Making War to Keep Peace (6 page)

In the Vietnam War, the search for a political solution had become an excuse for deferring needed military replenishments and not seeking victory. In fact, the very idea of winning had been discouraged in many quarters as evidence of an insufficient interest in peace or a parochial concern with strictly national perspectives.

In the Gulf conflict, Bush emphasized from the outset that if Saddam refused to withdraw completely and unconditionally from Kuwait, it would be necessary to defeat him definitively. Bush rejected any suggestion that avoiding the use of force and finding a political solution should be the goal of negotiations. He declined to become involved in endless negotiations, even when they were promoted by Mikhail Gorbachev, with whom he was working to develop relations. His refusal must have been frustrating to Saddam, who was accustomed to the tactics of endless delay common in the diplomacy of his region. A French diplomat of my acquaintance observed, “Saddam didn't understand that he was dealing with Anglo-Saxons. He thought he was in a game that could go on forever.”

Bush signaled that a full force would be assembled, equipped, and utilized from the outset. He stated clearly that there would be no sanctuary. Although various UN diplomats and coalition members urged that attacks be limited to Kuwait, which would have ensured that Iraq suffered no damage, Bush refused to discuss such restrictions. If war came, the coalition would strike at the heart of Saddam's power—inside Iraq.

At every stage—at home and abroad—Bush encountered questions, debate, and opposition; one by one, he overcame them.

THE WAR BEGINS—FOR AMERICANS

On January 16, 1991, Bush announced that allied air forces, as he called them, had begun attacks in Iraq and Kuwait. “The twenty-eight countries with forces in the Gulf area have exhausted all reasonable efforts to reach a peaceful resolution,” he told the nation, “and have no choice but to drive Saddam from Kuwait by force.”
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He promised that Saddam's nuclear and chemical potential would be destroyed and that Iraqi forces would leave Kuwait. “The legitimate government of Kuwait will be restored to its rightful place and Kuwait will once again be free.”
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Noting the five-month delay, he acknowledged flatly that “while the world waited, Saddam Hussein systematically raped, pillaged, and plundered a tiny nation no threat to his own.” He quoted a U.S. Army lieutenant: “If we let him get away with this, who knows what's going to be next.”
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Bush did not micromanage the war; he operated on the principle
that military decisions should be left to the military. Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Colin Powell, and the force commanders made the strategic and tactical military decisions. Bush concentrated on dealing with the heads of state in the coalition, with Congress, and with the American people.

Throughout, Bush proved himself a man of great steadiness who sat at his own center of gravity and communicated confidence in the goals he set for the nation and the coalition. His confidence was contagious and he turned in a remarkable performance, supported by the dazzling power and precision of America's high-tech weaponry, its highly professional military forces, and effective leadership in the Pentagon. Together, they buried the ghost of Vietnam in the desert of Kuwait.

THE WAR ENDS—FOR THE COALITION

In approximately one hundred hours, coalition forces captured 73,700 square kilometers of territory and cut the Iraqi army to pieces—leaving only seven of forty-three divisions capable of operating effectively. Casualties for the coalition were few: for the United States, 148 dead and 458 wounded; for other coalition members, 92 dead and 318 wounded.
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Then, after the collapse of Iraq's army, Bush decided to end the war—leaving Saddam Hussein in power and his Republican Guard nearly intact. Charles Lane wrote in the
New Republic
, “In the final hours of the ground war…Colin Powell counseled the President to call off the fighting. It was the only ‘option' he proposed.”
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In an address to the nation on February 27, 1991, Bush announced the suspension of hostilities in decidedly international terms:

After describing the terms of the cease-fire, Bush added:

Thus, Bush placed the fate of Saddam Hussein not in the hands of the coalition that had defeated him, but in the hands of the UN Security Council, some of whose members, like Russia, had merely acquiesced in the Gulf War and would remain profoundly ambivalent, even hostile, to the use of force against a recalcitrant Saddam Hussein in the aftermath of this military action.

Bush's defense of Kuwait against Iraq's invasion was instinctively understood and broadly supported by a large majority of the American people, but many of these same Americans did not understand why Saddam's forces were spared or why his subsequent massacre of Iraqi civilians was permitted. Nor did they understand why Israel, the smallest state in the region and the only democracy, had been pressured to remain passive under attack. A sudden end of a war that spares the aggressor and gives him the chance to fight again and to repress minorities again requires much explaining. Over the years, Congress has pressed many inquiries about the end of Desert Storm.

