By Adeed Dawisha--professor of government and politics at George Mason University.

"The king is dead. Long live the king." This was hardly the kind of clarion call the administration of United States President George Bush or the American public wanted to hear in the wake of the Persian Gulf war. "Baghdad's Dictator"--as Bush continued to call Iraq's president Saddam Hussein--had emerged from the war not just defeated but bloodied and humiliated. His much vaunted army devastated, and his economy in shambles, Saddam would surely be headed for a quick and ignominious exit from Iraq's political scene. That was the conventional wisdom in early March 1991: the king was dead. Or so it seemed.

But in the fall of 1991, Saddam, his confidence apparently restored, was still in power, ruling over the hapless Iraqi people in a way that suggested little had changed. Although he was careful not to push the United States too far, neither did he seem ready to submit to "international will." Indeed, as the days passed, Saddam grew more defiant, intent on showing the world, as well as the Iraqi people, that he was back at the helm, and that news of his death was greatly exaggerated.

In Washington the debate that followed the war took the gloss off Bush's military triumph, particularly after it was revealed that General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, the commander of United States forces in the Gulf, had preferred to continue the war effort, presumably until Saddam's demise. Bush's decision to call a cease-fire on February 27 was increasingly characterized as having been "too hasty."

Saddam's Resilience

"Why did the allied forces stop short of ridding Iraq and the world of Saddam Hussein?" This question dominated the American political debate after Bush's unilateral announcement of a cease-fire. And when major insurrections in March by the Kurds in northern Iraq and the Shiites in southern Iraq were ruthlessly suppressed by the remains of Saddam's supposedly "devastated army," many came to believe that with its cease-fire announcement the White House had lost its best, and perhaps only, opportunity to overthrow Iraq's "dictator."

Bush and members of his administration insisted that they had done the right thing. First, they argued, none of the United Nations (UN) Security Council resolutions issued after Iraq's August 1990 invasion sanctioned interference in Iraq's internal affairs. The objectives of the resolutions were Iraq's withdrawal from Kuwait and the restoration of Kuwait's sovereignty. The resolutions could justify the destruction of Iraq's offensive capability, even its economic and industrial infrastructure. But hunting down Saddam himself was outside the language of the resolutions, and any such action would have quickly lost international, especially Arab, support and would have undermined the international coalition that Bush had so painstakingly built.

Administration officials further argued that forcibly removing Saddam from power would have been a logistical nightmare, entailing a military thrust as far as Baghdad and engaging some of the Iraqi leader's best equipped and most loyal troops. The allied forces would have had to hunt Hussein down at immense risk. Once they had captured him and eliminated his government, the allied troops would have had to stay long enough to put another government in place--and that is when the real problems would have begun. Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney expressed this apprehension:

"What kind of government? Should it be a Sunni government or Shi'a government or a Kurdish government or a Ba'athist regime? Or maybe we want to bring in some of the Islamic fundamentalists? How long would we have had to stay in Baghdad to keep that government in place? What would happen to the government once U.S. forces withdrew? How many casualties should the United States accept in that effort to try to create clarity and stability in a situation that is inherently unstable?" (The Soref Symposium: American Strategy after the Gulf War--Washington D.C.: Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 1991, p. 45.)

Cheney's view suggests another reason for American reluctance to eliminate Saddam. Administration officials were apparently convinced that one of two outcomes, neither of them attractive, would follow Saddam's demise. The first would be either a Baathist or a military regime. In other words, the ruling elite that had participated in the invasion of Kuwait and the war against the United States would remain in power. Administration officials knew that would not be tolerated by the American public.

The second outcome would be a balkanization of the Iraqi state into three conflicting areas: Kurdish in the north, Shiite in the south, and Sunni in the center. The northern Kurdish region would destabilize the large Kurdish minorities in Iran, Turkey, and to a lesser extent Syria. In the south, the Shiites could look to their co-religionists in Iran for protection, a state of affairs that would not only threaten American strategic interests, but would also be unacceptable to the Kuwaitis and Saudis.

