by Greg Grandin
Kissinger took the point position in countering what he called America’s “new isolationists,” that is, those conservatives who were against taking a strong stand in the Gulf. What Bush did next in Kuwait, he announced in the very first sentence of his August 19 syndicated column, published in a number of major papers across the country, would make or break his administration. Anything short of the liberation of Kuwait would turn Bush’s “show of force”—his quick dispatch of troops to Saudi Arabia—into a “debacle.” The president faced three choices: passively endorse whatever tepid consensus emerged at the UN, act in league with other oil-dependent industrial democracies, or “take the lead in opposing Hussein” in an “effort in which the United States would bear the principal burden.”4
Kissinger felt history’s urgency. If Bush didn’t act, the widespread support he enjoyed would quickly evaporate. Above all, he needed to avoid a protracted siege, which would sap American will and strain credibility. Kissinger, who during his tenure at the White House and State did more than any other single person to tie the United States to high oil prices and the Saudi regime (as long as the Saudis kept buying US weapons, contracting US construction firms, and depositing what was left in US banks), was arguing against conservatives like Kirkpatrick, who were making the “fashionable” argument that it didn’t matter who produced the oil. Baiting them in terms they would recognize, he said such advice was nothing short of “abdication.” There are, Kissinger said, “consequences” to one’s “failure to resist.”
Kissinger was among the first, possibly the first, to make the analogy between Hussein and Hitler.5 He argued that if Iraq’s annexation of Kuwait was allowed to stand, the “absolutely inevitable” result would be a series of wars that would threaten the existence of Israel (Hussein, after grabbing Kuwait, suggested that all of the region’s occupations should be adjudicated simultaneously, including Israel’s control of the occupied territories).6 In opinion pieces, appearances on network and public TV, and testimony before Congress, Kissinger forcefully argued for intervention, including the “surgical and progressive destruction of Iraq’s military assets” and removal of Hussein from power.7 Sweeping aside the concerns of cautious hawks like Kirkpatrick, Kissinger insisted that there was no turning back: “America has crossed its Rubicon,” he said.
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Another way to assess how far our expectations have shifted from 1970—how what seemed to be the collapse of the national security state was really the beginning of its reorganization on different, more spectacular, more covert, and, over time, more interventionist footings—is to compare the secrecy with which the bombing of Cambodia was carried out with the visual immediacy of the first Gulf War, conducted to capture and keep the public’s attention.
Actually, before making that comparison, it’s worth taking a moment to consider the way Panama offered a preview of what was to come. According to one US brigadier general, Operation Just Cause was “extraordinarily complex, involving the deployment of thousands of personnel and equipment from distant military installations and striking almost two-dozen objectives within a 24-hour period of time.… Just Cause represented a bold new era in American military force projection: speed, mass, and precision, coupled with immediate public visibility.”8
One year and one month after that display of “immediate public visibility,” on January 17, 1991, Operation Desert Storm was launched. In a way, this war represented the full flowering of the logic behind Kissinger and Nixon’s covert air campaign on Cambodia: that the United States should be free to use whatever military force it needs in order to compel the political outcome it seeks. Where Kissinger worked to keep that operation hidden for as long as he could (because he feared the public’s reaction), Desert Storm was preceded by a four-month on-air discussion among politicians and pundits (including Kissinger). Where those executing the bombing of Cambodia burned records and fabricated false documents to cover their tracks, Bush led an assault for all the world to see. “Smart bombs” lit up the sky over Baghdad and Kuwait City as the TV cameras rolled. Featured were new night-vision equipment, real-time satellite communications, and cable TV—as well as former US commanders ready to narrate the war in the style of football announcers, right down to instant replays. “In sports page language,” said CBS News anchor Dan Rather on the first night of the attack, “this … it’s not a sport. It’s war. But so far, it’s a blowout.”9
And Kissinger himself was everywhere—ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, and on the radio and in the papers—giving his opinion. “I think it’s gone well,” he said to Dan Rather on the first night of the bombing.10 So well, Walter Cronkite felt he had to warn Americans not to be “overly optimistic” or “euphoric.”
The next day, January 18, in the CBS studio, Cronkite and Rather engaged in an extended conversation that made them seem less like sports announcers describing live action than veteran color commentators comparing today’s game to how it used to be played.11 The two men concluded that the old big-bellied B-52s that had been used extensively in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia and now were being deployed to bomb Baghdad were more effective at sowing terror and generating panic than the lean “hi-tech” missiles the media were fascinated with:
WALTER CRONKITE: You have seen the B-52s in operation in Vietnam, I have, and they are almost a terror weapon, they are so powerful. They are dropping all of those bombs. My heavens, 14 tons of bomb out of a single airplane—they could very well panic the Iraq army.… One thing that’s interesting about this, Dan, these bombs come in at a very low rate of speed, comparatively—compared to rocketry and other such things and, as a result, the bomb blast is widespread. It can do an awful lot of surface damage without serious damage to a single target, except right where it lands—blow out a lot of windows, blow out a lot of walls, things of that kind as opposed to the high-speed missiles that are inclined to bury themselves and blow up.…
DAN RATHER: I want to pick up on what you were talking about with the B-52s. It’s certainly true, anybody who’s seen or been through a B-52 raid, it’s an absolutely unforgettable, mind-searing experience.
