Former President George H.W. Bush critiqued the performances a few of his son’s top aides during his presidency and his son’s performance in the upcoming biography Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush. It’s the president’s fault. “And he served as vice president, he served my brother really well”.
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Bush knows Cheney well, as the latter was his secretary of defense during the 1991 Operation Desert Storm, the U.S.-led military push that liberated Kuwait from Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi army. His administration was shaped by his thinking, his reaction to the attack on 9/11.
Bush continues his critique with the former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld by saying he “served the president badly” and was an “arrogant fellow”. “I don’t know, he just became very hardline and very different from the Dick Cheney I knew and worked with”, Bush Snr told his biographer. The question the book raises is whether everything about George H.W. Bush is outdated or whether he is a model the party and its president should return to-a noble kind of restraint in foreign policy based on diplomacy and a prudence in domestic affairs.
In his statement, George W. Bush did not respond to his father’s critical comments about the strong rhetoric. Bush declined. “That’s what I said”.
“His seeming knuckling under to the real hard-charging guys who want to fight about everything, use force to get our way in the Middle East”, Bush said. “I don’t like what he did, and I think it hurt the president having his iron-ass view of everything”. “I think my dad, like a lotta people that love George, wanna try to create-a different narrative perhaps just to-just ’cause that’s natural to do, right?”
Cheney, for his part, told Fox News that he took the “iron-ass” jibe as a compliment, saying: “I took it as a mark of pride”.
“Rumsfeld, meanwhile, said that Bush 41 is getting up in years and misjudges Bush 43, who I found made his own decisions”, reports The New York Daily News.
Emails and phone calls to several contacts for the Cheney family were not immediately returned.
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“I do disagree with his putting it on Lynne and Liz”, he added. “I can say that I apologize for the fact that the intelligence we received was wrong because, even though he had used chemical weapons extensively against his own people, against others, the program in the form that we thought it was did not exist in the way that we thought”, Blair said in an exclusive interview on CNN.