Observers in the Middle East ascribed ulterior motives to America's reluctance to remove Saddam Hussein from power. One argument pointed to the Security Council's resolutions demanding that Iraq pay war reparations. Indeed, on August 15, 1991, the Council voted to allow Iraq to sell $1.6-billion worth of oil, but with the stipulation that 30 percent of the income from the sale would be set aside for reparations. Those who argued this said that if Saddam were replaced with a compliant and democratic regime, then the allies of the United States, notably Kuwait, Israel, and Saudi Arabia, would find it more difficult to demand reparations from Iraq.

Ulterior motives notwithstanding, it was also suggested that the White House overestimated Hussein's vulnerability and underestimated his instinct for, and power of, survival. Certainly, the administration could be excused for thinking that his days were numbered as his humiliated army began to return to Baghdad. Few other dictators had survived such a devastating defeat.

America's Arab allies shared this perception. Most Arab observers thought Hussein would not last more than six months. Lieutenant General Khalid bin Sultan, the commander of the Arab coalition forces and the son of Saudi Arabia's defense minister, gave Iraq's leader only 40 days, and repeated this prediction many times.

The insurrections that erupted in early March in the Shiite south and the Kurdish north seemed to confirm expectations that Saddam would be overthrown from within, either through the insurrection or by elements of his own ruling circle. But Saddam was able to suppress the rebellions with surprising ease. In the cities of southern Iraq, thousands of Shiite rebels were killed. In the north the defeat of the Kurdish insurrection was so complete, and the fear of Saddam's retribution so pervasive, that by early April more than one and a half million Kurds had fled their homes for the Turkish and Iranian borders. Hussein's troops might not have matched the coalition's superior technology, but they could still easily suppress any uprising within Iraq.

With Western hopes for a quick overthrow of Iraq's leader dashed, Bush decided on April 16 to pursue British Prime Minister John Major's suggestion to establish "safe havens" for the Kurds in northern Iraq. Bush announced that American, British, and French troops would build and protect several interim refugee camps for the Kurds in the flatlands of northern Iraq. When asked whether this would constitute an infringement of Iraqi sovereignty, Bush replied that his decision was consistent with Security Council Resolution 688, which approved the establishment of safe havens for the Kurdish refugees. Four days later, United States marines took control of Zakho, nine miles south of the Iraqi-Turkish border, and, on May 2, American, British, French, and Dutch troops extended the protected zone beyond Amadiya, expelling virtually all Iraqi troops from the area in the north of Iraq that covered approximately 15,000 square miles.

While this operation looked like yet another blow to Saddam's prestige and credibility, by early May he had successfully consolidated his position and forcefully rallied his troops, using them effectively--and brutally--against opposition forces. By now, the Bush administration's expectations of Saddam's early demise had dimmed considerably.

In the summer and fall of 1991, the United States and the UN Security Council encountered a revived and increasingly defiant Saddam, Iraqi authorities constantly harassed inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) who had been dispatched by the UN to Baghdad to check on Iraqi nuclear facilities in accordance with Security Council resolutions. Twice in June, IAEA inspectors were fired on as they tried to check military compounds for nuclear devices. And in September, when the inspectors discovered a large cache of documents relating to Iraq's secret development of nuclear weapons and missiles, Iraqi guards prevented them from removing the documents and detained the inspectors at the site for a few days. This incident occurred while Bush was addressing the UN General Assembly. He reminded the international community that "Saddam's contempt for UN resolutions...continues even as I speak," and then urged the UN members "not to compromise for a moment in seeing that Iraq destroys all of its weapons of mass destruction and the means to deliver them."

The United States president's tough words reflected his mounting frustration at Hussein's consolidation of power, and the inability of the United States to do much about it. If the president had hoped that Iraq's summary defeat would be a salutary lesson for Hussein, Iraqi action in the fall of 1991 proved that to be an illusion. White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater admitted that Saddam Hussein simply had not "got the message." He added that "the history of dealing with Saddam Hussein is, you lose a lot of money betting he will get the message and follow through before it's too late."

