10 Denouement
The truth is rarely pure, and never simple.
Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
Reagan’s popularity was such that George Bush, a man of small political
proWle and experience, had little choice but to run on the promise of
continuity with the great communicator (though upon election he pro-
ceeded, as steadily as he could, to distance himself from his predecessor).
The dominant public sentiment in 1988 seemed no longer one of injured
national pride, but fear of recession and unemployment,
1
and in the end it
would be Bush’s perceived inability to handle the economy that would
cost him a second term. Continuity meant, for Bush, reaping some of the
economic problems sewn but not ripened in the Reagan years, the budget
deWcit in particular. A Democrat-dominated Congress did not ease his
task, and he was saddled with his own campaign promise of ‘‘no new
taxes.’’
2
Continuity also meant that Bush’s own central commitments
remained something of a mystery. Earnest and hard-working rather than
inspiring, he seemed to have no clearly articulated moral purpose, no
vision of America, to which to harness his undoubted political ambition
and, consequently, he was often accused of ‘‘wimpish’’ indecisiveness.
This was part of the reason that Bush’s apparently brilliant foreign
policy successes failed to translate into votes at home. The larger story
was that the Bush presidency marked the deWnite end of the era that had
produced America’s moral crisis. With the collapse of the communist
governments of Eastern Europe and the fragmentation of the Soviet
Union itself, the old enemy simply disappeared, and with it the con-
solidating eVects that enmity had had, not only on America but on all the
nations of the First World. So much of the internal and international

to America, while historical and/or cultural alliances inevitably engaged
the US in North Korea, Taiwan, Ireland and Israel. A policy of mini-
containment persisted with nations identiWed as ‘‘rogue’’ – Libya, Cuba,
Iran and later Iraq – and in the Caucasus countries of the former Soviet
Union there were important new oil interests to be safeguarded. But what
of Bosnia, Rwanda, Somalia, Serbia/Kosovo and East Timor? Against
humanitarian responsibilities, a president had to balance his responsibil-
ity to an electorate that showed small enthusiasm for sacriWcing American
lives where American interests were not directly involved. America was
not willing to be, no doubt could not be, the world’s policeman.
Yet Americans could not simply turn inwardly isolationist once the
larger threat of nuclear rivalry had disappeared, for the United States was
now locked deeply and irreversibly into the world politico-economic
system. Moreover, its economic and military dominance automatically
gave it a leadership role that it would have to fulWll, albeit under condi-
tions that made leadership more diYcult than formerly. The developed
nations of the West that had relied on America’s aid, trade and nuclear
umbrella – while often simultaneously resenting the preponderant and
236 Moral capital and the American presidency
occasionally overbearing inXuence their dependency gave that nation –
were now in the process of establishing diVerent kinds of relationship
both with the United States and with one another. American power
though still preponderant was less hegemonic. Old allies became much
more recalcitrant about doing America’s bidding while still, nevertheless,
expecting America to show traditional leadership. Presidents had necess-
arily to devise more subtle, complex, Xexible (and indeed tactful) re-
sponses to cope with the demands for leadership that their power still
inevitably invoked.
Bush, who in his career had been an ambassador to the United Na-
tions, head liaison oYcer to communist China, and director of the CIA,

adviser Brent Scowcroft used the term ‘‘practical intelligence’’; George Bush and Brent
Scowcroft, A World Transformed (New York, Knopf, 1998), p. 35.
à See David Mervin, George Bush and the Guardianship Presidency (New York, St. Martin’s
Press, 1996); Charles Tiefer, The Semi-Sovereign Presidency: The Bush Administration’s
Strategy for Governing Without Congress (Boulder, CO, Westview, 1994).
237Denouement
the Gulf Wve days after Saddam’s invasion of tiny, oil-rich Kuwait, he who
put and held together the disparate international coalition that supported
and helped Wght the war, he who oversaw it strategically, and he who
terminated it when he judged his mandate fulWlled (there was little ‘‘wimp
factor’’ in evidence during this crisis). At home, his decisive action
revealed that the supposedly defunct imperial presidency was anything
but, and that the presidential prerogative in matters of foreign policy still
held. Bush (remembering the Johnson–Nixon years) made a conscious
eVort to consult with Congressmen and gain formal Congressional ap-
proval, receiving in the process some criticism from Congress (mostly
tactical rather than principled). Yet the crisis showed that Congress,
however much it might frustrate Bush on the domestic front, was still not
a reliably independent source of foreign policy. Over the Gulf, it virtually
acquiesced in traditional fashion to the president’s Wrm lead.
Whatever its intrinsic motives, the Gulf War was also eVectively the last
act of the drama that had begun decades earlier. It is impossible to
understand its course outside of the context of American post-war history
and, in particular, of the deWning experience of Vietnam.
5
Vietnam had
taught, for one thing, the importance of international backing for Ameri-
can actions, and Bush performed a remarkable and sustained feat of
personal diplomacy to build a United Nations coalition that provided
moral, Wnancial and military support. The most important lesson,

