TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/012891/0128990.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 8.0 KB | 187 lines

                                                                                THE GULF WAR, Page 14

A Storm Erupts


As the bombs fell and missiles flew, hopes for a new world order
gave way to familiar disorder

By STROBE TALBOTT


    Force. Derived from the Latin fortis, meaning "strong," it
was the watchword of an extraordinary week.

    I am stronger than you; therefore you will do what I say.
Obey, or I will use force. That was what George Bush said to
Saddam Hussein. For more than five months he had been saying
it with warnings, then an ultimatum. Wednesday evening he
switched to the vocabulary of bombs.

    But Saddam talked back. I am stronger than you, he said to
the man he calls the Satan in the White House. You may have
more means of killing, but I have many more soldiers willing
to die. Therefore I will not do what you say. On the second day
of the war, Saddam added, Not only do I refuse to do what you
want, I will now do something you thought you could prevent me
from doing.

    With that, sirens sounded in Israel.

    The interaction of Bush's adamancy and Saddam's defiance
was, to an unprecedented degree and in unprecedented ways, seen
and heard round the world. Even when deprived of video
transmission, television newsmen in Baghdad could still hold
microphones to their hotel windows. Audiences on every
continent studied maps of the city while they listened to the
boom, boom, boom of what Bush was saying to Saddam.

    Everyone expected this war. It started on schedule. The
reporters were as ready as the warriors. Partly for that
reason, and partly because the coverage was so pervasive and
transfixing, another spectacle in another corner of the global
village caught the world by surprise and received far less
attention than it deserved. The agents of Soviet power and the
people of Lithuania engaged in a grim dialogue of their own.

    I am stronger than you, said Mikhail Gorbachev. Therefore
you will do what I say. You can, if you insist, pursue your
secessionist ambitions, but only according to rules and a
timetable that suit those of us who don't want to see you ever
achieve your goal. Otherwise I will use force.

    The Lithuanians' reply: We are stronger than you because we
have historical justice on our side. We are also strengthened
by your own promises to govern democratically and to forswear
the principle that might makes right. Therefore you cannot
crush us.

    Gorbachev: Wrong.

    With that, the tanks rolled in Vilnius.

    Thus the world saw, in a few astonishing days, two examples
of the resort to force that were, in many ways, at opposite
ends of the moral spectrum. If there is such a thing as a just
war, President Bush launched one against Saddam. The Iraqi
dictator confirmed the worst that Bush had said of him by
raining down ballistic missiles on the civilian population of
Israel, a nation totally uninvolved in the dispute over Kuwait
-- and one with which Saddam's Foreign Minister, Tariq Aziz,
had said only a week earlier Iraq has "no bilateral dispute."

    At the other end of the spectrum, Gorbachev was showing the
world that however earnest he may be in wanting to reform the
Soviet Union, the system over which he presides -- and for
which he bears responsibility -- still relies heavily on the
threat and use of force. The Soviet version of the social
compact still boils down to the powers that be saying to the
citizenry: We are stronger than you; therefore you will do what
we say.

    It is, as Russians often say, no accident that Joseph
Stalin's first important job in the Bolshevik government was
commissar of nationalities. Gorbachev demonstrated last week
that he is prepared to tolerate if not instigate Stalinist
methods to keep the U.S.S.R. together. His alibis and
obfuscations do not change that stark, ugly bottom line.

    Yet there was a bizarre similarity between what Gorbachev
and Bush felt compelled to do last week. Each was resorting to
the use of force in the name of law and order.

    Gorbachev hopes the world in general and Bush in particular
will indulge him in his crackdown on separatists because the
alternative could be worse: the chaotic disintegration of the
Soviet Union, which in turn may trigger a takeover of the
country by a troika representing the military, the secret
police and the Communist Party hard-liners. The sad implication
of last week's massacre in Vilnius was that such a reversal may
already have begun, with Gorbachev himself either as a
participant or as a front.

    For his part, Bush justified the violence he unleashed on
Iraq as an unavoidable step toward the forging of "a new world
order, a world where the rule of law, not the law of the
jungle, governs the conduct of nations."

    It was the right rhetoric on behalf of the right policy. But
no one should be under any illusion that the much vaunted new
world order is in place or even at hand. Quite the contrary,
last week's events in the Persian Gulf and on the Baltic Sea,
while different in so many respects, had the combined effect
of making the new world order seem all the more remote.

    The U.S. Administration has been praised, deservedly, for
securing the support of the United Nations Security Council and
assembling a multinational coalition behind the effort to drive
Saddam from Kuwait. Bush and other U.S. officials stressed
repeatedly that the armed forces of 27 nations were fighting,
or at least supposedly prepared to fight, alongside the
American soldiers, sailors, aviators and Marines.

    While all that is admirable, it is hardly new. The U.S. went
to war against Adolf Hitler half a century ago as part of an
alliance and on behalf of principles similar to those at stake
today. In 1950 the U.S. plunged into Korea with the backing of
a Security Council resolution and accompanied by the forces of
16 other nations.

    Moreover, politically comforting as it is to have them
there, the multitude of different colored flags arrayed in and
around Saudi Arabia is not terribly relevant to the outcome of
the battles now under way in Kuwait and Iraq. Desert Storm is
very much an American operation. Once again, America's
hardware, prowess and ability to absorb casualties will
ultimately make the difference. In his press conference Friday,
when Bush expressed his desire for the U.S. to be a "healer"
and a "conciliator" once the fighting stops, he sounded
downright Wilsonian. Even the President's idealism and his
eagerness to be a good winner are out of the past.

    Much of the talk about a new world order started a year ago,
when Saddam was just another loudmouth bullyboy who was being
paid off by the gulf Arabs, lethally equipped by the Soviets,
as well as by the French and Germans, and coddled by the U.S.
The cold war was over -- that was the big news and the
all-transforming fact of international life.

    Yet now that proposition seems less clear-cut than it did
even a few weeks ago. The horror in Vilnius is a reminder that
there is still a lot of trouble, and terror, left in that giant
country, not to mention almost 30,000 nuclear weapons. And if
Gorbachev's relatively benign foreign policy collapses because
of the vicious circle of internal revolt and repression, the
West may find itself waging a Cold War II in the coming years.
At a minimum, the Soviet Union may be less cooperative in the
Security Council the next time Uncle Sam tries to round up a
posse to go after some bad guy.

    But the most basic refutation to the idea of a new world
order was what happened in the air and on the ground in the
Middle East last week. The resort to force -- no matter how
necessary under the circumstances -- was an admission that the
preferred and defining methods for making a better world had
failed. Talk of a pax Americana was not just premature but out
of place. There was plenty of Americana but too little pax. It
was the same old world last week, and a not very orderly one at
that.