A New Presence in the Gulf

Delivering the keynote address at a Washington Institute for Near East Policy symposium in late April, Defense Secretary Cheney enunciated the strategic goal of United States policy in the Gulf:

"The president has made it clear that we are not interested in a permanent, or long-term United States ground presence...But we are interested in [an] enhanced naval presence. We think we can do that safely...We think there is a greater receptivity on the part of our friends in that part of the world to an occasional United States presence, a tactical fighter squadron, for example, deployed from time to time on a temporary basis to work out exercises jointly with our friends in the region; pre-positioned equipment, both for air and ground forces; those kinds of arrangements we think make sense, [and would] remind and reassure everyone of our commitment." (The Soref Symposium: American Strategy after the Gulf War--Washington D.C.: Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 1991, p. 45.)

In the question-and-answer session that followed his address, Cheney explained the administration's rationale for wanting a presence in the Gulf. He said that

"given the enormous resources that exist in that part of the world, and given the fact that those resources are in decline elsewhere, the value of those resources is only going to rise in the years ahead, and the United States and our major partners cannot afford to have those resources controlled by somebody who is fundamentally hostile to our interests." (The Soref Symposium: American Strategy after the Gulf War--Washington D.C.: Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 1991, p. 53.)

Never before, certainly not before the Gulf war, had America's desire for a presence in the area been articulated so publicly and forthrightly. In the past, United States officials shied away from such public pronouncements because it was always assumed that any American military presence would destabilize the indigenous regimes. It would be the ultimate proof that these regimes, autocratic and archaic, had no domestic legitimacy; that their survival could only be guaranteed by outside powers. The presence of white, Christian soldiers on Arab lands, it was argued, would constitute an affront to Islam and Arabism that would ultimately undermine the stability of the very regimes an American presence was meant to safeguard.

Because of the war, people in the countries of the Persian Gulf had begun to accept the presence of foreigners in their midst. This attitudinal change was most dramatic in Kuwait, but less so in Saudi Arabia, where Islam's holiest shrines are located. The almost universal realization by the Gulf populations that, without foreign men and women, they stood little chance of frustrating Iraqi ambitions meant that the idea of an American presence can no longer be considered egregious or necessarily destabilizing.

On a visit to the Gulf in May, Cheney told reporters that he had reached "broad agreement" with the members of the Gulf Cooperation Council--Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, Bahrain, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates--on the storage of United States military equipment in the region, and on joint military exercises involving American troops. Cheney announced that detailed arrangements between the United States military and each Gulf state were to be negotiated in the next months.

In late October, however, press reports suggested that Saudi officials had balked at the size of the proposed American equipment stockpile in their country. The Defense Department had planned to leave behind in the desert kingdom a division's worth of tanks, Bradley Fighting Vehicles, and other military equipment. The Saudis reportedly considered this stockpile, with its attendant personnel, unnecessarily large and too visible. Nevertheless, Defense Department officials dismissed suggestions of an impasse between the two allies. Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Paul D. Wolfowitz insisted that the United States and Saudi Arabia had "come a long way in agreeing in principle on the kinds of pre-positioning that we would both like to see out there."

Kuwait, however, had no such qualms about a security arrangement with the superpower that had restored its sovereignty. In early September, Kuwait and the United States publicly signed a 10-year security pact that allowed the United States to stockpile equipment and conduct military exercises in Kuwait. Reports also circulated that Kuwait's ruling family had "asked both the United States and the United Kingdom to establish permanent military presences in the Gulf region...The U.K. reportedly had turned down the Kuwaiti request." (Facts on File, September 12, 1991, p. 682.)

In addition, the Bush administration followed an aggressive policy of arms sales to the region, brushing aside loud objections from Congress. On May 23, the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee, echoing UN and international concerns, approved legislation calling for an arms sales moratorium in the Middle East as part of the 1992-1993 foreign aid authorization bill. Two weeks later the White House announced that it intended to sell 20 Apache attack helicopters to the United Arab Emirates and 8 to Bahrain. By law, Congress had 30 days to oppose the sale. But despite initial congressional opposition, the waiting period expired and the sale went through. Clearly, Congress was wary of challenging a popular president.

