POLITICS AND
POLICY
Members of Gulf War
Council Are Divided on Attacking
By JEANNE
CUMMINGS
Staff Reporter
of THE
A decade ago, Mr. Cheney was a member of the "Gang of
Eight," an ad hoc war council of top White House advisers assembled by
President George H. W. Bush to guide the 1991 war with
Joining the first President Bush and then-Defense
Secretary Cheney in that inner circle were national-security adviser Brent
Scowcroft; his deputy, Robert Gates; Secretary of State James Baker III; Vice
President Dan Quayle; Colin Powell, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff; and White House Chief of Staff John Sununu.
Today, Mr. Cheney has become the foremost spokesman for a tough
policy of moving pre-emptively to oust Mr. Hussein, and his views are echoed in
large measure by Mr. Quayle. But Mr. Scowcroft, by dint of a recent op-ed
article in The Wall Street Journal, has become the most prominent voice arguing
against rushing into a war with
And Mr. Powell, now the Secretary of State, is widely thought to
be the senior adviser to the current President Bush most uneasy about going to
war with
The great unknown in all this, of course, is the opinion of the
first President Bush, and the substance of any private deliberations may have
had with the current president. There is no sign that the views expressed by
Mr. Scowcroft or Mr. Baker are necessarily shared by the elder Mr. Bush. Mr.
Scowcroft, for example, neither told the former president in advance about the
article he wrote on
The two Presidents Bush are very close,
and, at family gatherings and in telephone conversations, often discuss the
events of the day, White House aides say. But the senior Mr. Bush, in keeping
with a longstanding personal policy regarding his son's administration,
declined an interview request for this article. And the current president has
said repeatedly that he hasn't made up his mind about how to proceed in dealing
with
But just Tuesday, in a meeting in
That general idea -- that Saddam Hussein is a dangerous figure who
should be replaced -- is something the Gang of Eight can agree upon. The
fissures are largely along tactical lines: Is the effort to change leaders in
To some extent, the debate over how to proceed reflects a much
broader debate among Republican foreign-policy thinkers over whether the
The debate was sharpened earlier this month by Mr. Scowcroft,
arguably the Gang of Eight member who remains closest to the senior Mr. Bush.
Mr. Scowcroft wrote that a confrontation with
In addition, Mr. Scowcroft said there isn't an international
consensus for an attack because there isn't enough evidence yet to demonstrate
that Mr. Hussein poses an immediate threat.
Mr. Baker followed by urging the administration, as Mr. Scowcroft
did, to try to win U.N. support for another round of unfettered weapons
inspections in
On the other side of the debate stand Mr. Cheney and Mr. Quayle.
They both argue that Mr. Hussein's regime must be expelled before it has enough
time to build a nuclear weapon or fine-tune his ability to use chemical and
biological weapons. Like the president, Mr. Cheney suggests that the
Similarly, in an interview, Mr. Quayle, who now serves on the
Pentagon Defense Policy Board, said he is convinced
that if Mr. Hussein develops nuclear weapons "there isn't any doubt he
would use them or he would blackmail a nation with them." In such
circumstances, "by not having a policy of pre-emption, you are putting the
security interests of our country in dire jeopardy."
Mr. Sununu and Mr. Gates didn't return telephone messages.
There is another area of dispute. Both the current President Bush
and Mr. Cheney have suggested a strong possibility that Mr. Hussein would
someday share with terrorists weapons of mass destruction. Mr. Scowcroft took
exception to that premise, arguing that cooperation with rogue terrorist groups
and outsiders doesn't fit with the track record of Mr. Hussein, who prefers to
maintain iron-fisted control over all those around him.
When the new Bush team entered office two years ago, most
anti-Hussein forces feared that Mr. Cheney would argue against another
confrontation with the Iraqi dictator, precisely because he was a part of the
war council that decided not to seek his ouster after liberating
But Sept. 11 changed all that, prompting Mr. Cheney to focus on
the horror that could be unleashed by a marriage of Mr. Hussein and the kind of
terrorist group that carried out the attacks here, says Mary Matalin, his spokeswoman.
"That's what is missing from these stories," she says.
"Who could have imagined 12 years ago that extremists could get to our
shore?" she says.
Lee Hamilton, a former Democratic chairman of the House Foreign
Affairs Committee and president of the
As for the White House, he says, "Their public posture has to
be, 'We welcome their criticism.' To me, at least, the Cheney speech makes it
clear they aren't listening to it because they don't agree with it and they are
going to proceed."
Write to Jeanne Cummings at jeanne.cummings@wsj.com4
Updated
Copyright 2002
Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved
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