Postwar Chaos: Bush's Undoing?
WASHINGTON — It's too early to suggest that peace in Iraq has already set some of the snares for President Bush that caught his father in 1991-92, although not having killed or captured Saddam Hussein could get politically hairy as the 2004 presidential season opens.
It's also too early to say that the end of hostilities in the Persian Gulf is leaving Bush exposed to new hazards, as the end of hostilities in Vietnam did to Richard Nixon in 1973 or the peace negotiations in Europe did to Woodrow Wilson in 1919.
Still, it's already possible to see Middle East circumstances falling into an old and unnerving pattern: victory on the battlefield metamorphosing into unexpected embarrassments in the diplomatic and geopolitical aftermath. There's a good reason. Wars typically unleash new forces, alignments and confusions that begin to emerge only as the shooting part of the conflict tails off.
That's happening again in 2003. The problems already visible -- revitalized Islamic terrorism, eroded U.S. alliances and credibility, the false premises of going to war and the ungovernability of Iraq -- may not develop quickly enough or harshly enough to defeat Bush in 2004. They could cost him his place in history, though.
During the 20th century, the U.S. fought five major wars: World Wars I and II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War and the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Four of the five gave the party in the White House victories to smile about when the armistice or peace was declared, but then left it holding the short end of the political stick. That came a year or two -- or four or five -- after unwise peace terms, postwar stresses, broken promises, diplomatic disappointments and war-related scandals had played out. Only the short Korean War, which can be considered part of the aftermath of World War II, doesn't fit the pattern.
Although history repeats only in outline, it's worth looking at the half a dozen factors that tripped up Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Nixon and the first President Bush to see how many of these factors may now threaten George W. Two for sure, probably three and maybe four.
Inept peace terms and arrangements undid Wilson after World War I, Roosevelt's Democrats after World War II, Nixon after Vietnam and George Bush after the 1991 Gulf War. Wilson's naivete at the Versailles peace talks in 1919 made him look like a fool once the French and British turned the whole affair into a cynical triumph of greed, recrimination and unworkable new national boundaries. FDR, sick for months before he died in early 1945, gave away too much to the Russians at Yalta, and public opinion soured over the next few years when much of Eastern Europe fell to the Communists.
