Making War to Keep Peace (4 page)

The New United Nations

That it was possible to forge a consensus among the five permanent members of the Security Council (the United States, the United Kingdom, France, China, and the Soviet Union
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) and others regarding Iraq's invasion of Kuwait was a dramatic demonstration of how much the world had changed in a short time and what those changes meant for the UN. For the first time since the organization's founding, a series of Security Council resolutions condemning aggression could be passed without cold war vetoes. A large majority of the member states condemned Iraq's invasion and annexation of Kuwait, imposed sanctions, and authorized their enforcement by all necessary means. As George Bush told the UN General Assembly in September 1991:

This response was possible because of a new pattern of interaction in the UN. If Iraq, bound to the Soviet Union by a friendship treaty, had invaded Kuwait two years earlier, the Security Council could not have passed a resolution condemning the invasion. The Soviet Union would have called Iraq's aggression a “liberation” that fulfilled age-old aspirations for the unity of two peoples wrested apart by colonial powers.
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(This was Iraq's own rationale for the invasion.) Iraq could have counted on 100 percent support from the Soviet bloc and wide support from the nonaligned nations, among which the Soviets had broad influence. Internal divisions would have neutralized the Arab bloc and the Islamic Conference, and a long procession of speakers would have declared the condemnation of the invasion to be simply another machination of imperialist and Zionist powers, and Kuwait a corrupt remnant of the colonial era.

For decades, aggression by the Soviet Union and its allies had been
defined as liberation. For example, the Soviet invasions of Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan were described as acts of international fraternal solidarity. But that era had passed. Instead of defending Iraq as a treaty ally, Dr. Nikolay Shishlin, political adviser to the Soviet leadership, pointed out that Iraq broke its 1972 friendship treaty with the Soviet Union when it invaded Kuwait. Shishlin said, “The people regard [the invasion of Kuwait] as a crime and a criminal act.” Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev's closest adviser, Aleksandr Yakovlev, called the invasion a violation of “a moral law.”
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For the first time, Soviet officials read the UN Charter as it was meant to be read, and the Soviet government joined in the series of resolutions. China, which usually avoids casting a veto alone, also joined in. An unprecedented consensus was born among the permanent members that held throughout the Gulf War.

Securing the Support of Congress

Some legal scholars have argued that a mandate from the UN Security Council is all the authorization required to legitimize U.S. military action. But that argument assumes that the Security Council's decision overrides the requirement of the U.S. Constitution that Congress must declare war and tacitly transfers that authority in the U.S. government from Congress to the president, who decides how the United States will vote in the Security Council. President Bush saw his obligations differently. Just as he sought explicit approval from the Security Council for the use of force against Saddam Hussein, he also sought the support of Congress in committing U.S. troops to the conflict.

Bush remembered the bitter debates when Lyndon Johnson failed to secure congressional support before plunging U.S. forces more deeply into the war in Vietnam. He wanted clear authorization from Congress, not a Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. UN Security Council Resolution 678, which set a deadline for Saddam's withdrawal, was expected to help with Congress, but the Democratic leadership in both the House and the Senate—including House Speaker Tom Foley (WA), Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell (ME), and Armed Services Committee chairman Sam Nunn (GA)—opposed the resolution requested by Bush.

Most Democrats argued, along with Nunn, that rather than risking thousands of lives on a war on the other side of the globe, the United States should allow more time for the economic sanctions to produce the desired results.
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Most Democratic leaders in the Senate argued that Saddam could not indefinitely withstand the economic pressure of the sanctions. Mitchell charged that Bush was about to make the decision “prematurely.”
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Senator Claiborne Pell (D-RI) thought Iraq's military strength was already being eroded.
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Many arguments were heard for and against granting Bush the power to send American forces into combat. Some questioned the efficacy of economic sanctions in general and of these particular sanctions against this particular adversary. Others wondered whether denying Bush the authority to use force, or making him wait for such authority, would undermine U.S. credibility and render the threat in UN Security Council Resolution 678 (and subsequent UN resolutions) hollow.

Senator Joseph Lieberman (D-CT), an articulate supporter of Bush's request, emphasized practical issues: the effect of any delay on the coalition against Saddam, on the uneasy allies in the Gulf, and on U.S. and other troops deployed in the area. Lieberman also raised the prospect that waiting might give Saddam time to perfect weapons of mass destruction.

The debate considered whether Bush had exhausted all options and whether congressional authorization would encourage him to turn to war. It considered whether protecting the Gulf was a
vital
U.S. interest or merely an important one, and why countries that were more dependent on Gulf oil were not playing a much larger role in its protection. It was a searching debate, resolved by a narrow, largely Republican majority in the Senate (52 to 47) in favor of granting the authorization Bush wanted. The House approved the joint resolution by a wider margin (250 to 183).

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:

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.”
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Like Bush, Nixon characterized the world's response to this aggression as a precedent:

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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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