George H.W. Bush, RIP

I have written a lot about George Herbert Walker Bush over the years, and while I am saddened by his passing, I am sure that he, and his family, are glad he is with Barbara once again.  Our longest presidential marriage is an example for us all.  As was his sense of duty, honor, and decency, something that is too often missing in politics today.

But George H.W. Bush was more than a good man.  He was a good president.  Many of the obituaries talk about how President Bush went back on his pledge at the 1988 Republican Convention: “Read my lips, no new taxes.”  What they didn’t mention is why President Bush felt he needed to agree to a tax increase in the fall of 1990.  In October of 1990, there was a short government shutdown over the Columbus Day weekend.  By then, however, and following on President Bush’s statement of August of 1990 that Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait “will not stand,” U.S. troops were already beginning to deploy to the Middle East.  President Bush explained his decision to agree to a tax increase in order to avoid a further government shutdown as follows: “When push came to shove and our troops were moving overseas, we needed a fully functioning government.  I simply had to hammer out a compromise to keep the government open ….”¹  This is obviously an approach to government, and responsibility, that not many people in Washington, at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue, seem to have today.

While President Bush’s obituaries mentioned the Persian Gulf War, many did not give him sufficient credit for was his handling of the war – and especially its end.  The Wall Street Journal, for example, complained that President Bush left the Persian Gulf War unfinished.  We should have gone on to Baghdad and finished the job, throwing out Saddam Hussein, they said.  In response, I would offer these excerpts from a letter to the editor I wrote to the Chicago Tribune in November of 1991 (you can find the whole letter on the Tribune website here):

“Paul Greenberg`s recent column on Operation Desert Storm and his conclusion that the ‘one thing more impressive than the president`s taking the country into this desert war was his decision to end it’ demonstrated how important it is to have a president who is experienced in foreign relations and who knows his history well enough to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past.

The war in Kuwait reminded me greatly of the first six months of the Korean War.  Just as the totalitarian regime of Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, the communist regime in North Korea invaded South Korea, enjoying initial success.  In 1990, as in 1950, the United States worked through the United Nations to assemble an alliance of nations to stop the aggression and throw back the aggressor.

In Kuwait, we built up our ground forces and then attacked.  In Korea, we held the Pusan perimeter and then counterattacked.  In Kuwait we threw Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait in 100 hours once the land battle started.  It took a little longer in Korea, but with the invasion at Inchon, it happened quickly there too, and the North Koreans collapsed.

It was at this point that George Bush really showed that he had learned from history.  In both Korea and Kuwait, the euphoria of … overwhelming success led many people, including so many of the so-called ‘opinion leaders’ in Washington, to say that we should not stop … with the aggressors in power.

In Kuwait, these people urged President Bush to drive on to Baghdad and throw Saddam Hussein out of power.  In Korea, they said we should cross the 38th Parallel and reunite Korea.

In Korea we crossed the 38th Parallel and the war continued for 2-1/2 more years at a cost of tens of thousands of American and allied casualties, before we finally signed an armistice in July of 1953 with us at the 38th Parallel and the North Korean communists still in power.

In Kuwait we had a president who knows his history and learns from it.  When President Bush accomplished what he set out to do, to throw the Iraqis out of Kuwait, he stopped.  He did not change his goals once the war began. …”

Regardless of whether the decision to invade Iraq was right in 2003, it would have been wrong in 1991.  We had a goal that needed to be accomplished: Ensuring that aggression would not stand.  And we had an alliance to achieve that goal.  Once we did so, it was time to stop.  George H.W. Bush understood both that we needed to go in and that, once our purpose was achieved, we needed to stop, something that too many of his contemporaries did not.

Finally, there was President Bush’s greatest accomplishment.  Ending the Cold War and the division of Europe, peacefully.  Too many of the obituaries of President Bush talked about him “presiding” over the end of the Cold War, making it sound like it was something that just happened naturally, with no real effort.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  While Ronald Reagan’s policies may have won the Cold War, it was George H.W. Bush who won the peace that followed.  I have said this before, but it can’t be said often enough.  The Cold War did not end on autopilot.  The Cold War ended the way it did, peacefully and with the right of people throughout Eastern Europe to finally choose, for themselves, their own governments and their own alliances, because of the intelligent diplomacy of the United States.  Mikhail Gorbachev was necessary.  Helmut Kohl was necessary.  But George H.W. Bush, leading the United States and the western alliance, was indispensable.  What seemed unimaginable in January of 1989 wound up happening so smoothly that it seemed, even four years later, it could only have happened that way.  Which was the farthest thing from the truth.  Consider what followed World War I.  Consider what followed World War II.  Then consider what followed the Cold War.  This was not just George H.W. Bush’s greatest accomplishment.  It was one of the greatest accomplishments of U.S. diplomacy and leadership – ever.
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¹ George Bush and Brent Scowcroft, A World Transformed (1998), p. 380.