Former President George Bush has led an often adventurous private life. His pursuit of adventure stands in sharp contrast to the caution he showed at crucial moments in his presidency, reacting with restraint to the demolition of the Berlin Wall and resisting demands after liberating Kuwait to oust Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

Bush’s foreign policy provides a contrast to the problems of his son, who has reversed his father’s combination of an adventuresome private life and a cautious public course.

Indeed, the reasons the former president gave for his decisions seem like a prescient warning of problems his son has encountered.

“It would have been a disaster to go beyond the mission, to go into Baghdad as some are now saying we should have,” the elder Bush said in a 1997 interview.

Reversing Saddam’s takeover of Kuwait “was the mission,” Bush went on. “It wasn’t to be an occupying power in the Arab land, it wasn’t to kill Saddam Hussein. It wasn’t to destroy his legions. It was to end the aggression. People forget that.

“And, of course, had we gone in there and tried to find him, it would have been disastrous. We would have been alone, for one thing. I’m not sure if the Brits could have even stayed with us. The coalition would have been gone, shattered. And we would have been what Saddam Hussein said we wanted to be, an occupying power in this Arab land.”

A year later, in a book he wrote with former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, Bush made a similar point.

“We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq,” they wrote. Not only would U.S. allies be angered, they added, “the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land.”

To be fair, the main fear by Bush and his top advisers was that trying to oust Saddam would have undermined an alliance created to expel him from Kuwait.

But they also worried it would damage efforts to revive the Arab-Israeli peace process, which the successful campaign in Kuwait enabled them to do, and create a dangerous vacuum in the region.

A decade later, Scowcroft expressed similar concerns about a second U.S. war against Iraq.

“Any campaign against Iraq, whatever the strategy, cost and risks, is certain to divert us for some indefinite period from our war on terrorism,” he wrote in The Wall Street Journal.

“Possibly the most dire consequences would be the effect in the region,” he added, noting that U.S. pursuit of what was seen as “an obsession” with Iraq would create “an explosion of outrage against us,” endanger Israel and possibly destabilize other Arab regimes.

While Scowcroft spoke for himself, some speculated his views tracked closely with those of the former president.

President Bush says he doesn’t discuss policy much with his father.

But the striking contrast in their approaches to Iraq provides a fascinating subtext for the events that will determine if the current president’s gamble to forsake his father’s caution pays off, substantively and politically.

Carl Leubsdorf is Washington bureau chief of the Dallas Morning News.