Sins of the Son

An attempt to penetrate the family drama behind George W. Bush's decision to invade Iraq.

Reviewed by Michael Getler
Washington Post

THE BUSH TRAGEDY
By Jacob Weisberg
Random House. 271 pp. $26

Well before the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, some experienced people raised their voices against it. One was Brent Scowcroft, former national security adviser to George H.W. Bush, the 41st president. Scowcroft made his point in a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece on Aug. 15, 2002, headlined "Don't Attack Saddam."

Because Scowcroft was so close to Bush 41, the piece was widely viewed, as Jacob Weisberg puts it in The Bush Tragedy, as "a worried father's only way of communicating with his bellicose son." But that son, the 43rd president, reacted to Scowcroft "not as a concerned uncle but as an irksome surrogate for his dad." Scowcroft, the younger Bush was quoted as saying, "has become a pain in the ass in his old age."

After five years of war in Iraq, it remains remarkable how little we know about exactly how, why, when and in whose presence one of the most important -- and maybe one of the worst -- decisions in recent American history was made. Nor can we be sure what, if anything, the complex relationship of two presidents, father and son, both of whom have gone to war against Saddam Hussein, had to do with it.

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