President Bush made a curious analogy in his speech Monday night when he compared his rationale for attacking Iraq with that used by former President John F. Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Some scholars of the nuclear showdown, and one former senior adviser to Kennedy, disagree whether it's an apt comparison between the presidents.
"My hope is that Mr. Bush takes the right lesson from the Cuban Missile Crisis," said Theodore Sorensen, a senior aide in the Kennedy White House.
Sorensen said he helped write the Kennedy speech, which Mr. Bush quoted from in his national address on Monday, explaining the rationale for waging war against Iraq.
In the October 1962 speech, Kennedy said nuclear weapons did not have to be fired to constitute a threat to national security. Likewise, Mr. Bush said the mere existence of Iraq's biological and chemical weapons are a threat that must be eliminated.
Yesterday, Sorensen bristled at the suggestion that Mr. Bush's argument for preemptive action against Iraq is similar to Kennedy's reasoning during the missile crisis.
"Kennedy rejected the notion of a preemptive strike," said Sorensen, now a fellow at the Institute of Politics at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government.
"If Bush was using Kennedy's words to justify a preemptive strike against Iraq, than he was taking that quote out of context."
Marc A. Genest, a visiting professor at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, said the Cuban Missile Crisis was a "good analogy" for the need for a preemptive strike against Iraq. Mr. Bush is acting with as much patience and poise as Kennedy, if not more, he added.
An instructor in the strategy and policy department, Genest said Kennedy's handling of the missile crisis is viewed as an example of moderation. But Kennedy was always prepared to invade Cuba if the stalemate continued, he said.
"[Kennedy] was always going to carry out a preemptive strike on Cuba had it gone on for much longer," Genest said. "The art of diplomacy is saying 'nice doggy,' while grabbing a big stick. I think that's what the president is doing right now."
"It's a wonderful combination of military and diplomatic threats," he said.
This weekend, a group of former Kennedy advisers including Sorensen, Soviet officials and Cuban officials -- all involved in the missile crisis -- are traveling to Havana for a conference commemorating the 40th anniversary of an event that brought the world to the brink of nuclear war and became a model for crisis management.
Scholars from Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies are leading the trip to Cuba.
P. Terrence Hopmann, a Brown political science professor who will attend the conference, said the threat posed by Saddam Hussein is nowhere near as serious as the nuclear threat during the missile crisis.
For one, Iraq might have weapons of mass destruction, but there's little chance that they could reach the shores of the United States, Hopmann said. By comparison, the nuclear weapons deployed in Cuba were 90 miles off the Florida coast.
"In Iraq, nothing has changed dramatically or quickly," Hopmann said. "We have known for a long time that Iraq has had chemical weapons. We know he has no capacity to deliver nuclear weapons to the United States in any large quantity."
The Cuban Missile Crisis transfixed the nation. Americans huddled around televisions, watching every development and worrying whether the standoff would lead to nuclear war.
On Monday night, none of the major television networks broadcast Mr. Bush's address. Fox aired the speech, interrupted with messages on the screen telling viewers about the Major League Baseball game to follow.
James G. Blight, a Brown professor and author of a new book on the missile crisis, said that the country is not gripped with the same kind of fear as during the Cold War.
Yet, Blight said there are some similarities that he finds troubling. When Kennedy first learned there were nuclear missiles in Cuba, he immediately wanted to attack the island nation, Blight said.
"Kennedy said, 'Let's go in, invade and hit them hard,' " said Blight. "Then Kennedy asked, 'If we do this, what are the Russians going to do?' "
According to Blight, newly declassified documents from Cuban and Soviet archives disclose that the Cuban army was prepared to use tactical nuclear weapons against invading American troops.
"We now know that if we followed the recommendations of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and attacked Cuba, we know that the military commanders in Cuba would have used nuclear weapons, and there would have been a nuclear war," Sorensen said. "The generals were wrong."
Blight and others questioned whether Mr. Bush has shown enough skepticism in studying his military options. If Saddam feels threatened, he might use chemical or biological weapons against American troops.
According to Blight, Kennedy avoided a doomsday scenario in 1962 by pursuing both a military option, including the naval blockade of Soviet ships headed for Cuba, and secret negotiations with the Kremlin.
"Kennedy did not want a preemptive strike," Sorensen said. "It eliminates all other options."
Genest, of the War College, said Mr. Bush is allowing diplomacy to work its course, while showing that "strong foreign policy must be backed up by the use of force."
President Bush explained in his speech Monday that unless Saddam was removed from power, the United States risked another attack on the scale of Sept. 11. Sorensen said Kennedy and his advisers, too, faced an awful threat in 1962, but they did not resort to war.
"Let's not compare miseries," Sorensen said. "If Khruschev fired nuclear weapons against the United States, you and I would not be talking today."
Kennedy's role in the Cuban Missile Crisis has been celebrated in numerous books and movies. But he learned foreign policy the hard way. Kennedy had been humiliated when he launched the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in an effort to overthrow Fidel Castro.
The invasion flopped and Kennedy's political career was endangered. Blight said Mr. Bush should heed the lessons of this failed attempt at a regime change in Cuba, where Castro still reigns 40 years later.
"Is this going to be Bush's missile crisis or his Bay of Pigs?" asked Blight. "I don't know the answer, but I think he'd better think about it."
