Add the late President Gerald Ford to the list of those who disagreed with President George Bush’s invasion of Iraq — the news coming via the release by reporter Bob Woodward of an embargoed interview:
Former president Gerald R. Ford said in an embargoed interview in July 2004 that the Iraq war was not justified. “I don’t think I would have gone to war,” he said a little more than a year after President Bush had launched the invasion advocated and carried out by prominent veterans of Ford’s own administration.
And it gets worse: Ford names names.
In a four-hour conversation at his house in Beaver Creek, Colo., Ford “very strongly” disagreed with the current president’s justifications for invading Iraq and said he would have pushed alternatives, such as sanctions, much more vigorously. In the tape-recorded interview, Ford was critical not only of Bush but also of Vice President Cheney — Ford’s White House chief of staff — and then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who served as Ford’s chief of staff and then his Pentagon chief.
And worse for the neocons, in general:
In a conversation that veered between the current realities of a war in the Middle East and the old complexities of the war in Vietnam whose bitter end he presided over as president, Ford took issue with the notion of the United States entering a conflict in service of the idea of spreading democracy.
“Well, I can understand the theory of wanting to free people,” Ford said, referring to Bush’s assertion that the United States has a “duty to free people.” But the former president said he was skeptical “whether you can detach that from the obligation number one, of what’s in our national interest.” He added: “And I just don’t think we should go hellfire damnation around the globe freeing people, unless it is directly related to our own national security.”
Woodward writes that the interview was for a planned future book project with the understanding that they could be released upon his death.
However, Ford’s disagreement with Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld is not totally unexpected: he was an example of a more center-right Republican from the “old school” of the GOP. The neocons represent the “new school.” But now many GOPers want no Republican Left Behind and yearn for the days of the more cautious, international consensus-oriented old school.
But Ford’s mince-no-words-comments underscore the depth of the fissure within the Republican Party over Bush’s policy, particularly amid indications that he’ll soon be pressing for troop increases if he (as expected) opts for the “surge” option. Reports say he is in Texas pondering a course. But from all indications, he pondered and decided it some time ago.
It is also clear from Woodward’s book, bipartisan Iraq Study Group and various news reports that Bush 43’s policies are not beloved by the people who were around Bush 41…or even by some Republicans elites who came before the first Bush.
Is this overstating the problem for Bush and the White House?
Not at all. Note this tidbit from Robert Novak’s latest emailed political report:
The debate inside the Republican Party is whether the mid-term election defeat was solely the result of unhappiness over Iraq or constituted deeper concern with the drift of the GOP, under both presidential and Congressional leadership. Defeated Republicans who put all of the blame on Iraq are infuriated by White House denials of this argument. In any event, we find widespread agreement among Republicans that U.S. troops must be leaving Iraq at the end of 2007 to avoid catastrophe in 2008.
And, he adds, there is a feeling that Bush may be hurting McCain, whose stance may be hurting himself as the public (and Democrats, independents and Republicans) sour on either the war itself or the way it has been and will likely be conducted:
The decline in the polls of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), as measured against Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.), reflects more than declining Republican popularity nationally in the weeks after the election. It connotes public disenchantment with McCain’s aggressive advocacy of a “surge” of up to 30,000 additional U.S. troops to Iraq. Unless the additional troops show immediate benefits, President George W. Bush’s determination to put more boots on the ground is feared by Republicans as another political burden to bear.
This can’t be good news for the GOP, since McCain has been the presumptive front-runner.
So if you look at Ford’s comments within this context, what do you see?
Further evidence of a Presidency increasingly isolated from not just the opposition, but from people within its own party, including many of the party’s longtime respected establishment — people who were never accused of being “RINOS.”
ALSO READ: Americablog and Lawyers, Guns and Money, First Draft.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.