In the time it took to debate these issues in the administration, in Congress, and among the allies, great harm had been done to the people and the country of Kuwait, and Israel and Saudi Arabia had been subjected to great danger. Yet the result was that no reasonable charge of precipitous, ill-considered, or unauthorized action could be made against the Bush administration. The legitimacy of his action had been firmly established, and this had unquestionable value for the U.S. polity, even as it raised doubts that aggression could be quickly and effectively countered through the laborious processes of the UN Security Council (and Congress).
Building Support Among the American Public
Bush needed support not only in the UN, in the Gulf, and in Congress, but from the public as well. Vice President Dan Quayle made numerous speeches explaining the nature of the adversary and emphasizing Saddam’s desire to be the leader of a new Arab superpower. Quayle said:
To that end, he spent some fifty billion dollars on arms imports during the 1980s alone. He has launched two wars of aggression during this period…at a cost of some one million lives thus far. He has built the sixth largest military force in the world. He has acquired a sizable stockpile of both chemical and biological weapons…and he has launched a massive program to acquire nuclear weapons.45
Former president Richard Nixon entered the discussion with his own evaluation of the U.S. stake in the Gulf and of why the United States should act: “[because] Saddam Hussein has unlimited ambitions to dominate one of the most important strategic areas in the world…. Because he has oil, he has the means to acquire the weapons he needs for aggression against his neighbors, eventually including nuclear weapons.”46
Like Bush, Nixon characterized the world’s response to this aggression as a precedent:
We cannot be sure…that we are entering into a new, post–cold war era where armed aggression will no longer be an instrument of national policy. But we can be sure that if Saddam Hussein profits from aggression, other potential aggressors in the world will be tempted to wage war against their neighbors.
If we succeed in getting Mr. Hussein out of Kuwait in accordance with the UN resolution…we will have the credibility to deter aggression elsewhere without sending American forces. The world will take seriously U.S. warnings against aggression.47
Saddam’s Threats
The Gulf War reflected not only one man’s ambitions, but also that man’s misunderstanding of his relative power position. In spite of the sustained efforts of Bush, Mitterrand, and UN secretary-general Javier Perez de Cuellar to make Saddam understand the strength and determination of the forces assembled against him, the Iraqi leader continued to underestimate the power of his adversaries. His speeches, and the commentaries in the Iraqi press in the days before the expiration of the UN deadline, made plain that Saddam seemed oblivious to Bush’s promise that he faced an imminent choice between withdrawal and destruction.
Saddam sometimes insisted that the issue was not Kuwait at all but the liberation of Palestine. He said he was engaged in a crusade to eliminate the terrible injustice of Israeli occupation that had been inflicted on the Arab world. The Iraqi army, he told his people, would “achieve several aims in one battle,” eliminating injustice, poverty, and foreign hegemony.48 As Saddam saw it, liberating Kuwait from Iraq’s aggression was but a pretext, a smokescreen to obscure the real U.S. goal, which was to establish its hegemony over the Gulf and its oil and to dominate the world. According to Al Qadisiya, a Baghdad newspaper, “America wants to control oil resources in such a way that will make the oil resources needed by the rest of the world come under its hegemony. Thus, America will regain its lost influence by governing all other countries; it will give oil to anyone it wants and deprive anyone it wants.”49 The choice, as Saddam described it, was between American dominance of Gulf oil, on one hand, and the elimination of global injustice, poverty, and occupation on the other. It would not be a local or regional war, Baghdad radio insisted. “In one way or another, it will spread all over the world, where more than a billion Muslims from Indonesia to West Africa will view this battle as a war against colonialism.”50
Meanwhile, Saddam’s state-controlled press told him that “[a] lot of Arabs consider President Saddam Hussein the only Arab leader who dares to challenge Israeli occupation of Arab territories and believe he might rescue them.”51 It seemed clear from Baghdad that, because America’s objectives were so ignoble, God would be on the side of Iraq, as promised in the Koran: “To those against whom war is made, permission is given to fight, because they are wronged, and verily, God is most powerful for their aid.”52
Saddam and his lieutenants threatened blood and destruction. They promised to burn their enemies with “a great fire that does not go out,” to “drown them in rivers of blood,” and to destroy Israel. Saddam saw himself as the fearless champion of the Arab nation who would rally the faithful to the ultimate jihad. He saw the American president as facing a defeat “terrible and total.”53 But Bush had a different plan.
Saddam understood that he was no match for the United States militarily. In October he opened a new front, this time against the Americans’ will. He understood that it was Bush’s determination to confront Iraq that was primarily responsible for the forces assembling against him. He sought to frighten his adversaries with talk of jihad, threats of terrorism, and predictions of heavy casualties. He tried to split the heterogeneous anti-Iraq coalition—accusing the Saudis of defiling Muslim holy places, charging Morocco with being a Zionist agent, and seeking tirelessly to inflame the Palestinian issue.
