Making War to Keep Peace (5 page)

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 withdrew 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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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:

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.”
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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.
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THE COMPLEXITY OF COLLECTIVE ACTION

The process of dealing with Saddam through the United Nations, and establishing new principles of international conduct, demonstrated the se
rious 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.
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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 penetrated 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:

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.

Such divergences of policy had existed between the United States and its Franco-German allies from the outset of the crisis. In part these differences were a matter of style, but they stemmed from the fact that the Europeans were simply less indignant about the destruction of Kuwait. They were less concerned about the danger Saddam posed to stability in the Gulf, less committed to Israel, and less interested in engendering a new world order. These factors led some European governments to resist making a major commitment of money and people to the effort; Washington, in turn, found its confidence in the solidarity of some of its allies wavering.

François Mitterrand sought to draw Saddam into negotiations on Kuwait with promises of a conference on Arab-Israeli settlements, which Israel and the United States opposed and most Arab states supported. Mitterrand pledged that France would be willing to discuss all Middle Eastern problems at one or more international conferences once Iraq had withdrawn from Kuwait. “With Kuwait under occupation,” he said, “nothing is possible. With Kuwait evacuated, everything is possible.”
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But neither the United States nor Israel would acquiesce in a deal that linked the Gulf War's end to regional initiatives unrelated to Iraq's invasion. The United States had long opposed an international conference on the Arab-Israeli conflict, but supported direct negotiations between
Israel and her neighbors, as called for in Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338.

Efforts to find a negotiated settlement to the Kuwait occupation intensified as the January 15 deadline approached. Some urged the United States to strike a deal that would permit Saddam to save face. The U.S. government took the position that this was exactly what we should not do. There should be a price for invading, occupying, and devastating a neighboring country—and it should include losing face.

Americans argued that Saddam and Iraq, having trashed Kuwait, disrupted the region, cost the United States more than $30 billion, and cost other members of the coalition perhaps $30 billion more, should not be permitted to walk away without a substantial penalty. At the very least, Saddam would have to withdraw unconditionally from Kuwait and compensate his victims and their allies for the economic costs of his violence. He could not undo the human misery and death, but he could provide the financial compensation called for by Resolution 674.
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France and Germany agreed that Iraq must honor the UN demand to withdraw, but Mitterrand told the General Assembly that after Saddam released foreign hostages and announced his intention to withdraw, negotiations between Iraq and the coalition could begin on the withdrawal's timing and related details. The United States—and the UN resolution—said there could be negotiations only after “complete and unconditional” withdrawal of Iraqi forces and the restoration of the legitimate government of Kuwait.

Meanwhile, Bush focused on winning the war. His understanding of the size trength, and character of the enemy helped his team make accurate estimates of what would be needed to defeat Saddam. And no asset was more important than his personal clarity about U.S. goals in the Gulf. He was determined to avoid the damaging and demoralizing incrementalism of the Vietnam War, with its endless wrangling in and out of Congress.