TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/031191/0311991.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 7.2 KB | 150 lines

                                                                                THE GULF WAR, Page 20

CONSEQUENCES

White Flags In the Desert


Now that Iraq is defeated, the world must take up the more
challenging task of keeping the peace

By STROBE TALBOTT


    Suddenly, there he was, the only major participant in this
most televised war in history who had remained off-camera. For
weeks, the world had watched the nightly pyrotechnics over
Baghdad, the battered allied pilots on Iraqi TV, Patriots
rising to meet Scuds, the nose-camera view of smart bombs at
work, the artificial twilight above the burning oil fields, top
guns catapulting into the mist, even Saddam Hussein presiding
over his Revolutionary Command Council. Only the frontline
Iraqi soldier had stayed out of sight.

    But he was never out of mind. The briefers in Riyadh
referred to him constantly in the anonymous yet curiously
familiar third-person singular: "He's dug in along the border
. . . He's taking quite a beating . . . If he heads north,
we'll cut him off." As long as he was invisible, he was easy
to imagine as one of half a million clones of Saddam himself,
smug, defiant and murderous.

    So it came as something of a shock when he scrambled out of
his hole in the ground. He was thin, pitiable, and quivering
with the fear that his captors were going to shoot him on the
spot. He knew what execution squads attached to his unit were
doing to others who tried to give up. Why should he expect
better from the enemy? When he realized he was going to be fed
and cared for, he fell to his knees and kissed the hands of a
U.S. Marine.

    They surrendered all along what was supposed to be the
mighty "Saddam line," in squads, then platoons. Many waved
tattered pieces of white cloth. Some held aloft the Koran.

    These were the most telling images of the entire war. For
one thing, they put faces to the staggering estimates of many
tens of thousands of Iraqi casualties, making them less of a
box-score abstraction.

    At the same time, the gratitude with which many Iraqis
turned themselves in hammered home the justification for this
war, terrible as it was. They were not just relieved to be
alive or trying to please their new masters. Several groups of
prisoners even began chanting the name of George Bush. It was
as though they sensed that their defeat was a necessary step
toward the liberation not only of Kuwait but of Iraq as well.

    Certainly that is how Bush has come to see this war. Time
and again, he made clear that for him, the rationale was not
merely geopolitical; there was more at stake than Persian Gulf
oil or, as James Baker once put it, American jobs. The
President's critics, from Mikhail Gorbachev to protesters on
the home front, were right when they accused him of having an
objective that went beyond the United Nations mandate of
expelling Iraqi forces from Kuwait. For its Commander in Chief,
Desert Storm became a moral crusade, targeted against a leader
whose very regime was an abomination. "Saddam tried to cast
this conflict as a religious war," said Bush in a speech in
January, "but it has nothing to do with religion per se. It
has, on the other hand, everything to do with what religion
embodies: good vs. evil, right vs. wrong."

    Even after he had inflicted on Iraq the mother of all
defeats, Bush left no doubt, as he said Friday, that in his own
mind, there would be no "definitive end" to the war so long as
Saddam was "still there." For the next phase of the campaign,
Bush needed only to revert to the advice that the doves were
offering him before he ordered the bombers into action on Jan.
16: Give sanctions a chance.

    The U.S. public welcomed last week's triumph in the gulf as
much more than a mission accomplished. It has been 46 years
since Americans were able to celebrate a real victory in a real
war. Only about 30% of the country's 250 million citizens were
even alive on Aug. 14, 1945, when Japan capitulated at the end
of World War II. Bush can remember listening to that news on
the radio as a junior naval officer, and Brent Scowcroft was
a cadet at West Point. But for the others who ran Desert Storm,
the memory of the U.S.'s last "good war" -- best defined as an
unambiguous win against an unambiguous villain -- is probably
dim at best: Dick Cheney was four years old on V-J day, Colin
Powell was eight, and Norman Schwarzkopf, 10.

    Since then, the U.S. has settled for a draw in Korea and
swallowed a defeat in Vietnam. The invasions of Grenada in 1983
and Panama in 1989 did not qualify as wars; they were
neighborhood busts. For decades, many Americans were worried
that the U.S. suffered from a national character flaw, a
syndrome of flabbiness and faintheartedness. Perhaps, mused
some, it was a side effect of too much democracy, too much
safety behind the oceans and too little gumption.

    Such self-doubts never made much sense. For more than four
decades, the exertion of U.S. power was, quite properly,
inhibited by the cold war and its twin, the ever present danger
of a global conflagration. Over the horizon of every
battlefield was the Soviet nuclear arsenal. If tangling with
Kim Il Sung or Ho Chi Minh could lead to World War III, it was
only prudent to pull back to the DMZ in Korea and, eventually,
all the way home from Vietnam.

    Prudence is George Bush's favorite word. Yet he has led his
nation into battle and won decisively. That's a credit to his
personal determination, the prowess of the armed forces he
commands, the steadfastness of the alliance he has assembled
and the wizardry of military technology he has at his disposal.
But last week's stunning conclusion would not have been
possible if the U.S. and the Soviet Union were still competing
on every issue, at every level, at every point in the world.
Had the Kremlin been playing its old, deadly zero-sum game,
threatening to intervene on Saddam's behalf with its still
formidable military might rather than just kibitzing
diplomatically, Kuwait might be a DMZ today.

    Now that both the cold war and the gulf war are over, the
United Nations, with the U.S. more than ever its senior
partner, will be more credible when it vows to punish -- and
thus deters -- would-be aggressors. However, in almost every
other respect, the happy ending of the gulf crisis does little,
in and of itself, to advance the much vaunted new world order.
Whatever challenges to international security and stability
lurk in the future, chances are they won't be so morally stark
and politically compelling as this one was. Therefore, it won't
be so easy to mobilize a multinational coalition. In that
sense, while Bush was masterly as a war President, he was also
lucky.

    Successful as it was in its own terms, Desert Storm was the
consequence -- indeed, a tacit admission -- of a massive
failure. The international community has had to pay a vast
price for waiting too long to put in place arrangements that
will control the spread of weaponry, ameliorate the social
pressures that feed extremism and, above all, keep the peace.
Creating those structures now will be every bit as important as
rebuilding Kuwait and Iraq.