Then, in mid-October, came new hints of an interest in peace—just two days after the Iraqi minister of information had said there was no room for any compromise and one day after the New York Times published a series of interviews in which Jordan’s king Hussein warned that war would be catastrophic for the region.54 Iraqi officials began to encourage hopes for a diplomatic solution, hinting that Iraq might withdraw from Kuwait and retain only the strategic island of Bubiyan, an oil field at the Iraq-Kuwait border, and a few other special privileges over Kuwaiti territory.
Presumably, Iraqi officials understood that there was no better way to prevent the United States and its allies from using their superior force than to hold out the prospect of a diplomatic solution based on a compromise. In such situations, the mirage of a peaceful alternative to war breeds false hope and diminishes the will to fight, though the “solution” may be only the first step on the road to defeat. The classic textbook example is Neville Chamberlain’s “peace in our time” compromise at Munich.
If Saddam Hussein did not understand how vulnerable the West is to appeals to peace, his good friend Yasir Arafat did. Words like “negotiated settlement, peaceful solution,” and “compromise” are the political equivalents of the rubber hammers with which physicians test our reflexes. But any compromise that gave Iraq a piece of Kuwait would have rewarded Saddam’s aggression and left him stronger than ever and emboldened to target other governments in the region. On behalf of the coalition, Bush and Baker rejected the siren song of appeasement. “It’s our position that he should not in any way be rewarded for his aggression,” Baker said.55
As Carl von Clausewitz observed, as long as an aggressive man remains armed, he can be persuaded to abandon his aggression by “one single motive alone, which is that he waits for a more favorable moment for action…. If the one has an interest in acting, then the other must have an interest in waiting.”56
Preparations for war went forward. At the end of October 1990, 200,000 more U.S. troops were ordered to the Gulf, doubling the total in the region. Saddam had made not one move to end the devastation and plunder of Kuwait or defend its suffering people, and now the U.S. and allied troops and materiel required to restore Kuwait’s independence were being moved into position. Saddam Hussein had been given ample notice of the seriousness with which the United States and its allies regarded his aggression, though he may not have understood that unless he w
ithdrew his forces, they would be driven out.
“If we desire to defeat the enemy,” wrote von Clausewitz, “we must proportion our efforts to his powers of resistance. This is expressed by the product of two factors which cannot be separated; namely, the sum of available means and the strength of the will.”57 Bush had assembled the necessary means. Now he needed to demonstrate a will to use them equal to Saddam’s will to resist.
As Eliot Cohen, Professor of Strategic Studies at Johns Hopkins University, wrote at the time: “The longer he [Saddam] has to fortify Kuwait, to prepare his armies and people for war and to lay the groundwork for a campaign of terror and subversion overseas, the harder he will make it for us.”58
Saddam had been given plenty of time. It was time to begin the liberation of Kuwait.
Dreaming of a New World Order
Bush was determined not only to turn back Saddam Hussein’s aggression, but to create a new system of international security that would deter or defeat future aggression. This new world order would be his legacy. “The civilized world is now in the process of fashioning the rules that will govern the new world order beginning to emerge in the aftermath of the cold war,” he told Newsweek in November 1990. “When we succeed, we will have shown that aggression will not be tolerated. We will have invigorated a United Nations that contributes as its founders dreamed. We will have established principles for acceptable international conduct and the means to enforce them.”59
George Bush, a man who had once publicly proclaimed to be devoid of “the vision thing,” had a clear vision of America’s role in the post–cold war world. He shared that vision with Congress and with the American people in a series of speeches that explained who we were, what we must do in the Gulf, and why. In his January 1991 State of the Union Address, he spelled out his version of American exceptionalism and explained why American forces were halfway around the world:
We know why we are there: We are Americans, part of something larger than ourselves. For two centuries, we’ve done the hard work of freedom. And tonight, we lead the world in facing down a threat to decency and humanity.
What is at stake is more than one small country; it is a big idea: a new world order, where diverse nations are drawn together in common cause to achieve the universal aspirations of mankind—peace and security, freedom, and the rule of law.
For generations, America has led the struggle to preserve and extend the blessings of liberty. And today, in a rapidly changing world, American leadership is indispensable. Americans know that leadership brings burdens and sacrifices. But we also know why the hopes of humanity turn to us. We are Americans; we have a unique responsibility to do the hard work of freedom. And when we do, freedom works.60
Like Wilson, FDR, and Truman before him, Bush sought a more peaceful world community based on law, and he believed the United States had a special obligation and calling to build that community.
Bush acted not because the United States had formal or close ties to Kuwait (we did not) or because the United States was dependent on Gulf oil (we were not), but because he saw a broader national interest in preserving the independence of Kuwait and the Gulf states—all of which he believed to be threatened by Saddam’s appetite—and in preventing Saddam, or any other dictator, from gaining control of the Gulf’s vast resources.
Like most of his generation, Bush believed that it was essential that aggression not be permitted to succeed. He knew that the American response in this crisis would establish a precedent that would influence how the United States and the UN dealt with other crises, other dictators, and other acts of aggression. He knew that the League of Nations had never recovered from its inaction in the face of Mussolini’s conquest of Abyssinia in the 1930s. This second, broader objective of setting a precedent was the reason Bush rejected a “Libyan solution” of simply acting unilaterally to turn back Saddam and sought authorization for the use of force from the UN Security Council.