CRONKITE: When you’re not underneath it directly.
RATHER: Exactly. And that’s when you’re able to just sort of observe it. It is a devastatingly effective physical bombing weapon, but also psychologically. That’s one of the reasons of going right at the heart of Saddam Hussein’s best troops is [to cause] panic and to—to break the back of morale.
Such color commentary, along with the real-time reporting, the night-vision equipment, and camera-carrying smart bombs, allowed for public consumption of a techno-display of apparent omnipotence that, at least for a short time, helped consolidate mass approval. The assault was meant as both a lesson and a warning for the rest of the world. And with instant replay came instant gratification, confirmation that the president had the public’s backing. At midnight January 18, a day into the attack, CBS TV announced a new poll “indicates extremely strong support for Mr. Bush’s Gulf offensive.” “By God,” Bush said in triumph, “we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.”12
Darkness rendered into light, the inherent made manifest, helped along by the counsels of Kissinger, “an ancestral voice prophesying war,” as one reporter wrote.13 And thus, in a short eight years since the Beirut barracks bombing, when Reagan chose not to answer Henry Kissinger’s call to fully commit to the Middle East, the United States delivered a stunning display of “shock and awe” (before the phrase was invented). For a moment, then, between the invasion of Panama and the liberation of Kuwait, it seemed as if the reality Kissinger believed he ought to live in (where massive bombing would, in Dan Rather’s words, “break the back” of its targets) rather than the reality he had been living in (where bombing made more problems than the problem that justified the bombing in the first place, including mass radicalization) had come into being. Hussein was easily driven out of Kuwait.
CLINTON AND IRAQ
But he continued in power in B
aghdad, creating a problem of enormous proportions for Bush’s successor, Bill Clinton. It was the UN that first imposed sanctions on Iraq, which remained in force even after its army was driven out of Kuwait. But it was up to the United States to enforce those sanctions, which included demands that Baghdad allow inspectors in to search for weapons of mass destruction. We now know that Saddam Hussein didn’t have such weapons, yet he still refused to cooperate fully with inspectors. A twelve-year siege ensued, with the sanctions greatly damaging Iraq’s economy and inflicting unimaginable hardship. That hardship was captured in a now infamous answer Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright gave to a question put to her in 1996 by the journalist Lesley Stahl, on 60 Minutes. Stahl asked Albright about the estimated half a million Iraqi children who had died as a result of the sanctions. “I mean,” Stahl said, “that’s more children than died in Hiroshima.” “We think the price is worth it,” Albright responded.14
By this time, Clinton was sending cruise missiles into Iraq at regular intervals, for various reasons: to punish a Baghdad-backed assassination attempt on George H. W. Bush (twenty-three missiles launched, including three that struck a residential area and killed civilians), to protect the Kurds (forty-six missiles), to force Iraq to cooperate with UN weapons inspectors. This last assault took place in 1998, on the eve of the House impeachment vote related to the Monica Lewinsky affair, and was described by the New York Times as “a strong sustained series of air strikes.” “More than 200 missiles rained down upon Iraq,” the Times reported, “without any diplomacy or warning.”15
Kissinger watched all of this with amusement. In a way, Clinton was following his lead: he was bombing a country we weren’t at war with without congressional approval, and one of the reasons he was doing so was to placate the militarist right. For example, in 1997 Clinton tried to appoint Anthony Lake, the former NSC staffer who in 1970 resigned because of his opposition to the invasion of Cambodia, as CIA director. Lake faced resistance in the Senate from many Republicans and more than a few Democrats because he came from the (mildly) dissenting wing of the foreign policy establishment. He not only quit the NSC but, in a 1989 book called Somoza Falling, described CIA activities in Nicaragua as “covert actions run amok.” To counter opposition to Lake, the Clinton administration in effect repudiated the questioning spirit of the 1970s, giving Kissinger what must have been a gratifying vindication. According to the New York Times, the White House tried to sell Lake to Congress “as a man so tough-minded that he lost no sleep when a United States missile aimed at Iraqi intelligence headquarters went awry and killed civilians in 1994.”16 It didn’t help.* During three days of confirmation hearings, Lake was grilled on everything from his opinion of the Vietnam War to his having listened to protest music in 1970, with his resignation from Kissinger’s NSC over Cambodia painted as “unpatriotic.” Lake withdrew his nomination.17
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Kissinger gave a full airing of his opinion of Clinton’s bombing of Iraq shortly after Pol Pot died, in 1998. At a conference commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the accords that ended the Vietnam War,18 he started, appropriately enough, with Cambodia, defending his actions there, before turning the discussion to Clinton and Iraq:
I talked with some Clinton Administration person recently when the bombing of Iraq was being contemplated. I said that, in my view, we ought to go after the Republican Guard divisions. “Oh, my God,” he said. “Republican Guard divisions? You can’t go after the Republican Guard divisions. What we’re accusing Iraq of is hiding biological weapons. We can go after every deposit of biological weapons. But we can’t go after things that are outside our legal framework.”
