Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America from Colonial Dependence to World Leadership

by Conrad Black

  Whatever he thought of the satellite countries, he was too preoccupied to pay much attention to them now. On August 19, 1989, the democratic Catholic journalist and intellectual Tadeusz Mazowiecki was installed as prime minister of Poland, after the Solidarity labor movement backed by the pope had forced compromises on the government. Institutional democratic reforms followed quickly. In October, Hungary legislated itself to be a democratic republic; the Soviet Union pledged by treaty to withdraw; Imre Nagy and his followers, whom the Russians and their Hungarian followers had executed in 1956, were reinterred with state honors; and the borders were opened to the West. On November 9, the government of East Germany (the German Democratic Republic) announced that the barriers between East Germany and the West would be opened, and the Berlin Wall (the “Antifascist Protection Rampart”) was swarmed over by huge crowds on both sides, chipped at, and soon attacked and pierced by heavy equipment. The East German state, which in 1953 had “lost confidence in the people,” dissolved. The Czechoslovak communist state progressively disintegrated through the autumn and formerly imprisoned dissident and intellectual Václav Havel was elected president on December 29. The reform leader deposed by the Soviet intervention in 1968, Alexander Dubcek, returned as parliamentary speaker.

  The 24-year dictatorship of Nicolae Ceausescu and the entire Communist Party government in Romania ended most dramatically of all. Ceausescu addressed a large crowd in the chief square of Bucharest on December 21, 1989, condemning dissent in a provincial town. The crowd booed and jeered and he fell silent, tried to regain attention, promised everyone a raise, and retreated inside, barricaded in the party headquarters by the crowd overnight. As reports came in of the state falling apart throughout the country, his elite forces suppressed and injured many demonstrators, the defense minister committed suicide, and the armed forces deserted. Ceausescu emerged again on December 22 to try to speak, and the crowd threw stones and bottles at him. The protesters smashed down the doors of the building and only missed lynching their ostensible leader and his wife by a few seconds, as they fled from the roof by helicopter. The army closed the airspace and the helicopter had to land. The Ceausescus were arrested by local police and held until a military unit arrived. The first couple was held for three days, then given a perfunctory drumhead “trial,” found guilty of a vast range of offenses from embezzlement to genocide, taken to a wall while Ceausescu sang the “Internationale,” and executed by firing squad. At least, unlike many other deposed leaders who were executed in this narrative, from Mussolini to Nuri as Said (Iraq) to Najibullah (Afghanistan), their corpses were not displayed and desecrated.

  Apparently indifferent to the collapse in shame and shambles of the rule Stalin imposed and his successors maintained on Eastern Europe, contrary to Stalin’s commitments at Yalta in 1945, Gorbachev had another very jovial summit meeting with Bush, at Malta in early December. Also in December, the United States, supposedly motivated by the shooting of an American serviceman and the suppression of the results of free elections, seized Panama City with 24,000 troops who had been airlifted to the Canal Zone (which had not yet been vacated under Carter’s treaty with Panama). The authoritarian president, Manuel Noriega, a former CIA operative, was chased into the residence of the apostolic nuncio, and eventually surrendered to U.S. forces (who did not violate the Vatican’s diplomatic privilege). The democratically elected president, Guillermo Endara, was installed and the removal of Noriega appeared to be popular with the Panamanians and is justifiable.

  Bush’s transportation of him to Florida, where he was then tried in U.S. criminal court as a racketeer and drug dealer, was a more questionable enterprise. At time of writing, 23 years later, Noriega, who was handed over to France after 20 years in prison in Florida, and imprisoned by the French for a sequential set of grievances, is back in Panama under house arrest. There have been worse injustices inflicted on more sympathetic national leaders, but the legality of trying the president of a foreign country as a common criminal after seizing him by military force is questionable, though no one has much seemed to care about it, so distasteful a character was he. By this time, Cuba had been such a conspicuous economic failure and notoriously oppressive state, Castro’s incumbency was useful to the United States as illustrative of the failings of communism in Latin America. Gorbachev had tired of this open artery also, and stopped paying all Castro’s bills.

