-Caveat Lector- >From http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/04/opinion/04DOWD.html
September 4, 2002 Who's Your Daddy? By MAUREEN DOWD ASHINGTON — In the Bush family, the gravest insult is to be called a wimp. When Newsweek published its "Fighting the `Wimp Factor' " cover about Bush senior when he was running for president in 1987, he was so angry he refused to talk to the magazine again until he had a meeting with the editors and the publisher, Katharine Graham. Mr. Bush even knew the precise number of times the word "wimp" appeared in the article. In his memoir, Bush Junior wrote: "My blood pressure still goes up when I remember the cover." The Bushes arranged their whole lives to put a veneer of Texas lock-'n'-load over Greenwich lockjaw. After he buried Iraq as commander in chief, Bush Senior assumed he'd buried the W-word. And yet here it is again, the nightmare from which it is impossible for a Bush to awake, hurled at him by his own son's supporters. As crazy Al Haig said Sunday on Fox, Bush 43 "has to be careful of the old gang. These are the people that created the problems in the first place by not handling Saddam Hussein correctly. . . . I'm talking about the previous administration and their spokesmen, Jim Baker, Scowcroft, and a very wise daddy who's not talking at all and he shouldn't." The pathologically blunt General Haig simply spit out what other conservatives imply: Daddy wimped out in Iraq and Junior has to fix it. You might think the United States would have an elevated debate before deciding to launch a major war against another country. But we've simply had a childish game of Chicken, with different factions sneering at one another: "You're a wimp!" "No, you're a wimp!" The clique of conservative intellectuals pushing the war has labeled Colin Powell and the Bush I crowd wimpy "appeasers." Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and Bill Kristol echo the message of Eliot Cohen, author of "Supreme Command": "As Lord Salisbury said, `If you ask the soldiers, nothing is safe.' To which the politicians must respond, `Neither is inaction.' " They paint the military brass as wimpy. "Powell did not want to do Bosnia," said a whack- Iraq'er. "The Pentagon was reluctant on Kosovo. On Iraq, Powell and Schwarzkopf dragged their feet on the first war. And the civilians are right this time, too. Iraq has had 11 years to comply with cease-fire arrangements on weapons of mass destruction." The military types snipe back that the loudly squawking hawks — Cheney, Wolfowitz, Perle — are war wimps. "All the generals see it the same way," said the retired Marine Corps general Anthony Zinni, a Powell adviser, "and all the others who have never fired a shot and are hot to go to war see it another way." And Senator Chuck Hagel, a hero in Vietnam, chimed in: "Maybe Mr. Perle would like to be in the first wave of those who go into Baghdad." (Maybe he would.) Giving a new definition of chutzpah, the conservatives pushing for war began taunting W., saying he had gone too far on Iraq to turn back now without being a wimp. "The failure to take on Saddam after what the president said," Mr. Perle said, "would produce such a collapse of confidence in the president that it would set back the war on terrorism." Or: Nice little administration you have here; pity if something should happen to it. The Bushies figured if they went after Saddam, whom they could find, as opposed to the vanished Osama, they would not seem wimpy. But the more the president let Dick Cheney make the case for him, the more he risked being seen as wimpy. He was saved only by the Democrats, silent all summer, too wimpy to take on the White House and carve out their own case on Iraq. It seems that Mr. Cheney now regards the end of the gulf war as a great historic gaffe and wants to earn his immortality correcting it. But the more Junior goes along with his vice president and surrogate Daddy and stakes his entire presidency on trying to finish the job, the more he underscores the contention that his real Daddy went wobbly. Last night conservatives were muttering that the inscrutable president was losing control of the debate. He could not simply persuade the Congressional leaders gathering at the White House today, they argued. He had to do something really forceful, like asking for a resolution authorizing the use of force against Saddam. Otherwise, they warned, W. might inherit the W-word. 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