The quick military success made clear to all that the U.S. military had learned important lessons from Vietnam. Saddam had also analyzed the Vietnam War, but he learned the wrong lessons. He had concluded that Americans lacked the weapons and the will necessary to defeat Iraq's well-equipped and experienced army. He underestimated the American people and George Bush, and he continued to do so after his forces had withdrawn from Kuwait. Saddam did not stop making war; he merely found another target.

THE WAR ENDS

Elie Kedourie, one of the true experts on the Middle East, described as a great mystery the Bush administration's decision to abruptly end Operation Desert Storm, allowing “the tanks and the helicopters and the
soldiers to escape and be used again by a ruler whom no law can contain and no popular suffrage can dismiss from office.”
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The result of this policy was a massacre of civilians unequaled in the region since Syria's Haffez Assad slaughtered some thirty thousand Sunni Arabs at Hama in early 1982.

Kedourie, who died in 1992, believed that no one ever truly understood why the Bush administration permitted Saddam's forces to survive. At a June 1991 hearing of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Europe and the Middle East, when assistant secretary of state John Kelly was asked whether the allies should have continued on to remove Saddam from power, he responded:

Some speculated that the administration's decision to stop the fighting was motivated by a desire to preserve Iraq's territorial integrity from Iran. But, as Kedourie rightly observed, “Why the integrity of a state with such a continuous record of violence and malfeasance should have been thought worth preserving is quite mysterious.”
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Bush himself took pains to explain his decision, which was grounded in his belief that Saddam Hussein could not long remain in control of his country. In this he was challenged even by his own coalition commander. When General Norman Schwarzkopf appeared on the
MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour
on March 27, 1991, he claimed that he had not wanted to end the war when Bush did but wanted to finish the job. “Frankly, my recommendation had been…to continue to march,” Schwarzkopf insisted.
“We could have completely closed the door and made, in fact, a battle of annihilation.”
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But Bush's position was firm: “We are not targeting Saddam and we have no claim on Iraqi territory,” he told a press conference shortly after the end of combat operations.
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It seemed clear to many observers that Bush wanted to see Saddam out of power, but he wanted the Iraqis to remove him. On February 28, Bush wrote in his diary: “He's got to go, and I hope those two airplanes that reported to the Baghdad airport carry him away. Obviously when the troops straggle home with no armor, beaten up, fifty thousand…and maybe more dead, the people of Iraq will know. Their brothers and their sons will be missing never to return.”
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A month later, Bush told a group of reporters:

But Bush underestimated the strength of Saddam's grip on Iraq and the lengths to which he would go to stay in power.

Among the reasons offered by observers to explain Bush's decision to end the war were pressures from Saudi Arabia and Egypt, pressures from Moscow, and concern about becoming bogged down in an occupation of Iraq. Whatever the contributing factors, he seems to have had misgivings even as the moment of decision was upon him. On February 25, two days before announcing the end of the war, he contemplated the possible ramifications of the decision in his diary. “It seems to me that we may get to a place where we have to choose between solidarity at the UN and ending this thing definitively,” he wrote. “I am in favor of the latter because our credibility is at stake. We don't want to have another draw, another Vietnam…. We're not going to permit a sloppy ending where this guy emerges saving face.”
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Bush later commented that “I was not about to let Saddam slip out of Kuwait without any accountability for what he had done, nor did I want to see an Iraqi ‘victory' by default, or even a draw. Either he gave in completely and publicly, which would be tantamount to a surrender, or we
would still have an opportunity to reduce any future threat by grinding his army down further.”
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And yet the concerns remained. On February 28—the day after the war ended—he wrote in his diary: “Still, no feeling of euphoria…. After my speech last night, Baghdad radio started broadcasting that we've been forced to capitulate. I see on the television that public opinion in Jordan and in the streets of Baghdad is that they have won…. It hasn't been a clear end—there is no battleship
Missouri
surrender. This is what's missing to make this akin to WWII, to separate Kuwait from Korea and Vietnam.”
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In
A World Transformed
, written seven years after the Gulf War, Bush gives perhaps his fullest explanation of why he chose not to lead the coalition on to Baghdad to remove Saddam from power:

The way the war ended provoked swift criticism from, for example, Colonel David H. Hackworth, who reported based on extensive conversations with soldiers who fought in Operation Desert Storm: