Bush and Baker threw their weight around one more time, following the 1991 Gulf War that began with Saddam Hussein’s August 1990 invasion of oil-rich Kuwait. In January 1991, Bush ordered US armed forces into action. Dubbed Operation Desert Storm, the US ousted Iraqi troops from Kuwait in two months, but not before Iraq fired volleys of Scud missiles into Israel, attempting to draw Israel into the war.
This time, Shamir heeded Bush’s request to keep the IDF out. Flush from their military victory and their success in restraining Israel, Bush and Baker dragged Shamir to a regional peace conference in Madrid in November 1991.
“I warned President Bush and Baker against empowering [PLO Chairman Yasser] Arafat after the Palestinians supported Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War, but they refused to listen,” said Yossi Ben-Aharon during a 2006 interview with Mishpacha. Ben-Aharon was Shamir’s director-general and recalls other occasions on which the US pressured Israel. “When Shamir was prime minister, Bush the elder pressured us very hard to give the Palestinians everything, including East Jerusalem. Shamir said no, in no uncertain terms.”
The Madrid Conference ended inconclusively, with the US and Israel openly quarreling about the future of Jewish settlements — a dispute unresolved to this day.
In the final analysis, all of President Bush’s military and foreign policy successes, as well as his 89% approval rating in the aftermath of the Gulf War, were forgotten when the economy plunged into another downturn during Bush’s 1992 reelection campaign.
Bush’s approval rating plummeted precipitously to 29%. His broken promise from his 1988 campaign “Read my lips, no new taxes,” came back to haunt him when he raised them in 1990 in a budget deal with Democrats. An independent candidate, H. Ross Perot, threw his hat in the ring, siphoning off enough votes from Republicans to hand Democrat Bill Clinton a stunning 370 to 168 victory in the Electoral College.
In retrospect, Bush left office disappointed, a US president who served just one term.
From my own brief encounter with Bush, I saw his two sides: the malice that comes with the political turf on which he played, and his crowd-pleasing charm. He at least possessed the dignity to reserve the vitriol he doled out for appreciative audiences behind closed doors, or when he felt he needed to push his political weight around.
Politics is replete with complicated relationships and equations.
George Herbert Walker Bush was both good to the Jews and tough on them, choosing one over the other as he deemed appropriate.
(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 738)