papered-over wounds of the past still went. The lengthy title of a piece by
Stanley Cloud in Time magazine said it all: ‘‘Exorcising an old demon: a
stunning military triumph gives Americans something to cheer about –
and shatters Vietnam’s legacy of self-doubt and divisiveness.’’ The pain
of the Vietnam memories, said Cloud, had somehow only increased with
the years, but the victory of US-led forces in the Gulf had defeated the
virulent old ghosts: ‘‘Self-doubt, fear of power, divisiveness, a fundamen-
tal uncertainty about America’s purposes in the world.’’ America had
demonstrated that is was not only powerful, ‘‘but credibly so.’’ American
servicemen were no longer baby-killers who had to ‘‘slink home’’ in
shame, but heroes who would return to ticker-tape celebrations. An
American marine in the Gulf took an old Xag, given him by a dying
comrade in Vietnam, and laid it before the gates of the Kuwaiti embassy:
‘‘a circle had been completed, a chapter closed.’’ What had made it all
work was a combination of ‘‘the rightness of the cause and the swiftness of
the victory.’’
7
Pride and virtue, in other words, power and goodness, had
at last been restored and reunited.
Once the initial euphoria had subsided, however, things did not seem
quite so clear-cut. At the root of the problem were the reasons given for
embarking on military involvement in the Wrst place. Bush, in keeping
with the Carter doctrine, had initially asserted the danger to American
strategic and economic interests represented by an expansionist Iraq
whose next target looked set to be Saudi Arabia with its massive oil
reserves. (One curiosity about this was that the main strategic interest was
tied to Cold War rivalry, yet the United Nations coalition had been
obtainable only because of the US’ much improved relationship with
Moscow.) Moreover, if America did not take up the challenge it was
certain that no one else would, having neither the power nor the will to do

was keen to push on to Baghdad) to halt at the border of Kuwait. Bush
correctly pointed out that expulsion, not invasion, was all the allied forces
had been legally sanctioned to perform, and he was bitter about the
‘‘sniping, carping, bitching, [and] predictable editorial complaints’’ that
followed.
8
He had, however, brought the criticism on himself – his moral
tale of goodies versus the big baddy hardly squared with such belated
legalistic propriety. It was as though the allies of World War II, having
pushed Hitler back behind the German border, considered their job done
and called oV the war. Worse, Bush had gone so far as to call for an
uprising against Saddam within Iraq with an at least implicit promise of
American support. This turned out not to be forthcoming when the
Shi-ite population of the South and the Kurdish population of the North
duly obliged with rebellion. Saddam proceeded to use the remnants of his
still powerful army to put down the uprisings with his usual ruthlessness
(this American betrayal was one of the central themes of a popular movie,
Three Kings, a decade later). It took some time for the realization to sink in
– A Bush diary entry quoted by Woodward, Shadow,p.188.
240 Moral capital and the American presidency
to the public mind that Saddam was not going to be toppled, perhaps for a
long time, perhaps ever. For months afterwards Americans watched as
Kurdish refugees huddled in the northern mountains of Iraq under the
tardy shield of American air power.
Apart from legality, there were any number of realpolitik reasons that
could have been adduced for non-intervention in Iraq: the prospect of
long-term American entanglement; the diYculty of setting up a friendly
regime with popular support; the consequent probability of accusations
of new imperialism and oVense to other Arab nations; the risk of creating
a power vacuum that would enlarge the inXuence of Iran; the connection

international sanctions caused suVering, not to the wicked regime
itself but to ordinary Iraqi men, women and children, and perhaps have
241Denouement
wondered at the moral complexities involved in taking an active stand
against evil.
Bush’s ending was not the clean and happy one that his story de-
manded, and his splendid victory soon began to taste of ashes. His
ratings, sky high in the immediate aftermath, began to decline steadily,
eventually to drop drastically when problems of the budget, the economy
and the tax hike set in with a vengeance. Reagan had managed to raise
taxes several times and still maintain his anti-tax image but Reagan had
had a reserve fund of trust that Bush did not – Reagan might lose some
battles (politics was like that), but no one doubted his life-long commit-
ment to tax reduction. Though Bush mouthed the Reagan rhetoric, in
him it sounded thin and unconvincing, and in fact his conservative
credentials were always rather suspect among Republicans. He seemed
lacking in Wrm prejudices, never mind principles. Though he had a
reputation for personal integrity, this, unsupported by the moral capital
that accrues from long and visible public adherence to a cause, proved
very vulnerable when he broke his pledge by signing the largest single tax
increase in US history to that date.
9
There was therefore little enthusiasm for his reelection in 1992, a year
in which America was troubled at home by murderous riots in Los
Angeles. Polls showed that Americans were by now only marginally
concerned with foreign aVairs, Bush’s special Weld, and Democratic
nominee Bill Clinton endeavored to capitalize on this preoccupation
(his motto for the campaign being, famously, ‘‘the economy, stupid’’).
But Clinton had a huge question of character already hovering over his
youthfully grey head, and was forced repeatedly to combat charges that