New York, Knopf, 1998), p. 35.
à See David Mervin, George Bush and the Guardianship Presidency (New York, St. Martin’s
Press, 1996); Charles Tiefer, The Semi-Sovereign Presidency: The Bush Administration’s
Strategy for Governing Without Congress (Boulder, CO, Westview, 1994).
237Denouement
the Gulf Wve days after Saddam’s invasion of tiny, oil-rich Kuwait, he who
put and held together the disparate international coalition that supported
and helped Wght the war, he who oversaw it strategically, and he who
terminated it when he judged his mandate fulWlled (there was little ‘‘wimp
factor’’ in evidence during this crisis). At home, his decisive action
revealed that the supposedly defunct imperial presidency was anything
but, and that the presidential prerogative in matters of foreign policy still
held. Bush (remembering the Johnson–Nixon years) made a conscious
eVort to consult with Congressmen and gain formal Congressional ap-
proval, receiving in the process some criticism from Congress (mostly
tactical rather than principled). Yet the crisis showed that Congress,
however much it might frustrate Bush on the domestic front, was still not
a reliably independent source of foreign policy. Over the Gulf, it virtually
acquiesced in traditional fashion to the president’s Wrm lead.
Whatever its intrinsic motives, the Gulf War was also eVectively the last
act of the drama that had begun decades earlier. It is impossible to
understand its course outside of the context of American post-war history
and, in particular, of the deWning experience of Vietnam.
5
Vietnam had
taught, for one thing, the importance of international backing for Ameri-
can actions, and Bush performed a remarkable and sustained feat of
personal diplomacy to build a United Nations coalition that provided
moral, Wnancial and military support. The most important lesson,

though, was the need to gain and keep American public support, and here
again Bush succeeded astonishingly well. The question of popular sup-
port dominated the conduct of the war. Bush assured the people that the
mistakes of Vietnam would not be repeated. Once the deadline he had set
for Iraqi withdrawal had passed and all diplomatic initiatives had failed,
6
‘‘Operation Desert Storm’’ commanded by General Norman Schwarz-
kopf proceeded in such a way as maximally to avoid allied casualties – a
long aerial bombardment using every type of modern ordnance to soften
resistance followed by a determined and swiftly victorious allied push.
Estimates placed Iraqi casualties at around 100,000 against a total of 188
Americans, only 79 of them in combat. Schwarzkopf expressed sincere
fatherly concern about preserving his soldiers’ lives, but underlying this
concern was the general belief that popular support would crumble if too
many troops came home in body bags. The press (to its intense annoy-
ance) was also tightly controlled as it had not been in Vietnam, so that the
news could not be ‘‘distorted’’ in the way the establishment believed it
had been in the previous war.
Õ See Crabb and Mulcahy, ‘‘The Elitist Presidency,’’ p. 282.
ΠFor why Bush had to have the war once committed, see Bob Woodward, Shadow: Five
Presidents and the Legacy of Watergate (New York, Simon & Schuster, 1999), pp. 184–188.
238 Moral capital and the American presidency
It was a stunning victory for the allies, for Schwarzkopf, and for Bush.
In the general euphoria, Bush forgot himself and started talking in
semi-visionary terms about a New World Order (naturally under
American leadership). In the joy and relief of the moment, the victory
appeared to have performed in actuality the healing of American
pride and virtue that Reagan had performed only in make-believe. Bush
himself exclaimed ‘‘by God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once
and for all.’’ The American reaction demonstrated how deep the

papered-over wounds of the past still went. The lengthy title of a piece by
Stanley Cloud in Time magazine said it all: ‘‘Exorcising an old demon: a
stunning military triumph gives Americans something to cheer about –
and shatters Vietnam’s legacy of self-doubt and divisiveness.’’ The pain
of the Vietnam memories, said Cloud, had somehow only increased with
the years, but the victory of US-led forces in the Gulf had defeated the
virulent old ghosts: ‘‘Self-doubt, fear of power, divisiveness, a fundamen-
tal uncertainty about America’s purposes in the world.’’ America had
demonstrated that is was not only powerful, ‘‘but credibly so.’’ American
servicemen were no longer baby-killers who had to ‘‘slink home’’ in
shame, but heroes who would return to ticker-tape celebrations. An
American marine in the Gulf took an old Xag, given him by a dying
comrade in Vietnam, and laid it before the gates of the Kuwaiti embassy:
‘‘a circle had been completed, a chapter closed.’’ What had made it all
work was a combination of ‘‘the rightness of the cause and the swiftness of
the victory.’’
7
Pride and virtue, in other words, power and goodness, had
at last been restored and reunited.
Once the initial euphoria had subsided, however, things did not seem
quite so clear-cut. At the root of the problem were the reasons given for
embarking on military involvement in the Wrst place. Bush, in keeping
with the Carter doctrine, had initially asserted the danger to American
strategic and economic interests represented by an expansionist Iraq
whose next target looked set to be Saudi Arabia with its massive oil
reserves. (One curiosity about this was that the main strategic interest was
tied to Cold War rivalry, yet the United Nations coalition had been
obtainable only because of the US’ much improved relationship with
Moscow.) Moreover, if America did not take up the challenge it was
certain that no one else would, having neither the power nor the will to do

