W., borne back ceaselessly
WASHINGTON – During W.’s 2000 convention in Philadelphia, my sister showed up at my door. She was volunteering for the Republican nominee and carrying a “W. Stands for Women” sign. The hotels were sold out and she wanted to crash in my room.
I told her that she could come in but the sign could not.
I brought Peggy along for a meal with Johnny Apple, the Times politics and food writer who was known as a legend in his own lunchtime.
She asked Johnny if W. would win the presidency. I was interested in his reply because he had known W. and Al Gore since they were young, having covered their dads.
“Bush will win,” he told my sister in his booming voice, his napkin hanging from his neck like a bib. “And he will be a very popular president.”
I always think of that moment, and how 9/11 upended everything and what could have been different, on the rare occasions when W. pops up.
The former president gave a short eloquent speech in Dallas at the memorial service for five police officers murdered by a sniper. In a slap at Donald Trump, a man loathed by the Bush family, W. said: “We do not want the unity of grief nor do we want the unity of fear. We want the unity of hope, affection and high purpose.”
He is right that the world has had too much of the unity of grief, plunged into the random lightning strikes of mass shootings and terrorist attacks.
The reputations of W. and President Obama are getting a Trump bump, burnished by the contrast.
W. talked in Dallas about “finding our better selves.” If only he had found his in office. Instead, his ghosts are never far away. He must watch as riptides from his mistakes continue to rip up the globe.
A new biography, “Bush,” by Jean Edward Smith, makes the same points that Trump made when he shook up the Republican orthodoxy and tripped up Jeb – that W. ignored warnings before 9/11 and overreacted after.
“To argue that by taking the actions that he did, the president kept America safe is meretricious,” Smith writes, adding: “The fact is, the threat of terrorism that confronts the United States is in many respects a direct result of Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003.”
Speaking of meretricious, we finally got to see two long-awaited government documents last week.
The sterling former Sen. Bob Graham of Florida pushed the Bush and Obama administrations to declassify the notorious 28 pages held back when the 9/11 congressional inquiry was released in December 2002.
The section details suspicious ties between the hijackers – 15 out of 19 were Saudis – and other al-Qaida operatives to the Saudi royal family. In one instance, the first al-Qaida prisoner in CIA custody post-9/11 had a phone number that belonged to a company that took care of Prince Bandar bin Sultan’s Colorado home. The former Saudi ambassador was so close to the Bushes he was known as Bandar Bush.
If the 28 pages had been released back in 2002, the revelations might have helped stop the Iraq invasion by refocusing attention where it belonged: on possible real links between al-Qaida and Saudi royals, rather than the fantasy links between al-Qaida and Saddam pushed by Dick Cheney.
W. said releasing the pages back then would “make it harder for us to win the war on terror.” But now that we can see them, it’s clear that the reverse is true: It was the Saudis who repeatedly stymied U.S. efforts to crack down on al-Qaida in the years before 9/11.
The British government’s Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq War also finally landed – a 2.6 million-word report savaging Tony Blair.
In 2002, Blair affirmed his lap-dog bona fidos by sending W. a note saying “I will be with you, whatever.”
The British public deemed Blair a pariah long ago. But it took the British government seven years to conclude that Blair enabled W. to start a war on dodgy intelligence with inadequate planning to control the killing fields of a post-Saddam landscape, a landscape that eventually spawned the Islamic State.
Sarah Helm, the wife of Jonathan Powell, a top Blair aide in the ramp-up to war, wrote a piece in The Guardian recently about a conversation between W. and Blair. She said she listened with Powell on a crackly secure phone at their house one night in March 2003. A journalist, Helm took notes that she would later use in a play.
This is her account: Blair was still trying vainly to steer the president, who was cocky and impervious. W. told Blair he was “ready to kick ass.” He dismissed Hans Blix, the U.N. weapons inspector who could not find any WMD in Iraq, as “that no-count.” He praised Blair’s body language in pushing for war and urged the poodle prime minister to “hang on in there” and show “cojones.”
When Blair raised the objections of the French, W. mocked: “Yeah, but what did the French ever do for anyone? What wars did they win since the French Revolution?”
W. comes across as a naive, willful, spangly cartoon cowboy. Sometimes, when at last you get a peek behind the curtain, your worst fears come true.