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{249} Chapter Seven Catholics and George H. W. Bush (1989–1993) In demeanor as well as ideology, Republican George Herbert Walker Bush was the epitome of moderation. In the Persian Gulf War, he would order United Nations troops to stop short of Baghdad. In the urban crisis, he would propose less than a Marshall Plan for cities. On abortion, he would never offer a proposal to repeal Roe v. Wade. If his moderation often exasperated liberals in the other party and conservatives in his own, however, it often endeared him to American Catholics, whose bishops were moving to the middle as well. Though wary of his war in the Gulf, dissatisfied with his aid to the cities, and disappointed with his reluctance on abortion, the prelates nonetheless found Bush far more receptive to their ideas than his predecessor had been. With his devotion to just-war theory, compassion for the urban underclass, and commitment to the unborn, Bush gained the support of the Catholic hierarchy before he lost the loyalty of the rank and file. War and Peace: The Persian Gulf Perhaps no other American president was so equipped to lead the nation’s armed forces. World War II pilot, Central Intelligence Agency director, United Nations ambassador, China representative, congressman, and vice president— George H. W. Bush had accumulated a foreign policy resume that any presidential candidate would envy. The U.S. Catholic bishops possessed no such credentials. Yet by the time of the Bush presidency, the bishops had become familiar players in the debate over American foreign policy. They had supported the Vietnam War before they opposed it, pressed for arms control when Ronald Reagan postponed it, and foresaw the end of the Cold War before Reagan helped prepare for it. So when Reagan’s highly capable successor dispatched U.S. troops to fight the hot war that the East-West struggle had never permitted, the bishops along with other American Catholics helped to supply the rationale. {250} chapter seven While the war with Iraq would transform President Bush’s image from the embodiment of vacillation to the enshrinement of decisiveness, it would propel the bishops in the opposite direction, from clarity against nuclear war to ambiguity toward the non-nuclear war in the Persian Gulf. Their discomfort with Bush’s means of resolving the crisis in Kuwait, however, could not obscure their contribution to his ends. And for a fleeting moment in history, as the United States recovered its global stature and American Catholics reinforced their moral relevance, both seemed better for it. Before the War With Palestinians talking to Israelis, and the U.S.S.R.’s neighbors speaking of Soviet domination in the past tense, history appeared to be on holiday as the Bush administration got under way in January 1989. But not everyone would observe the truce. Humiliated by an eight-year war with Iran that had cost his country hundreds of thousands of lives and left it $80 billion in debt, Saddam Hussein was badly in need of a victory. Accusing neighboring Kuwait of stealing Iraqi oil, refusing to write off Iraqi war debts, and exceeding its oil production quota, the Iraqi dictator dispatched his tanks against the tiny kingdom along the Persian Gulf on August 2, 1990.1 With one-quarter of the world’s oil supply under Iraqi control and the 15 percent of American oil imports that came from Saudi Arabia in imminent danger, President Bush now recognized after the fact what he had overlooked before it: the United States had to act so that this invasion “will not stand.” Following sixty-two calls to foreign heads of state in the first month of the crisis, Bush issued an executive order, endorsed by both houses of Congress, imposing a total U.S. embargo on Iraq. Then he assembled a multinational coalition of troops in Saudi Arabia to fend off a possible Iraqi attack. In October both houses of Congress overwhelmingly approved of Bush’s troop deployment . By November there were over 230,000 American forces in the Persian Gulf region.2 Though the Democratic Congress had given the Republican president all he had asked for in the Gulf crisis, some members of the opposition worried that they had given him too much. Catholic New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan feared that the Senate vote “would turn into a Tonkin Gulf resolution for the 1990s,” dooming the country to the type of open-ended involvement that had failed in Vietnam. Catholic Massachusetts...

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