Instead, Bush and Baker wanted to liberate Kuwait and strengthen the UN. “The credibility of the United Nations is at stake,” Baker told the Washington Post. “It’s very important that when the United Nations…passes resolutions and takes actions…that those resolutions and actions be implemented.”61 Moreover, they did not want to appear trigger-happy, so they made a point of exhausting all other options before they turned to force. In his address to the nation on January 16, 1991, announcing that military action had begun, Bush spoke as if for the world, emphasizing the deliberate, orderly, lawful course that had been taken, explaining that “sanctions were tried for well over five months” and that the United States and the UN had “exhausted every means” to achieve a peaceful end to the crisis.62
THE COMPLEXITY OF COLLECTIVE ACTION
The process of dealing with Saddam through the United Nations, and establishing new principles of international conduct, demonstrated the serious obstacles to an effective system of global collective security and military action.
Even in this singular moment in history—with cold war divisions overcome and the blocs partially neutralized, and with the United States armed and ready—it was still difficult to deal with a clear-cut case of international aggression. No major power had a stake in prolonging or exacerbating the conflict, and regional solidarity had been shattered by the aggression of one Arab nation against another. Yet the process of consultation among allies and the building and preserving of a consensus was cumbersome, time consuming, and, in a fundamental sense, irrational. Even governments that were in basic agreement disagreed, equivocated, and lost time. To expect a fifteen-member Security Council representing all regions and cultures to plan a war policy—or a peace policy—is a tall order. The perspectives and interests of the five permanent members differed, and their views were not easily reconciled.
The ten nonpermanent members of the council also had widely varying interests in the issue. As a neighbor in the region, North Yemen had a direct stake. But Colombia, Cuba, Ethiopia, Finland, the Ivory Coast, Malaysia, Romania, and Zaire had the power to decide the outcome, though they had no special knowledge of the countries or regions and no direct national interest in the conflict.
No one knew how stable the Security Council consensus would be or what role the council would play in managing the conflict once it was under way. This diverse body seemed perpetually on the verge of serious disagreement that threatened to rend the fragile coalition. Baker believed it was necessary to shuttle around the globe and spend hours negotiating with Security Council members, even though a consensus had been expressed in the first, unanimous resolution condemning the invasion.63 Anyone with experience in multinational diplomacy knows that it is much more difficult to preserve a consensus for action than to express condemnation. Again and again, it was necessary to overcome both straightforward and devious resistance to sustain the consensus.
Bush and Baker were especially anxious about the role Israel might play in the conflict. They feared that Israel’s entry into the war would rupture the diplomatic and military cooperation with Arab governments, but it was clear that Saddam intended to target the Jewish state. When Yasir Arafat and Jordan’s king Hussein rallied to Saddam’s side, the threat to Israel increased dramatically. Keeping Israel’s forces out of the war became a priority of the Bush administration. Two good friends of Israel—Larry Eagleburger, the deputy secretary of state, and Paul Wolfowitz, the assistant secretary of defense for international security policy—were dispatched to Jerusalem to persuade the Israelis to let the United States defend them, rather than responding to attacks themselves. The United States had no effective defenses against the Iraqi Scud missiles that were falling on Israel; it could only appeal to the Israelis to do what they had always refused to consider: delegate their self-defense to another government.
According to a study published in the British journal Nature in January 1993, of thirty-eight Scud missiles launched at Israel by Iraq during the Gulf War, ten hit Israeli cities, meaning that more than one in four pene
trated the Patriot missile defense system. The system was only effective because it was intercepting slow, rather primitive high-explosive-armed Scuds. As a retired army lieutenant general and former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency noted:
Had the Scuds been armed with a fusing system for chemical warheads, the Patriot would have been useless. The reason? In many cases, the Patriot intercepted incoming Scuds only eight thousand feet or less from the ground. Had the Scuds been chemically armed, poison chemicals would have rained down on their targets…. Of course, with nuclear warheads, intercepts close above the targets would be to no avail.64
Though many Americans did not realize it at the time, the performance of the Patriots demonstrated that the United States had no missile defense.
Allied Complications
And then there were the French and the Germans.
The twelve foreign ministers of the European Community (EC) had initially promised to coordinate their Gulf policies with the United States, but as the January 15 deadline for Iraq’s withdrawal from Kuwait approached, the French and German foreign ministers, Roland Dumas and Hans Dietrich Genscher, called the EC into session. U.S. officials speculated that by convening in the one international arena that excluded Americans, the Europeans meant to take the decision for war or peace out of the hands of the Bush administration. The EC had no tradition of common action on foreign affairs, so why did Germany—which had accepted no significant responsibility with regard to the Gulf crisis—suddenly seek to play a major role?
The Bush administration reacted cautiously, fearing that Saddam would perceive the European initiative—which called for Iraq’s withdrawal from Kuwait in exchange for assurances that the United States forces would not launch attacks on Iraq—as evidence of disunity in the coalition. In fact, there were potentially important differences between the United States and Europe with regard to the Gulf—differences that would not become clear until the question of ending the war arose.
Making War to Keep Peace Page 4