The fact is, George Bush has always been a pragmatist. This is not the first time he has watched from the sidelines as foreign despots trod on human rights. He stood by in 1989 as the Chinese crushed the pro-democracy movement in Tiananmen Square. He stayed silent as Lithuania tried to struggle free of the Soviet Union. Even in Panama, he did little as Gen. Manuel Noriega brutalized his people. Only when American lives were at stake did he invade.
In his first two years in office, Bush has practiced realpolitik as coldly as Lord Palmerston, the 19th-century British statesman who said that nations have no friends, only interests. Bush worries first about American interests, and only second about abstract notions of democracy and freedom. The confusion comes because Bush sometimes cloaks American aims in pieties about moral purpose. Bush is a product of the old foreign-policy establishment that always tried to provide a moral justification for its hard-nosed policies. Over time, of course, the establishment came to believe its own rhetoric. When John Kennedy vowed that the United States would “pay any price, bear any burden” to defend freedom, he set the country down the road to Vietnam.
Despite his expansive talk about a “new world order,” Bush reflects the more sober post-Vietnam view that the writ of Pax Americana does not run everywhere. He subscribes to the view of elder statesman George Ball, who once wrote that “God watched over every little sparrow that fell,” and the United States “could not compete with Him.” Bush regards Iraq as another potential quagmire. He doesn’t want to see the United States drawn into a civil war. Most Americans, Bush says, don’t want to sacrifice American lives to save Kurds and Shiites. So far the polls support this judgment: a NEWSWEEK Poll found only 27 percent in favor of military action to help the Iraqi rebels. A splintered Iraq, Bush believes, would just destabilize the region.
Bush is not insensitive, say his aides. “The president truly feels for these poor Iraqis,” says one adviser. “But he believes there is little he can do to help them.” Last week Bush belatedly requested a $10 million relief effort to aid the thousands of refugees fleeing Saddam’s Army. Air Force cargo planes will parachute food and medicine into the region, and the United States will establish a military hospital on the southern Turkish border to handle casualties inflicted by Saddam’s crackdown. Quickly thrown together, the aid program was designed as much to quiet critics of administration policy as it was to help the refugees. Earlier in the week State Department officials held largely symbolic meetings with Kurd and Shiite leaders. At the weekend Secretary of State James Baker flew off to visit the Turkish border. Through it all, Bush vowed not to send U.S. forces back into combat.
Bush seemed testy last week, jabbing his finger at a wire-service reporter who had compared his policy in Iraq to the Bay of Pigs in 1961, when the United States abandoned a force of Cuban freedom fighters trying to overthrow Castro. The president can be thin-skinned when he thinks the press is impugning his integrity. And he clearly had difficulty articulating his belief that once the revolt subsides, the ruling Baath Party or the Army will knock off Saddam. Bush is never comfortable in the bully pulpit, and he fears the public would fail to grasp the harsh logic of letting Saddam crush the revolt so the Iraqi Army can in turn overthrow Saddam.
Nonetheless, “the president isn’t losing any sleep over this,” says a confidant. Bush possesses his own inner righteousness, a belief that he knows best, at least when it comes to foreign policy. His privileged background and long resume have given him a sense of moral certainty peculiar to his class and generation. Challenged last week for giving only lip service to the Lithuanians and the Kurds, Bush snapped, “I think I was right in 1989, and I think I’m right now.”
His advisers point out that pragmatism can pay off in the long run. By not gloating over the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, Bush was able to win points with the Soviet Union that came in very handy during the gulf crisis. Beijing’s student reformers may still be in exile, but the Chinese did vote with the United States on the U.N. resolutions against Saddam. Bush’s men are counseling patience again: Saddam will fall, they say, without the cost of any more American lives.
Win, and the means will be judged honorable, wrote Machiavelli. The flip side for pragmatists is that there can be no honor in defeat. Bush, the old CIA director, will have some explaining to do if it turns out that the United States was running covert operations to incite the Kurds, and then pulled the plug to cut its losses. And if Saddam is still in power a year from now, Bush could have blood on his hands.
