Deja vu: Poppy also thwarted a last-minute plan to avoid war

[charlie]

Does the news of Dubya's rejection of avenues of settlement other than war sound familiar? We've been here before, in Poppy's Gulf War.

Bush was nervous about Gorbachev's inroads toward brokering a withdrawal. Schwarzkopf was keen to spare his soldiers lives by avoiding a full-on assault and was amenable to efforts to engineer a pullout. He was lead to believe that Powell shared his concerns and was making good-faith pitches for a ceasefire.

Bush couldn't risk flat-out repudiating Gorbachev's efforts, so Powell saved his boss' ass with an idea -- accept the proposed plan, but shrink the window of withdrawal to a point where the Iraqis couldn't comply:

On Feb. 21, 1991, the two generals (Powell and Schwarzkopf) hammered out a cease-fire proposal for presentation to the National Security Council. That last-minute peace deal would have given Iraqi forces one week to march out of Kuwait while leaving their armor and heavy equipment behind. Schwarzkopf thought he had Powell’s commitment to pitch the plan at the White House.

...

At the NSC meeting, Powell reportedly did reiterate his and Schwarzkopf’s support for a peaceful settlement, if possible. But sensing Bush’s mood, Powell substituted a different plan, shortening the one-week timetable to an unrealistic two days and, thus, making the ground war inevitable.

...

“We have to have a war,” Bush told his inner circle of Secretary of State James Baker, national security adviser Brent Scowcroft and Powell, according to Woodward.

“Scowcroft was aware that this understanding could never be stated publicly or be permitted to leak out. An American president who declared the necessity of war would probably be thrown out of office. Americans were peacemakers, not warmongers,” Woodward wrote.

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2000/122600b.html

There's plenty more in the article. Like his son, Bush was HOT to go to war and would not be thwarted.

Edit: Subject line change.

[charlie]

1. Kick

One-time kick, with a new title.

[Old and In the Way]

2. War Profiteers Must have their Wars..............

how else to make money on other people's suffering?

Here's a complimentary article about the lies GHWB used to get his war on.....it truly would be great to have a father/son stand for war crimes in the Hague, I think.

http://polyconomics.com/showarticle.asp?articleid=2240

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How You and I Got Snookered, Jeanne Kirkpatrick

Memo To: Jeanne Kirkpatrick, former U.N. Ambassador
From: Jude Wanniski
Re: Why We Supported the Gulf War

Holy smokes, Jeanne, I saw you on LateEdition with Wolf Blitzer yesterday, talking about what a bad guy Saddam Hussein was for invading Kuwait in 1990. But then you said he was about to invade Saudi Arabia too. I’m amazed that after all these years you still think Saddam was going to gobble up Saudi Arabia after he digested Kuwait. Do you remember how skeptical both of us were about why we should get excited about why Iraq went into Kuwait, when nobody in the neighborhood seemed to be bothered? You had written an op-ed, I recall, which is probably why you got invited to the Saudi Embassy for a briefing by Saudi’s Ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar, who is still there. I’d also written about why the United States should war with Baghdad when everyone knew the Kuwaiti Emir was stealing oil from Iraq and had driven the price of oil down to $11 a barrel by cheating the other oil producing countries on its promises to limit production. That’s how I got invited. I think we even shared a taxi from Empow

It was late August or early September, if I am not mistaken, because it did take a while for the Saudis and Egyptians to get their danders up after Saddam invaded Kuwait on August 2. The “evidence” that Saddam was about to hurl his military machine against the Saudis were photographs which Prince Bandar said he was shown in a Pentagon briefing, photos taken by “Naval Intelligence” which showed Iraqi tanks lined up at the Kuwait/Saudi border, ready to pounce! Wow, I remember thinking, this guy Saddam Hussein, who we backed in the war against Iran, turns out to be a Hitler after all. So did you. And we got behind President Bush and Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and his deputy secretary for policy, Paul Wolfowitz, and cheered our troops on. A few days later, on September 11, President Bush told a joint session of Congress that "following negotiations and promises by Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein not to use force, a powerful army invaded its trusting and much weaker neighbor, Kuwait. Within three days, 120,000

It was only later I discovered I had been snookered, Jeanne, and so had you. I was sure you had learned those photographs we saw showed tanks that were nowhere near the Saudi border – and Saddam never had the slightest intention of going anywhere near it. This has been confirmed in several different ways in the years since, but the first inkling that the photos were not what they were purported to be showed up in the St. Petersburg Times (Florida) of January 6, 1991. Jean Heller, a Times reporter, wrote "Public Doesn`t Get Picture with Gulf Satellite Photos." She was interviewed last month, September 6, by Scott Peterson of The Christian Science Monitor after President Bush included the canard in his bill of indictment against Saddam in his United Nations speech. (We may hear it again tonight when he addresses the nation at 8 pm EDT). Ms. Heller told the Monitor “It was a pretty serious fib.” In 1991 she had written:
Satellite photographs taken by the Soviet Union on the precise day Bush addressed Congress failed to show any evidence of Iraqi troops in Kuwait or massing along the Kuwait-Saudi Arabian border. While the Pentagon was claiming as many as 250,000 Iraqi troops in Kuwait, it refused to provide evidence that would contradict the Soviet satellite photos. U.S. forces, encampments, aircraft, camouflaged equipment dumps, staging areas and tracks across the desert can easily be seen. But as Peter Zimmerman, formerly of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency in the Reagan Administration, and a former image specialist for the Defense Intelligence Agency, who analyzed the photographs said: “We didn`t find anything of that sort anywhere in Kuwait. We don`t see any tent cities, we don`t see congregations of tanks, we can`t see troop concentrations, and the main Kuwaiti air base appears deserted. It`s five weeks after the invasion, and from what we can see, the Iraqi air force h

On September 18, 1990, only a week after the Soviet photos were taken, the Pentagon was telling the American public that Iraqi forces in Kuwait had grown to 360,000 men and 2,800 tanks. But the photos of Kuwait do not show any tank tracks in southern Kuwait. They clearly do show tracks left by vehicles which serviced a large oil field, but no tank tracks. Heller concludes that as of January 6, 1991, the Pentagon had not provided the press or Congress with any proof at all for an early buildup of Iraqi troops in southern Kuwait that would suggest an imminent invasion of Saudi Arabia. The usual Pentagon evidence was little more than "trust me." But photos from Soviet commercial satellites tell quite a convincing story. Photos taken on August 8, 1990, of southern Kuwait - six days after the initial invasion and right at the moment Bush was telling the world of an impending invasion of Saudi Arabia - show light sand drifts over patches of roads leading from Kuwait City to the Saudi border.

<snip>

Like Father, like Son, like Son, like Son, like Son..........

[SpiralHawk]

3. The coconut don't fall far from the tree

Like father, like son.

"I'm also not very analytical. You know I don't spend a lot of time thinking about myself, about why I do things."
- George W. Bush, Aboard Air Force One, June 4, 2003