TIME: Almanac 1995

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<text id=91TT0210> <title> Jan. 28, 1991: Bush's Biggest Gamble </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1991 Jan. 28, 1991 War In The Gulf </history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> THE GULF WAR, Page 32 THE WHITE HOUSE Bush's Biggest Gamble </hdr><body> 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!" </body></article> </text>