Pressing on their advantage, in late July administration officials announced arms packages to the Middle East, totaling $4 billion. For aircraft delivery bombs, cluster bombs, air-to-air missiles, and military vehicles, Saudi Arabia was to pay $838 million. A Defense Department statement said that this Saudi arms sale was "consistent with the...stated policy of assisting friendly nations to provide for their own defense." Again there was widespread criticism in Congress of the Saudi sale, which was depicted as undermining international efforts to slow arms proliferation in the region. But here too, congressional opposition fizzled out in the face of presidential popularity, and the sale went through.

The president was far less assertive on the questions of democratization and human rights in the Gulf states. Between March and October 1991, the press and international organizations reported widespread abuses of human rights in Kuwait. The New York-based Middle East Watch, a respected human rights organization, released a report on September 11 accusing the "highest level of the Kuwaiti government of flagrant human rights abuses...including rape, torture, and extrajudicial killings." The report charged that "Kuwait's human rights conduct since liberation has been nothing short of deplorable." (The Washington Post, September 11, 1991, and October 2, 1991.) Yet on the few occasions when the president felt compelled to respond to the mounting criticism of Kuwait's human rights record, he seemed to excuse the behavior of the country and its emir.

Nor was the president especially concerned that Kuwait's ruling Sabah family dragged its feet on promises to democratize the political system--promises it made while in exile. Bush reminded his critics that the United States had fought the war not to institute democracy in Kuwait, but to liberate the country from Iraqi occupation.

Still, to many in Congress and among the American public, the president's attitude toward Kuwait seemed to be at odds with his desire to create a "new world order" that presumably would be based on the cherished American values of democracy and human rights. Many Americans were confused and angry that he did not show any willingness to promote these values in a country that owed its very existence to the United States.

THE Middle East Peace Conference

Timidity was hardly evident in the way the Bush administration pursued its objective of resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict. The process began on March 6, when the president, addressing a joint session of Congress after the Gulf war ended, announced that a key challenge for United States policy in the Middle East was to provide a solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict, to be accomplished by Israel's release of occupied land in exchange for Arab recognition of Israel.

Five days later, in an effort to bolster the president's position, Secretary of State James Baker 3d traveled to Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Syria to explore the possibilities for peace. While in Israel, Baker met not only with Israeli governmental representatives but also with Palestinian representatives. He must have derived some initial encouragement from that meeting, because in the next seven months he visited the area seven more times. While the process was never easy--at times it looked futile--Baker and Bush persisted until October 18, when the secretary of state announced that an Arab-Israeli peace conference would take place in Madrid on October 30. (For a cogent analysis on the background to these meetings, see Melvin A. Friedlander, Conviction and Credence: US Policymaking in the Middle East--Boulder, CO: Lynn Rienner Publishers, 1991, chapter 5.)

How was Baker able to bring about this diplomatic coup? Why was he able to succeed where so many of his predecessors so frustratingly failed? The answer lies in two major developments: the collapse of the Soviet empire and the American victory in the Gulf war.

It is worth remembering that, in the past, Syrian President Hafez al-Assad had objected to a peace conference with Israel on the grounds that with its military superiority, even hegemony, in the area, Israel would have little incentive to make concessions to the Arab states. Consequently, a peace conference would only yield total Arab capitulation to Israeli demands. Assad believed that the only way the Arab states could wring meaningful concessions from the Israelis was through strategic parity with the Jewish state. As long as the Soviet Union was willing and able to supply the Syrians with sophisticated military hardware, Assad could continue to hope for the day when Israel would become sufficiently intimidated by his military prowess to make the kind of concessions he desired. In the meantime, why should he take the risk of negotiating with a country that would steamroll its way through negotiations with weak and dispirited Arab states?

