George H.W. Bush was the 41st President of the United States — and one of the presidents John Kiriakou briefed personally during his CIA career.
In the briefing room
Kiriakou spoke with George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Jimmy Carter over his career; he met and briefed the elder Bush a number of times.[1] Clinton was the smartest — combative, wanting to tussle — but Bush was “far more worldly, more aware of the country’s position in the world”: he had run the CIA, served as ambassador to the United Nations and to China.[2] Kiriakou remembers the agency years under Bush 41 and Clinton as genuinely good ones.[3]
The Gulf War and the ceasefire
Kiriakou stands by an unfashionable judgment: the first Gulf War was not a regime-change war, and Bush “actually threw away his presidency by keeping his word and not moving all the way to Baghdad.”[4] He watched the unilateral ceasefire announcement with colleagues at the agency[5] — and faults its execution: the no-fly rules grounded Saddam’s planes but not his helicopters, which slaughtered enormous numbers of Shia who had believed Bush’s call to rise.[6] The timing of the war itself, he notes, was set by logistics: Bush declared Kuwait would be liberated on August 2, but the wait until February 1991 was how long it took to move the satellite from over the Soviet Union to over Iraq.[7]
Saddam’s revenge — the 1993 plot to assassinate Bush in Kuwait — is, in Kiriakou’s reading, the personal root of the second Bush’s obsession with Iraq.[8] Bush 41 opens the sequence Kiriakou calls “a pissing match between Saddam Hussein and a series of American presidents."[9]
"The last fair shake”
Kiriakou relays the assessment — one he shares — that Bush 41 was the last president to give the Arabs a fair shake: when he told the Israelis to stop building settlements and “the Israelis gave him the finger, he cut off loan guarantees until they did stop.”[10] Less flattering entries in the ledger: an administration that pandered to the Saudis — Prince Bandar was a family friend[11][12] — and a record on leak prosecutions Kiriakou rates as “pretty bad."[13]
"Now’s not the time to go wobbly”
Kiriakou’s account of the Oval Office on the morning of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait has Bush closing the meeting without a decision — “Gentlemen, thank you. I need to think about this” — and Kiriakou is explicit about what that meant: “He genuinely didn’t know what to do.”[14][15]
What moved him, in Kiriakou’s telling, was a phone call from Margaret Thatcher later that afternoon: “George, now’s not the time to go wobbly.” Kiriakou runs the consequence straight on from the sentence — six aircraft carrier battle groups on their way to the Gulf, a quarter of a million ground troops, and the liberation of Kuwait in February 1991.[15]
The loan guarantees
Kiriakou cites Bush as the sharpest instance of an American president pushing back on Israeli requests for military action against Iran. Where other presidents simply refused — saying it would start a world war — Bush “actually revoked loan guarantees for Israeli housing construction because the Israelis would not stop with these constant requests to bomb Iran.”[16]
He places the episode in a run of American hope that the problem could be handled diplomatically: that the Iranians would come round to talks, perhaps through the Omanis or the Algerians. That never happened, and the Israeli pressure continued.[16]