Washington, Kissinger went on, has to “be able to bring” its “political and military objectives into some relationship to each other.” Weapons of mass destruction aren’t really what is at stake in Iraq, he said. The real “problem” is our motivation, or will. “The issue is, do we have a strategy for breaking the back of somebody we don’t want to negotiate with? And if we’re not able to do that, how can we then avoid negotiating with him? If we are not able to destroy and we are not able to isolate him, we’re only going to demonstrate our impotence.”
It’s that “strategic concept”—the need to be willing to break the back of somebody you refuse to negotiate with—that governed what he and Nixon were trying to accomplish in Southeast Asia. “Whether we got it right or not,” Kissinger said, “is really secondary.”
“Whether we got it right or not, is really secondary.” It’s not really a remarkable statement, at least not when one considers Kissinger’s long-standing insistence that the demonstrative effects produced by one’s act of will are more important than the consequences of that act. In any case, Kissinger then made an easy transition from defending his bombing of Cambodia to advising Clinton to bomb Iraq even more. “That approach,” he said, referring to the need to align one’s military actions with one’s political objective, “is the one we still need.”
And if Clinton did escalate, what would matter would be the effect more bombing would have not on Iraq but on the United States. Escalation, Kissinger said, would force us to answer this question: “Are we willing to pay this price? And if we are not willing to pay the price, we are back to the Vietnam syndrome of not being able to order our objectives.” If we were willing to pay the price, to project the required military force to achieve our goals and to finish what we started, we would be able to overcome our impotence.
At this point, in 1998, Kissinger’s opinions are nearly indistinguishable from those of Paul Wolfowitz, William Kristol, Robert Kagan, and other neoconservatives who were then laying the ideological groundwork for the 2003 drive into Iraq. Here is Wolfowitz in 2000, praising Clinton for bombing Iraq without congressional sanction but criticizing him for doing it without a clear sense of purpose: “American forces under President Clinton’s command have been bombing Iraq with some regularity for months now,” Wolfowitz wrote, without “a whimper of opposition in the Congress and barely a mention in the press.”19 And not just Iraq. “Everyone has become a ‘hawk,’” he wrote, cheering Clinton’s use of “armed forces in operations involving tens of thousands of troops in Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Iraq—and to conduct military strikes against Afghanistan and Sudan.”*
But, Wolfowitz said, the problem with this new militarism was that it was born out of softness, not hardness, out of “complacency bred by our current predominance.” It came too easy and had no real costs. There were, he wrote, in what almost sounded like a complaint, “virtually no American casualties” in Clinton’s wars. Clinton did bomb. But his bombing was “facile and complacent,” lacking focus. Without a threat that could galvanize America out of its prosperity-induced smugness, we would never be able, to return to Kissinger’s phrase, to “order our objectives.”
Wolfowitz’s opinion that post–Cold War America was too complacent was shared by William Kristol and Robert Kagan, who in an earlier, influential essay published in Foreign Affairs, wrote:
Somehow most Americans have failed to notice that they have never had it so good. They have never lived in a world more conducive to their fundamental interests in a liberal international order.… And that is the problem.… Today the lack of a visible threat to U.S. vital interests or to world peace has tempted Americans to absentmindedly dismantle the material and spiritual foundations on which their national well-being has been based.… The ubiquitous post–Cold War question—where is the threat?—is thus misconceived. In a world in which peace and American security depend on American power and the will to use it, the main threat the United States faces now and in the future is its own weakness.20
The echo of Kissinger is clear: power is weakness unless one is willing to use it. There is, however, a subtle difference worth pointing out. In the past, Kissinger tended to focus on our actions as the galvanizing agent: we had to take a tough stand; we had to act furiously; we needed to avoid inaction to prove that action was possib
le. His discussion of dangers the United States faced tended to be abstract, represented as disorder or instability. He never amped the danger into a primal threat to the nation’s existence. Post–Cold War militarists, in contrast, stressed the external menace as the animator, an existential evil that lurks beyond our border whose function seems to be to remind us that existential evil lurks beyond our border. It was 9/11 that brought the two positions together.
THE SECOND GULF WAR AND BEYOND
Between 1998 and the fall of 2001, the fight against radical Islam was not high on the list of reasons neoconservatives said we needed to carry out regime change in Iraq. Some invoked national security, insisting that Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction. Others said the arrangement left in place by the first Gulf War had become unsustainable. A decade of lobbing missiles into Iraq, killing innocents, and enforcing punitive sanctions had destabilized the region, created an unsustainable situation that was captured in the callous comment by Secretary of State Albright that half a million starving Iraqi children was a price worth paying to contain Hussein.* America’s policy toward the whole region had to change, but for that to happen, the region first had to change. And for the region to change, Saddam Hussein had to go. The solution to the problem created by the first Gulf War was a second Gulf War.