"Bush murderer." "Bush Terrorist." "Bush baby killer." Those are just a few of the placards that have turned up in antiwar demonstrations over the past few days.
In the view of those who oppose him, U.S. President George W. Bush bears a heavy personal responsibility for the war in Iraq, "Bush's war" as they call it. In this view, Mr. Bush and a small group of right-wing advisers are imposing a radical new U.S. foreign policy that aims not just to overthrow Saddam Hussein's regime, but to remake the world in the American image.
In a way, it's not surprising that so much anger should settle on the person of Mr. Bush. He is, after all, the chief executive of his government and the commander-in-chief of U.S. armed forces. The decision to go to war was ultimately his and his alone.
Would another president have done differently?
Before laying all the blame at Mr. Bush's door, consider this little slice of history.
In 1998, after years of evasion and deception, Mr. Hussein had stopped co-operating with United Nations weapons inspectors. The U.S. president at the time called Iraq an "outlaw nation," and urged the international community to take strong action.
If "we fail to act, or we take some ambiguous third route which gives him yet more opportunities to develop his weapons of mass destruction ... he will conclude that the international community has lost its will." The result, he said, would be disastrous. "Some day, some way, I guarantee you, he'll use the arsenal."
The name of the president? Bill Clinton.
The intelligent, highly articulate Mr. Clinton was popular outside the United States in a way that the blunt-spoken, unsophisticated Mr. Bush is not. In substance, though, their stand on Iraq is all but identical.
After the UN inspectors left Iraq later in 1998, Mr. Clinton ordered a military strike against Iraq: Operation Desert Fox. True, his administration did not go all the way and order an invasion of Iraq, as Mr. Bush has. Mr. Clinton would never have been able to muster the political support for that, even if he had wanted it. Regime change became the official policy of the U.S. government. Mr. Bush did not invent that policy; he inherited it.
If regime change became a more urgent priority under his leadership, it was not because of the change of presidents, but the change of circumstances. The 9/11 attacks brought home to Washington the dangers that might be posed by its enemies, especially if they armed themselves with weapons of mass destruction. Conservatives like Pentagon adviser Richard Perle, who had been arguing for years for a more muscular approach on Iraq, suddenly had Mr. Bush's ear. Planning for war began at once.
Whether Mr. Clinton would have reacted differently to the attacks is impossible to say. The former president has been broadly supportive of the White House's Iraq policy, saying in February that Mr. Hussein is "going to have to disarm ... if he wants to avoid war."
This month, he has turned more critical. Mr. Bush, he said, should have done more to line up international support before going to war.
That is a frequent refrain of Mr. Bush's Democratic critics. They say he alienated other countries by going it alone on other issues such as climate change and the new International Criminal Court, thus assuring that those countries would not listen when push came to shove over Iraq.
That may be true, but Mr. Clinton was not always the paragon of co-operative internationalism either. He signed the criminal court treaty only in the final days of his presidency and he bypassed the United Nations to take his country into the 1999 bombing campaign against Serbia over ethnic repression in Kosovo (though, in that case, he had more allies than Mr. Bush has on Iraq).
Mr. Bush may rub people the wrong way. He may lack Mr. Clinton's impressive persuasive skills. But the idea that his Iraq policy represents a radical break from the warm-and-fuzzy multilateralism of Mr. Clinton is, as Michael Moore might say, fictitious.
1
