TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/012891/0128996.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 7.0 KB | 146 lines

                                                                                THE GULF WAR, Page 32

THE WHITE HOUSE

Bush's Biggest Gamble


The President bets his place in history -- and, for the moment
at least, he looks like a winner

By DAN GOODGAME/WASHINGTON


    George Bush is the most gregarious of politicians, with
little use for solitude or contemplation. So it was odd to see
him, at a picnic on the lawn of his vacation home in Maine
during his first summer as President, standing apart from the
party and gazing somberly out to sea. "Penny for your
thoughts?" one guest interrupted. "Oh, I was just remembering,"
Bush replied softly, "that 45 years ago today, my plane was
shot down over the Pacific."

    Bush served as the Navy's youngest pilot during World War
II, and he harbors few illusions about combat. It is one of the
few subjects that can drive him to introspection. Thus last
Tuesday, as the world wondered whether Bush would make good on
his threat to wage war against Iraq, his friends attached
special importance to a highly unusual event. Shortly before
dawn that morning, the President took a stroll around the White
House grounds. Alone. And though his two Spaniels romped
nearby, Bush, his hair still slick from the shower, seemed lost
in thought and paid them little attention.

    A few hours later, warming himself beside the fire in the
Oval Office, Bush scratched his looping signature onto a
directive that committed the U.S. to its most lethal conflict
since Vietnam. "There was little sense of drama," says a senior
official who was present. "There was more a sense of
inevitability."

    Inevitable because George Bush, who in a long political
career had seldom held any inconvenient opinion for very long,
had finally found something that he was willing to defend in
the face of withering criticism and at a terrible cost in human
life. It was the belief that reversing Iraq's aggression could
usher in a new world order, one in which the U.S. and its
allies would work with a newly cooperative Soviet Union to
promote international peace. The normally cautious Bush has
gambled his presidency -- and his place in history -- on the
liberation of Kuwait. And, for the moment at least, he looks
like a winner.

    Bush is too well bred -- and too aware of the setbacks that
could lie ahead -- to put it that crassly. In typically
self-effacing style, he confined his assessment of the war's
early results to a modest "So far, so good." In remarks
delivered during a press conference last Friday, he cautioned
that "war is never cheap or easy" and warned against
"euphoria."

    Yet his aides say Bush is finding it hard to constrain his
own optimism. A senior White House official exults that "no one
here dreamed" that U.S. casualties for the first three days
would remain in single digits. "It's a source of enormous
relief to the President," says the aide -- and so were reports
that precise U.S. strikes have not killed many Iraqi civilians.
As he reviewed plans for the air war, Bush repeatedly insisted
that military targets must be struck with minimal damage to
nearby neighborhoods, mosques and antiquities.

    One of Bush's worst fears, that Iraq would manage to hit
Israel with Scud missiles, was realized. But Bush and his
lieutenants had engaged in careful diplomacy to prevent Saddam
Hussein from splitting the alliance by transforming the
conflict into an Arab war against the "Zionist entity." Said
an adviser to Bush: "The President was smart to anticipate this
problem."

    Bush looked both smart and lucky during the week before he
launched the war. The ugly intransigence displayed by Iraq's
Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz at his Geneva meeting with
Secretary of State James Baker helped cement congressional
support. Backing for Bush's policy hardened further when Saddam
rudely rejected the last-minute appeals of U.N.
Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar and the European
Community. And while Baghdad had clearly opted for war, Iraq
did not attempt a pre-emptive strike against Israel. "This was
an incredible series of good breaks for us," says a White House
official, "and the President knew conditions would never be
more favorable."

    As the battle rages, Bush is determined not to repeat the
mistakes of his predecessors. Unlike Lyndon Johnson during
Vietnam, Bush says, he will not micromanage the war. When Bush
learned on Thursday evening that Iraqi missiles had smashed
into Tel Aviv and Haifa, he coolly remained in the White House
residence, dining with Environmental Protection Agency
Administrator William Reilly and receiving occasional telephone
updates rather than rushing back to the Oval Office. Bush says
he is thinking through the political and diplomatic pitfalls
and opportunities a victory could provide.

    He knows that public enthusiasm for the war and his own
stratospheric approval ratings could plummet if casualties
mount among U.S. soldiers -- or if the allies carpet-bomb tens
of thousands of Iraqi conscripts. Arab outrage at such
slaughter might prove even more explosive. Thus the President
has directed the Pentagon to minimize both civilian and
military casualties. He declared last week that "once this is
over, we will have some very sophisticated diplomacy to do"
to show the Arab masses that Saddam's defeat need not be their
own. That means, according to a White House official, that "by
summer, we need to make a major movement toward progress on the
Palestinian question."

    Despite Bush's reiteration of his mother's advice to refrain
from gloating when things are going well, his political
advisers could scarcely restrain themselves last week. Said
one: "Strength in national defense and foreign policy is one
of the main reasons Americans elected George Bush, and a
victory over Iraq will virtually ensure his re-election."
Several leading Democrats could be hurt by their opposition to
the war, and the party in general risked looking unpatriotic
when House Speaker Thomas Foley and Senate majority leader
George Mitchell resisted including praise for Bush in a
resolution supporting U.S. troops in the gulf.

    The White House was hoping that a decisive victory would
buoy not only Bush's political fortunes but the entire country
as well. Said a Bush aide: "A successful outcome to this war
will give us all sorts of opportunities -- first of all in
national confidence, which is key to economic recovery. We can
end the post-Vietnam syndrome that fears involvement abroad.
We can have confidence in our diplomacy, our technology, our
all-volunteer Army and reserves." By Friday things seemed to
be going so well that Bush allowed himself a moment of
exultation. During his morning stroll, he carried a hand-held
television to follow live reports from the gulf. And later,
when TV aired the first footage of successful U.S. air raids,
Bush jabbed his index finger at each target on the screen as
though silently declaring "Gotcha!"