so. Immediate public reaction, however, indicated an unwillingness to
risk a large-scale war for the sake, as it seemed, of oil. Bush therefore
promptly fell back on a simple story of an evil dictator with ambitions to
dominate the whole Gulf region, one who had cruelly invaded a small and
œ Time 137(10)(11 March 1991), pp. 52–53.
239Denouement
innocent neighbor to the accompaniment of rape, murder and pillage.
Bush went into uncharacteristic rhetorical overdrive. Saddam was like-
ned to Hitler – mad, bad and cunning, a megalomaniacal bully who
understood only the argument of force and whom it was dangerous policy
to appease. Public opinion swung Wrmly behind the president. The story
worked because Saddam was clearly a thoroughly bad lot (though no
more of one, perhaps, than some other leaders in the region), and he had
undeniably broken the cardinal rule of international law by invading
another country. Nor could opposition to him be interpreted as anti-
Arab, for Bush had brought on side several Arab allies, obtaining even
Syria’s acquiescence.
There were, however, diYculties with Bush’s simplistic moral scenario
that honest reporters soon began to point out. Saddam had, until recent-
ly, been an American ally, and large amounts of his sophisticated
weaponry and training had been provided by, among others, America
itself. This aid had been given, despite Iraq’s clear threat to Israel, in
order to assist Saddam in his long and fruitless war against neighboring
Iran, itself utterly demonized in American eyes by the hostage crisis and
the virulent anti-Americanism of its clerical leadership. This former
complicity with the enemy mattered less, though, than the aftermath of
the victory. The Iraqi leader had been portrayed in such Wendish terms by
Bush that it seemed expulsion from Kuwait would not be enough; only
his fall would bring long-term peace to the Gulf and relief to Saddam’s
own people. Yet Bush had ordered the allied forces (which Schwarzkopf

was keen to push on to Baghdad) to halt at the border of Kuwait. Bush
correctly pointed out that expulsion, not invasion, was all the allied forces
had been legally sanctioned to perform, and he was bitter about the
‘‘sniping, carping, bitching, [and] predictable editorial complaints’’ that
followed.
8
He had, however, brought the criticism on himself – his moral
tale of goodies versus the big baddy hardly squared with such belated
legalistic propriety. It was as though the allies of World War II, having
pushed Hitler back behind the German border, considered their job done
and called oV the war. Worse, Bush had gone so far as to call for an
uprising against Saddam within Iraq with an at least implicit promise of
American support. This turned out not to be forthcoming when the
Shi-ite population of the South and the Kurdish population of the North
duly obliged with rebellion. Saddam proceeded to use the remnants of his
still powerful army to put down the uprisings with his usual ruthlessness
(this American betrayal was one of the central themes of a popular movie,
Three Kings, a decade later). It took some time for the realization to sink in
– A Bush diary entry quoted by Woodward, Shadow,p.188.
240 Moral capital and the American presidency
to the public mind that Saddam was not going to be toppled, perhaps for a
long time, perhaps ever. For months afterwards Americans watched as
Kurdish refugees huddled in the northern mountains of Iraq under the
tardy shield of American air power.
Apart from legality, there were any number of realpolitik reasons that
could have been adduced for non-intervention in Iraq: the prospect of
long-term American entanglement; the diYculty of setting up a friendly
regime with popular support; the consequent probability of accusations
of new imperialism and oVense to other Arab nations; the risk of creating
a power vacuum that would enlarge the inXuence of Iran; the connection

