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Ex pres bush dislikes rumsfeld { April 7 2003 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/07/national/07LETT.htmlhttp://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/07/national/07LETT.html
April 7, 2003
Another President Bush Watches on the Sidelines
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
WASHINGTON
On the opening night of the Persian Gulf war, Jan. 16, 1991, President George Bush unloaded his anxieties into a tape-recorded diary. "I have never felt a day like this in my life," he said. "I am very tired. I didn't sleep well, and this troubles me because I must go to the nation at 9 o'clock. My lower gut hurts, nothing like when I had the bleeding ulcer. But I am aware of it, and I take a couple of Mylantas. . . . I think of what other presidents went through. The agony of war."
A dozen years later, the first President Bush is closely watching the second gulf war, not from his son's White House but from "the bench," as he likes to say. Last Friday evening, the bench was his Houston home, where Mr. Bush was the host of a fund-raiser around the time that United States troops began encircling Baghdad.
"He was in very good spirits," said C. Boyden Gray, who was Mr. Bush's White House counsel. "I got there a little early, and he was chatting and flipping through the channels on the TV."
The 41st president rarely speaks publicly about what he thinks of his son's war, but that has not stopped people from talking about his influence. As the conflict has unfolded, the father has become the ghost at his son's White House war council, the phantom antihawk who never liked Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld but worships Secretary of State Colin L. Powell.
In certain circles in Washington, the first President Bush is even seen as the third member, with Mr. Powell and Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, of what Strobe Talbott of the Brookings Institution calls the "axis of virtue."
Conversations last week with a dozen of Mr. Bush's friends and close advisers turned up nothing to dispel the view of him as an internationalist worried about the influence of the go-it-alone hawks in his son's administration. He is most concerned, they said, about the need to jump-start the Middle East peace process after the conflict and about how the United States and the United Nations will sort out their conflicting roles in administering a postwar Iraq.
His views, they said, are exactly those of his closest confidant, James A. Baker III, who said last week that he would not comment for any article about what the first President Bush thinks of the second gulf war.
But Mr. Baker, who was secretary of state during the 1991 conflict, made it clear in an ABC interview last month that postwar Iraq should not be a battleground for a replay of the prewar fight between the United States, which now wants the central role in Iraq for itself, and allies like France and Germany, who want the central role for the United Nations.
"It's really important that the role not be such that the postwar administration of Iraq gets all wrapped around the axle, politically, the way it happened in the lead up to the war in the Security Council," Mr. Baker said. "We've got to make sure that there's not an overpoliticization of the question of the new government."
The 41st and 43rd presidents talk at least several times a week, but advisers to each man insist that the father never directly tells the son what to do. But that does not mean, the friends say, that the father does not have strong opinions. "I think he's genuinely conflicted," said one former aide to the 41st president. "The son's relationship to the father is one where he's still trying to prove his independence. And the father must intuitively know that, and if the father was to press a point strongly, he can intuit that it might well backfire. I can't imagine there has even been a conversation where the father said, `Hey, you're totally blowing it with the French.' "
So far, Mr. Bush's only public comments about the war have been totally in support of his son, even when he is asked why this White House failed to build the kind of international coalition that he did in support of the first gulf war. The situation was different then, Mr. Bush says, because the objective of driving the Iraqis from Kuwait was much clearer.
"I know we have differences with European countries, and they've got differences with us, some of them," Mr. Bush said in a speech in February at Tufts University.
But, he said, "I worked on those relationships, and I feel confident that when all this calms down, when Iraq lives within the international law, you will see the United States back together as allies and friends with both Germany and France."
He hated it, Mr. Bush added, when people criticized his son. "It hurts a lot more when they're criticizing, especially when some of the criticism is just meaningless in terms of having any intellectual base to it," Mr. Bush said. "I know there's a false stereotype out there that our president wants to go it alone, rush into war. That is totally false." In conclusion, Mr. Bush said, his son hated war, just as he did.
After all, in his tape-recorded White House diary of a dozen years ago, at the conclusion of the first gulf war, Mr. Bush said he had "no feeling of euphoria" when the fighting was over. America may have won, but Saddam Hussein was still in power.
"He's got to go," said the 41st president, now the ghost at his son's war council.
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