Will Papa Bush's Old Pals Prolong the Iraq Occupation?

By Tom Engelhardt, Tomdispatch.com. Posted November 22, 2006.

Things are always complicated. In the Washington Post, for instance, James Mann, author of Rise of the Vulcans recently suggested that it was far "too simplistic" to claim "the appointment of Robert M. Gates to replace Donald Rumsfeld [represents] the triumph of Bush the Father's administration over Bush the Son's."

Still, I prefer the analysis of Post reporter (and author of Fiasco) Thomas Ricks. When asked by the Post's media columnist Howard Kurtz whether a Newsweek headline, "Father knows best," was just "an easy, cheap Oedipal way for the press to characterize what's going on," Ricks replied: "Well, just because it's easy and cheap doesn't mean it's wrong."

At a moment when every version of the dramatic arrival of James A. Baker III and Robert Gates on the scene -- and the scuttling of Rumsfeld's Titanic -- is at least suspect, it's still worth considering the bare bones of what can be seen and known -- and then asking what we have.

Sooner or later, failure has a way of stripping most of us of our dreams and pretensions. So let's start with a tiny history of failure. George W. Bush's life trajectory of failing upward has had a rhythm to it -- and a rubric, "crony capitalism." Daddy's friends and contacts helped him into and -- after he failed -- out of the oil business, into and out of the baseball business, into and now, it seems, out of the failed game of global politics. His is, as the Boston Globe's Michael Kranish and John Aloysius Farrell put it back in 2002, "the story of a man who struck out numerous times before being bailed out by big hitters who often were family members, friends, or supporters of his father."

It's appropriate, then, that the man who bailed him out in Florida when he essentially lost the presidency in 2000, Bush family consigliere James A. Baker III, would reappear six years later, in the wake of another failed election, to bail him out again now that he's screwed up the oil heartlands of the planet. Daddy -- we're talking here about former President George H.W. Bush -- has three adopted boys: His former National Security Advisor (and alter ego) Brent Scowcroft, who went into opposition to the younger Bush's Iraq policy even before the invasion of 2003 and now lurks quietly in the wings; his former CIA Director Robert Gates; and Baker.

Like Daddy, Gates was deeply involved in, but never indicted for his dealings in the scurrilous Iran-Contra affair; was later involved in the tilt toward and arming of Saddam's Iraq against Khomeini's Iran, pioneered fertile territory in the late 1980s in terms of manipulating intelligence in the debate over the nature of Gorbachev's Soviet Union, had a hand in the first Gulf War, and most recently held the presidency of Texas A&M, where he was the keeper of the flame for Daddy's library. Could you ask for a better insider CV for taking over the Pentagon from one of Bush elder's rivals in the Gerald Ford era, Donald Rumsfeld?

We don't know how all this happened, but a little speculation never hurt anyone. Congress mandated the Iraq Study Group (ISG) to come up with some new recommendations for Iraq policy last March. Baker and co-chair Lee Hamilton began work in April. Iraq has been in an ever more horrific and bloodthirsty spiral downward ever since. Yet the ISG has still delivered nothing but promises of recommendations -- which Baker and others continue to swear will be no "magic" or "silver" bullet -- sometime in December or even January. Back in March, Baker insisted on getting the President, who initially seemed reluctant, to sign on personally. But the question is: What happened over the last eight as Iraq boiled? I think we have to assume -- and a cover piece in Time seems to confirm this -- that Baker, a distinctly hard-nosed guy, never intended to present a bunch of suggestions that Donald Rumsfeld could simply shoot out of the skies and so was stalling until his departure. (Time quotes a "Gates aide" as saying, "Baker wasn't going to let his report come out, so that Rummy could stomp all over it.")

Assumedly, he knew that, if his group took long enough, Rumsfeld would be gone and a secretary of defense more to his liking in place. Hence, the distant date for delivering "solutions." It's been, in essence, a stall. Everyone involved has claimed, of course, that Father Bush had nothing directly to do with all this and that Baker didn't even know, until the last second, that Rumsfeld was about to fall like a brick. I'd be surprised if that story lasted out the month.

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Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and, most recently, the author of Mission Unaccomplished: Tomdispatch Interviews with American Iconoclasts and Dissenters (Nation Books), the first collection of Tomdispatch interviews.

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