  Lithuania and Moldova professed to secede from the Soviet Union in February 1990, and Estonia and Latvia in March. There were jurisdictional disputes between the central government and most of the republics throughout the year, and Georgia announced its secession in October. East Germany proved to be completely ungovernable without being walled and fenced off from the West and overseen by the Red Army, and Baker and Bush, with the cooperation of host Brian Mulroney, turned an Open Skies conference in Ottawa in October 1990 into a meeting between both Germanies and the four postwar occupying powers, and agreed to the reunification of Germany. This was very skillfully strategized by Chancellor Kohl, but the diplomatic skills of Bush and Baker were essential, as Prime Minister Thatcher and the fourth president of the Fifth French Republic (since 1981), François Mitterrand, true to the entrenched attitude of the foreign policy establishments of both countries, opposed German reunification.

  Gorbachev himself was unenthused about it, but there was not a great deal he could now do to prevent it. All three powers had had good reason to fear a united Germany over the last 120 years. But of the Western Great Powers, the United States did not fear a united Germany and was pledged to achieve reunification, and Bush and Baker managed the negotiations with exquisite tact and persuasiveness. The reunification of Germany and the continuing recession and internal weakness of Russia changed the political equation in Europe. Helmut Kohl, probably the greatest federal German leader after Bismarck and Adenauer (obviously Hitler is in a special category of brilliance and evil), was sincere in his promotion of “a European Germany and not a German Europe.”

  Although the integration of the mismanaged East into the Federal Republic has been abrasive and complicated, it was necessary, had been promised, and was achieved gracefully by all the other countries involved. The event demonstrates again the statesmanship of President Truman and the other authors of the containment strategy, and of European statesmen starting with Churchill and de Gaulle, in putting West Germany back on its feet and treating it as a respected and trusted ally. The Franco-German Friendship Treaty negotiated by de Gaulle and Adenauer and concluded in 1963 was a landmark that Schmidt and Giscard d’Estaing and Mitterrand and Kohl elaborated. (It included a preamble promising continued cooperation with NATO and pursuit of German reunification, though de Gaulle was lukewarm about both.) Eisenhower’s almost unilateral election of Germany to NATO and the Franco-German Friendship Treaty were made possible by Adenauer’s successful rejection of Stalin’s offer of reunification in exchange for Cold War neutrality. In the positive evolution of Germany’s international status, all of these statesmen conducted themselves with distinction.

  11. THE FIRST IRAQ WAR

  On August 1, 1990, Iraq, under its dictator, Saddam Hussein, invaded and occupied the oil-rich sheikhdom of Kuwait. Margaret Thatcher, vacationing in the United States, concerted with President Bush a vigorous response. It has been a matter of some contention exactly what the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, said to Saddam when they met on July 25. She did say that the United States had no position on Arab-Arab disputes, nor on Iraq’s border claims, although she referred to Iraqi troop concentrations on the Kuwaiti border. In the circumstances, she could have made more cautionary noises, but it would not have been reasonable for Saddam to conclude there would be no intervention if he invaded. Saddam was not reasonable.

  He rejected demands for his withdrawal, was warned repeatedly, and was condemned in the United Nations, the Arab league, and elsewhere. Bush and Baker organized an immense coalition including all of NATO, most Middle Eastern countries except Jordan an
d Israel, and many other nations, ultimately amassing well over 500,000 soldiers and massive air and sea power, most, though certainly not all of it, American. Bush observed the War Powers Act, and after vigorous and often eloquent debate, both houses of the Congress authorized the use of force to liberate Kuwait. Every few days, television viewers throughout the world would see film of families waving goodbye to loved ones among the 6,000-person crews of giant American aircraft carriers and the 2,550-man crews of huge reconditioned battleships as they departed their home ports for the Persian Gulf. Saudi Arabia was officially the co-head of the coalition with the United States, and contributed a co-commander, though in fact the entire effort was commanded by American general Norman Schwarzkopf.

