>Smith offered his theory. "I think it's revenge for his father," he said.
Or as Bush said last night:
"Now that conflict has come, the only way to limit its duration is to apply decisive force. And I assure you, this will not be a campaign of half measures. And we will accept no outcome but victory."
I.e., no half-assed stuff like Dad in '91!
Doug
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Financial Times - March 20, 2003
WAR ON IRAQ: Growing divide between the Bushes By James Harding in Washington
As President George W. Bush prepared the American people this week for war in the Gulf, the White House has echoed the words of his father.
Mr Bush in his televised statement at the beginning of the week updated President George H. W. Bush's liberation message of January 1991, saying: "The tyrant will soon be gone. The day of your liberation is near." He was appropriating his father's proclamation on the start of the 1991 Gulf war that "the liberation of Kuwait has begun".
Administration officials were working on a presidential address from the Oval Office to coincide with the start of hostilities, recalling the elder Mr Bush's speech at the start of military action 12 years ago.
But, for all the similarities, what has been notably absent has been a ringing endorsement of Mr Bush's Iraq policy from his father or the White House team in 1991 that took the US to war.
The former president said this week that, like any parent, he was "totally supportive" of his son and backing the president "without reservation". But he continued in an interview on ABC television: "It's better to stay, you know, stay off the stage . . . There's plenty of critics, plenty of vocal supporters."
The comments have done little to silence the muttering that there is disquiet in the elder Bush camp about the damage done to the modern world order on the road to war.
"I don't see this administration understanding how much crockery it has broken along the way. We may not be able to put this world back together again - the world that came out of the cold war," says one former senior official.
The senior Mr Bush even appeared willing to offer his son some gentle guidance last month. "We've got differences with European countries and they've got differences with us," he said at Tufts University.
But, recalling his days in the White House, he suggested there was a way to resolve "acrimony and bad feeling".
"You've got to reach out to the other person. You've got to convince them that long-term friendship should trump short-term adversity."
The White House appears to have been listening, reaching out to Russia and Cameroon this week. But officials in the 41st administration have been agitated in the run-up to the second Gulf war.
Ari Fleischer, the president's press secretary, reported on a telephone call from Vladimir Putin in which the Russian president repeated his invitation to Mr Bush to come to St Petersburg in May and both sides agreed the need for long-term co-operation.
Brent Scowcroft, Mr Bush's former national security adviser, was quoted on ABC TV as saying: "Ad hoc coalitions of the willing can give us the image of arrogance and if you get to the point where everyone secretly hopes that the US gets a black eye because we're so obnoxious, then we'll be totally hamstrung."
James Baker, the secretary of state at the time of the Gulf war, weighed in with a comment in the Washington Post last September praising Mr Bush for his decision to take the Iraq issue to the United Nations and for not trying to link Iraq with the attacks of September 11 2001.
The UN effort has failed and Mr Bush has regularly tried to make that link. But Mr Baker last month gave an unequivocal statement of support: "When it comes to Iraq, the administration has made the right [decision]," Mr Baker wrote in the Wall Street Journal.
Still, those officials who have known both presidents Bush emphasise that very different men have embarked on different wars.
"One of the differences between the two is that the president is a born-again Christian," says a former US administration official. "It gives him a certitude about what is right."
The elder Mr Bush is a multilateralist "in his bones", with lifelong experience of diplomacy starting in the corridors of the UN. The younger Mr Bush is a man of moral certainty but less worldly wisdom, the official says. "I believe the president was sincere, after 9/11, thinking 'This is what I was put on this earth for'," he said. "And he was manipulated . . in a way his father never was. It is easier to be certain when you know less about things."