of Southern Shi-ites with Iran (a Shi-ite Islamic nation); and the connec-
tion of rebel Kurds with Kurds demanding independence in Turkey,
America’s ally. Bush, however, could not publicly adduce any of them.
They did not Wt easily with his simple tale of good versus evil and evil
defeated. Bush had been caught by the American mythology, by the need
for American power to be seen to be used only for clearly and cleanly
virtuous ends, a need made more sharply acute by the wounding betrayal
of the myth in Vietnam. An action deemed necessary to defend American
interests was impossible without public support, but a plain assertion of
even justiWed American interests was judged insuYcient to secure that
support. Bush therefore had recourse to a fabrication, not quite a lie but
not at all the whole complicated truth; and the ultimate consequence was
not quite the annihilation of a triumph but its muddying with a further
dose of disillusionment.
Bush had reportedly been convinced of the need for prompt military
intervention by British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who had
herself acted decisively over the Argentinian invasion of the Falkland
Islands in 1982. Bush could hardly have been unconscious of the fact
that British success in that conXict had propelled her, hitherto one of the
most unpopular of prime ministers, to a landslide election victory in
1983 and continuing power thereafter. But, whatever the rights and
wrongs of that war, it had been conclusive: Thatcher had achieved
precisely what she had said she was going to do. Bush had stuck to the
letter of his mandate but not to the spirit of his rhetoric, and the resulting
lack of a satisfactory conclusion to the drama he had constructed rubbed
the shine from his achievement. Americans would be reminded of the
unWnished nature of the conXict in 1994 when Bill Clinton redeployed
troops to a newly threatened Kuwait, and again in 1996 when he
bombed Iraq to force it to comply with weapons inspection agreements.
Those who were paying attention would also have heard how continuing

international sanctions caused suVering, not to the wicked regime
itself but to ordinary Iraqi men, women and children, and perhaps have
241Denouement
wondered at the moral complexities involved in taking an active stand
against evil.
Bush’s ending was not the clean and happy one that his story de-
manded, and his splendid victory soon began to taste of ashes. His
ratings, sky high in the immediate aftermath, began to decline steadily,
eventually to drop drastically when problems of the budget, the economy
and the tax hike set in with a vengeance. Reagan had managed to raise
taxes several times and still maintain his anti-tax image but Reagan had
had a reserve fund of trust that Bush did not – Reagan might lose some
battles (politics was like that), but no one doubted his life-long commit-
ment to tax reduction. Though Bush mouthed the Reagan rhetoric, in
him it sounded thin and unconvincing, and in fact his conservative
credentials were always rather suspect among Republicans. He seemed
lacking in Wrm prejudices, never mind principles. Though he had a
reputation for personal integrity, this, unsupported by the moral capital
that accrues from long and visible public adherence to a cause, proved
very vulnerable when he broke his pledge by signing the largest single tax
increase in US history to that date.
9
There was therefore little enthusiasm for his reelection in 1992, a year
in which America was troubled at home by murderous riots in Los
Angeles. Polls showed that Americans were by now only marginally
concerned with foreign aVairs, Bush’s special Weld, and Democratic
nominee Bill Clinton endeavored to capitalize on this preoccupation
(his motto for the campaign being, famously, ‘‘the economy, stupid’’).
But Clinton had a huge question of character already hovering over his
youthfully grey head, and was forced repeatedly to combat charges that

he was not a man to be trusted with the presidency any more than
pledge-breaker Bush. Indeed, trust was a major and dispiriting theme of
the presidential race. Third candidate Ross Perot’s entire campaign was
built on distrust of the Washington establishment to which Bush be-
longed. The nation appeared to be suVering a deeper sense of disillusion
with its political system than ever before. An American Viewpoint survey
in March asked 1,000 voters whether they agreed with the statement that
‘‘The entire political system is broken. It is run by insiders who do not
listen to working people and are incapable of solving our problems.’’
Seventy-three percent agreed.
10
Uninspired by the regular party candi-
dates, the electorate Xirted with outsiders – Paul Tsongas, Pat Buchanan,
Jerry Brown, most of all Perot – as if longing for the traditional hero on
horseback who would ride into Washington and clean the varmints out.
— See Richard Brookhiser, ‘‘The Leadership Thing,’’ Time, 136(5)(30 July 1990), p. 72.
…» Cited in Martin Walker in Clinton, the President They Deserve (London, Vintage, 1997), p.
140.
242 Moral capital and the American presidency