Bush has personal reason to get Saddam

WASHINGTON -- President Bush says he is going after Saddam Hussein to make the world safer, but he also has an intensely personal reason to target the Iraqi leader.

"After all," he told a Texas audience Thursday night, "this is a guy that tried to kill my dad." Bush has plenty of other reasons to seek Saddam's ouster. The Iraqi leader is, by consensus, a tyrant intent upon developing weapons of mass destruction, and his past suggests he may be willing to use them. He has defied the United Nations for a decade. And experience proves he cannot be trusted.

But on top of all that, in 1993 Kuwaiti authorities disrupted what they said was an Iraqi assassination plot against former President George Bush as he visited their nation. And that has to figure into his son's motivations.

White House officials say the president is not pursuing a family vendetta, but Saddam's demise would have to be sweet revenge for the close-knit Bush clan. Bush's father says he has "nothing but hatred" for the man he spared at the end of the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

"I hate Saddam Hussein, and I don't hate a lot of people," he told CNN earlier this month. "He is a brute."

To anticipate problems

What's less clear is the degree to which that family history influences the current president's thinking. Bush attributes his sense of urgency on Iraq to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, not to events from a decade ago.

The surprise terrorist assaults fundamentally altered Bush's attitude toward potential threats and convinced him he could no longer tolerate Saddam's efforts to develop weapons of mass destruction.

"We're vulnerable to attack, as we learned so vividly," Bush told a Colorado crowd Friday. "My job is to not only deal with problems. My job is also to anticipate problems. ... My job is to make sure that the world's worst leader is not able to blackmail or hurt America or our friends and allies with the world's worst weapons."

Still, few doubt that the family grudge factors into Bush's views on Iraq. He has spent much of his life following in his father's footsteps, and his filial loyalty is unquestioned.

If nothing else, the chance to avenge his father gives Bush another reason to pursue a policy that he would have pursued in any case, said Bruce Buchanan, a political science professor and longtime Bush watcher at the University of Texas in Austin.

"His father's history can't help but be a component in the intensity of his drive," Buchanan said. "It's a factor that adds intensity, and it's a potential threat to judgment."

Although Bush's father has made no secret of his contempt for Saddam, he has studiously avoided offering his son any public advice on how to deal with the dictator.

"That's the problem facing the president of the United States of America, not me," the first President Bush told CNN.