In the wake of the collapse of the Soviet empire, Baker was able to convince Assad that whatever credibility the Syrian argument might have had in the past, it was no longer valid. Baker did not have to argue the point too strenuously. It had become clear that the Soviet Union's economic problems had made the former Communist superpower a virtual hostage to Western political will. Soviet behavior during the Gulf war confirmed that when push came to shove, the Soviet Union would quickly yield to the United States. Consequently, when Baker came to Damascus, he encountered a new-found flexibility in the Syrian position.

The Gulf war also helped improve American-Syrian relations. Syria had sided with the allies during the crisis, and had actually participated in the war. Syria had its own reasons for doing so, not least of which was the intense personal rivalry between Assad and Saddam Hussein. The many months of close American-Syrian military and diplomatic cooperation during the crisis helped undo many of the psychological barriers to improved relations.

On the United States side, the war helped free Bush of the fear that had paralyzed most of his predecessors, namely, fear of the pro-Israel lobby in Washington. With his popularity soaring after the war, Bush was able to take on the pro-Israel lobby in the United States in a way that would have been unthinkable one or two years earlier.

The situation came to a head in September 1991, when Bush asked Congress for a four-month delay in considering Israel's request for a $10-billion loan guarantee to help resettle Soviet Jewish immigrants. The president and his secretary of state had been especially piqued by Israel's unrelenting settlement program in the West Bank in the face of continued American objections, and at a time when the secretary of state was conducting delicate negotiations with the Syrians and other Arabs in an effort to persuade them to attend a peace conference.

But Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir and the Israeli government continued to press Congress to approve the loan guarantees despite Baker's private appeal to Shamir to delay consideration. Shamir was evidently convinced that Israel's allies in the American Jewish community and Congress would make the president see the futility of his efforts. Indeed, Shamir's government was so confident of victory that it voted to include the first $2 billion of the $10 billion in American-backed loans in its 1992 budget even after Baker had informed Shamir that the administration was seeking a delay.

However, despite an intensive lobbying campaign in Congress, Israel's supporters had to concede defeat when it became apparent that the president was not going to budge, and that public opinion seemed solidly behind his position--a realization that undermined the resolve of many members of Congress who in the past had steadfastly voted in Israel's favor.

Bush's victory helped realize the efforts to convene a peace conference in two ways. First, it convinced Shamir and his hard-line government that their ability to influence congressional decisions to veto presidential actions had been reduced. Israel's government would thus become more susceptible to American pressure than before. Second, Bush's stand against the pro-Israel lobby helped to abate the age-old Arab suspicion that the United States was so beholden to Israel that it could not and would not act as an "honest broker." The new perception was clearly articulated by Assad in a television interview in which he said that he accepted the American proposals for a peace conference because he trusted Bush. Assad believed that Bush "was a man who was genuine about seeking peace."

The conference convened in Madrid on October 30. After the bluster of the introductory speeches, where well-established, maximalist positions were reiterated, the conference broke up into three sets of bilateral negotiations, in which the Israelis met face-to-face with the Syrian, Lebanese, and Jordanian-Palestinian delegations. When these discussions adjourned on November 4, no venue or dates were set for follow-up meetings, but there was general expectation that having brought the disputants this far, the United States would bring its weight to bear to convene a second set of bilateral meetings.

While little of substance was achieved in Madrid, the fact that these long-standing disputants sat across from each other at a table having discussions--even heated and bad-tempered discussions--was in itself a historic event. And it was obvious that, notwithstanding the joint sponsorship of the conference, it was primarily to the United States that the disputants played their respective tunes.

If the Madrid conference taught us anything, it simply confirmed what many had believed--that the peace conference was not the end but the beginning of a long and hazardous journey. The mistrust and suspicion among the participants were so great that the road to peace will be arduous, at times painful and full of frustration. Failure is possible at every stage. But if the process succeeds, it will become a glorious beginning to President Bush's "new world order." The months to come will prove a singular test of the Bush administration's willingness to stay the course.

[Adeed Dawish is, with I. William Zartman, the coauthor of Beyond Coercion: The Durability of the Arab State--New York: Methuen, 1989. He spent the academic year 1990-1991 in Cairo, Egypt, as a Fulbright Fellow.]