Goldsmith assumed that Baker would have counseled a less resolute response than Bush’s vow that Saddam’s aggression would be reversed, and he assumed also that Bush’s resoluteness was a consequence of the bracing company he was keeping. On the White House lawn before boarding the helicopter at the beginning of his trip to Aspen, Bush said ““we’re not discussing intervention [in the Gulf]. I’m not contemplating such action.’’ That was before the Iron Lady’s exhortation, delivered in Aspen: ““Remember, George, this is no time to go wobbly.''
The course of history certainly can be influenced by such contingencies, and perhaps it was then. And because Saddam Hussein has proved to be much more durable and dangerous than seemed likely in 1990, Bush’s entire conduct of the 1990-91 crisis has come under the shadow cast by his decision to end the war prematurely, before reaching Baghdad. However, the preponderance of evidence is that Bush, far from wobbling at the outset, drove the process that produced the coalition, the military buildup and victory.
Bush was the last president from a generation of leaders shaped by military service in World War II and by experience with the most dangerous years of the Cold War. Bush was one of those leaders for whom foreign policy was the primary reason for entering public life. Today’s president was formed by the anti-military culture of the 1960s’ campuses, and has only intermittent interest in foreign policy.
As the dust settles from Clinton’s conduct of the most recent crisis with Iraq, it is prudent to prepare for the next one by considering the continuing consequences of the one big blemish on Bush’s conduct of the Gulf War: rarely, if ever, has there been such a contrast between the decisiveness of a military victory and the victor’s reluctance to press his advantage, militarily or politically.
The decision not to send the forces of the victorious coalition rolling to Baghdad to destroy Saddam’s regime looks today, more than ever, like a miscalculation. However, those who made it had serious reasons. The cobbling together of the coalition had been made possible by the minimal nature of the United Nations’ mandate, which authorized only the liberation of Kuwait. And even so, Bush barely won congressional compliance with that.
In 1991 the facile talk about installing in Iraq a ““MacArthur regency’’ of the sort that governed Japan presumed that there would have been an Iraq after Saddam’s repression had been shattered. The nation might have splintered, with Kurdish uprisings destabilizing Turkey and drawing Iran and Syria into feasting on Iraq’s cadaver. Today many people feel about Iraq the way a Frenchman felt about Germany in 1918: he so loved Germany, he wanted there to be many Germanys. But Bush was not wrong to be wary of regional chaos.
Today it is said that Saddam has been brought to heel and the U.N. inspection team can ““complete its job.’’ But if its job is to extinguish the threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, that job cannot be finished until Saddam is. He will exploit any absence of restraints to enlarge–from scratch, if necessary–his arsenal of such weapons. That is a reasonable inference from the record.
The sanctions have cost him $100 billion in oil sales, which partially explains the decline of his conventional forces. David Wurmser, director of the Middle East program of the American Enterprise Institute, writing in The Wall Street Journal, says: ““Despite cruel penalties for desertion, about a third of the army is AWOL. Even among officers within the elite Republican Guard units, the AWOL rate is at least 17 percent.’’ For Saddam, everything is secondary to weapons of mass destruction.
Unfortunately, in the 1990s in the United States, conventional military strength is secondary to everything else. Defense spending is a paltry 3.4 percent of GDP, the lowest level since before Pearl Harbor, and is trending down. Fred Kagan, who teaches military history at West Point, writes in The Wall Street Journal that the war reduced Saddam’s army by two thirds and his tank force by half, but ““the U.S. Army has fared almost as poorly in the subsequent peace as the Iraqi army did in war.’’ In 1990, says Kagan, the Army had 11 heavy divisions; today it has six. Then it had three heavy armored cavalry regiments; today it has one. The Clinton who has recently been so rightly alarmed about dangers the nation faces should introduce himself to the Clinton who sends indefensible defense requests to Congress.
In August 1990 Bush was in Aspen with Thatcher for a conference on world affairs after the Cold War. His speech there announced that by 1995 the U.S. military would be reduced by an amount that would make problematic, if not impossible, the kind of commitment that Bush was just then making. It would be nice if this most recent crisis with Iraq–this reminder that the world remains a dangerous place–would inhibit the perennial temptation to pillage the defense budget. This vandalism is perpetrated by many members of both parties who continue to regard defense as a kind of budgetary Alaska–the last untapped source of revenues for domestic spending.
Furthermore, some good will come from Saddam’s continuing menace if it induces sobriety in those who regard the armed services primarily as institutions against which to score points in domestic ideological warfare, and in which to conduct social experiments germane to the gender wars. Saddam, so emblematic of the intractable nastiness in the world, is a reason why the military should be allowed to get on with getting ready for wars of other sorts.