  On January 17, 1991, carpet bombing with unprecedentedly precise weapons began on military targets throughout Iraq and in Kuwait. All Iraqi air defenses were quickly silenced and the Iraqi air force fled to Iran (a country on which Saddam had unleashed an unsuccessful aggressive war in which approximately a million people were killed, from 1980 to 1988, and Iran did not return the Iraqi airplanes). There were over 100,000 sorties, and the allies lost a total of 75 airplanes (most flight crews survived). Throughout this time, the Iraqis were lobbing Scud missiles at Israel, hoping to provoke an attack that might shake loose America’s Arab coalition partners. The U.S. and the Netherlands deployed Patriot anti-missile weapons that brought down most of the Scuds, which were not very effective anyway. Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir made it clear that if Iraq launched chemical or bacteriological weapons against Israel, he would reply with nuclear weapons, and added, “Israel asks no one to fight its battles.” There was no such escalation.

  This was the first recourse to ground combat on a large scale that the United States had undertaken since the terrible tragedy of Vietnam, and there was great concern that Iraq’s ostensibly large and well-armed army could put up fierce resistance and inflict heavy casualties. This did not happen. With Saddam still spitting defiance though his army had been pummeled and almost immobilized from the air, on February 24 allied forces invaded in overwhelming strength in Kuwait and Iraq, with close and heavy air support from several directions, spearheaded by elite forces of a number of countries, including U.S. Marines and air cavalry, the British SAS, and the French Foreign Legion.

  The Iraqis were quickly expelled from Kuwait and in full retreat when Bush and his commanders accepted a cease-fire after just 100 hours. Saddam renounced ambitions on Kuwait, but was allowed to remain in power in Baghdad, though a no-fly zone was enforced against the Iraqis over their northern, Kurdish, territory. The allies suffered 392 dead and 776 wounded, against Iraq’s approximately 30,000 dead, 75,000 wounded, and hundreds of thousands of prisoners. (The allies apparently surpassed the previous record for imbalance of casualties between land combatants, generally accepted to be held by Alexander the Great, who allegedly killed 50,000 Persians and captured over 100,000 others, at a loss of fewer than a thousand men himself, on one day, at nearby Gaugamela, on October 1, 331 B.C.) The conception and execution of the operation, diplomatically and militarily, by President Bush; secretaries Baker and Dick Cheney (Defense); and the chief of staff, General Colin L. Powell, and General Schwarzkopf, were all at the very highest standards of professionalism, and were universally recognized to be so. As the Soviet Union collapsed, the United States led the most “splendid little war” (in allied casualties, not scale of operations) in its history. Bush’s approval rating rose to about 90 percent. The contrast between the superpowers could not have been greater, as their long rivalry neared its end.

  More controversial were allowing Saddam to remain at all and not doing more to assure the end of the repression of the Kurds. Bush and his chief collaborators claimed that if they had taken Baghdad, they would have had to govern the whole country. This is a bit flimsy, since they wouldn’t have needed to occupy Baghdad, but just to overrun most of the country, liberate the Kurds, and demand Saddam’s departure. (And they did end up running the whole country anyway, starting in 2003.) Margaret Thatcher had lost the support of an appreciable number of her own Conservative members of Parliament, and retired earlier in the year, but was replaced by her chosen successor, John Major. Major was a good ally and sensible prime minister, but did not have the influence in the coalition and with Bush personally that Thatcher had had. It was not long before Saddam was portraying himself to the Arab masses as a David to the American Goliath, a great survivor, and even a plucky chap, all of which was preposterous, but not unsalable to such an impressionable and hero-starved audience. The fate of the dissentient Kurdish population was a gruesome one, despite the allied no-fly zone.

  12. THE END OF THE COLD WAR

  In January 1991, Gorbachev had recourse to traditional Soviet repressive methods in Georgia and Latvia, but his heart wasn’t in it, and he wasn’t prepared to kill people as Stalin and Khrushchev and even occasionally Brezhnev had done. On March 17, 1991, 76.4 percent of Soviet voters ostensibly voted to remain in a reformed Soviet Union, although the Baltic republics and Georgia and Armenia voted to secede and Moldova abstained. But on June 12, Boris Yeltsin, who had defected from the Communist Party and sought full democracy, denationalization and decontrol of all industry and agriculture, and the Russian secession from the Soviet Union, was elected head of the Russian Republic with 57 percent in a free vote. He was now a very serious rival, in terms of legitimacy to speak for the Russians, to Gorbachev.

  There were some final traditional exertions. President Bush came to Moscow for a summit meeting in July 1991, and he and Gorbachev signed a Strategic Arms Reduction Agreement (START), which had been under negotiation for almost a decade, and pledged a reduction in nuclear weapons of the two powers by about 30 percent. On August 1, President Bush stopped in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, the second most populous of the Soviet republics, and spoke to the legislature there, suggesting the virtues of renewed federalism. He emphasized that it was not America’s place to intervene in the relations between the different governments in the USSR and that he was not doing so. But he did praise Gorbachev while urging full freedom for Ukraine, and implied that something short of the complete disassembly of the USSR would be desirable. (Former Nixon speechwriter and lexicographer William Safire called this, a bit harshly, “the Chicken Kiev speech.”)

  And on August 19, while Gorbachev was on holiday in the Crimea, there was an attempted coup d’état led by his vice president (Gennadi Yenayev), prime minister (Valentin Pavlov), defense minister (Dmitri Yazov), and secret police (KGB) chief (Vladimir Kryuchkov). They purported to put Gorbachev under house arrest, and suspended elections, most of the media, and all political activity. It was astonishing that Gorbachev could be betrayed by his senior collaborators (just the sort of event that Stalin liquidated almost all of his closest comrades to prevent almost 60 years before). The launch of the New Union Treaty, which would grant the republics autonomy with a common president, common foreign and defense policy, and common market, was planned for August 20, but had to be deferred. Boris Yeltsin led the resistance to the coup and bravely appeared in public in front of the Russian Republic government building before large and supportive (to him) crowds.

  The coup collapsed on August 21 and Gorbachev returned, but he now had no moral or jurisdictional authority. He was the father of democracy throughout the USSR and was much admired in the world, but had completely lost control of events and owed to Yeltsin whatever position he retained. Events were almost running free, though not, fortunately, in the control of the formidable Soviet nuclear arsenal. Except for Georgia (the homeland of Stalin and Shevardnadze), which had already declared itself independent in 1990, all the republics declared their independence between August and December 1991, ending with Russia on December 21. On Christmas Day, without histrionics or serious recriminations, Gorbachev resigned as president of the Soviet Union and declared that the office had ceased to exist. On December 26, the Council of the Soviet Union voted recognition of the dissolution an
d the end of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and then voted to dissolve itself. Over the Kremlin, the hammer and sickle was lowered and the prerevolutionary flag of Russia was raised.

  Unimaginably, and with breathtaking swiftness, the Cold War, the Soviet Union, and international communism passed into history. All of the 10 U.S. presidents from the second Roosevelt to the first Bush, five of each party, deserved credit, though not equally, for what was the greatest and most bloodless strategic victory in the history of the nation-state. Without so much as a pistol shot ever being exchanged between them, the Soviet Union simply expired, unable to continue in the impossible competition to which Stalin committed it, against the United States. His violation of his Yalta pledge (1945) to the freedom and independence of Eastern Europe, and resumed agitation and subversion against the West throughout the world was, next to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and other targets in 1941, and to Kaiser Wilhelm II’s recourse to submarine attacks on American ships in 1917, the greatest world-significant strategic blunder since the Napoleonic Wars. It was the more surprising coming from such a cunning leader as Stalin.

  All three terrible mistakes were underestimations of the United States, which grew steadily in strength and importance, other than during the early years of the Great Depression, throughout the twentieth century.

  It was only 208 years since the British conceded three million Americans (including 500,000 slaves) their national independence—less than the time between George I and George V, or between the accessions of Louis XIV and Napoleon III. With most of an immense and stupefyingly rich continent open to it, armed with the English language, the Common Law, a democratic tradition, a revolutionary launch, Jefferson’s heroic mythos, and Madison and Hamilton’s Constitution, and brilliantly led when necessary, the United States had completed a rise without the slightest parallel or precedent in the history of the world.