Empire of the son; how George Bush rewrote the book on the imperial presidency.

• Author: Barber, James David

Time magazine asked the question with a cover story marking the anniversary of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait: WAS IT WORTH IT? By any meaningful standard, the answer is no. There was no true liberation of Kuwait, no restoration of human rights in the region, no toppling of Saddam Hussein, no peacemaking, no strengthened nuclear security. The United States, which George Bush famously promised would become "a kinder, gentler nation," killed tens of thousands of people, sent forth disease and starvation, and triggered and then permitted massive murder and torture by the enemy.

But this debate over the outcome of Operation Desert Storm, though welcome at long last, has obscured one of the most important long-term costs of the water, incurred even before the first booms hit the ground on the night of January 16: the damage to democracy, which is supposed to govern American war-making and all other policy. Bush has established a precedent for future American presidents, acting alone, to enter major wars.

To be sure, other presidents stepped beyond their constitutional authority to launch adventures abroad. But none ever approached the scale achieved by Bush, who, by drawing on his predecessors' examples, has created a model for an American monarchy--the rule by one--in the conduct of foreign policy.

That Bush has done so, given his character and beliefs, should come as no major surprise. Bush was thought of early on as a wimp, a latter-day Warren G. Harding who would swing along with the people around him. Not so. Considered in light of his life's important turning points, Bush's Iraqi adventure was predictable. As he declared in accepting the Republican presidential nomination, "I am a man who sees life in terms of missions"--missions that have tended to be driven less by specific goals than by a vague quest for adventure and self-reliance. Bush embarked on his first mission, he says, when he left on his eighteenth birthday to serve as the youngest Navy pilot in World War II. In so doing, Bush ignored the objections of both his parents--and not incidentally escaped his longstanding fear of his father and the interference of his mother. He once explained his decision to go like this: "I had a very powerful father.... Very much of a leader and admired by everybody, and I didn't want to do something on his, I had a kind of a, not a competitive thing with him, but I wanted to go out and do something on my own."

The second mission came after Bush graduated from Yale. Dismissing his father's efforts to land him a Wall STreet sinecure, he struck out in 1948 for West Texas (albeit with his family's financial backing): "I had a soft job on Wall Street all set, but I wanted to do something"--that phrase again--"on my own." The third revealing assertion of will came in 1975, when Gerald Ford offered Bush, at the time chairman of the Republican National Committee, the ambassadorship to either France or England. Bush asked for China. Again, his reasons seemed personal but vague. According to him, "The best future we could imagine was one that took us as far as possible from the immediate past. . . . We'd come to a decision much like the one we made in 1948."

Studying this background against a model I had used to examine previous presidents, I described Bush in The New York Times, before he was inaugurated, this way:

His character is active-positive, a pattern that means he is ready to learn, to change, to develop in office, as distinct from the fixated types, such as Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson.... The pattern strongly suggests that Bush sees himself as enlivened and inspired by a mission into a new, different, distant, unknown land. Could he move out into the real world and take on the challenge of forging peace and justice, not in the failed Reagan manner but in a new and different way? Give Bush's past, that is conceivable. He is not stuck with consistency.

On the other hand, Bush's hunger for mission could carry us all over the brink of disaster.... The ultimate danger is war...