It has only been 10 weeks since U.S. Marines were received as liberators on the streets of Kuwait City. Yet to many Americans, those joyous scenes already seem ancient history. They have given way to news footage of the Kurds’ agony, and images of Saddam Hussein, dressed in white, coolly greeting Iraqi schoolchildren at a staged “celebration” of his 54th birthday.
When the history of the gulf war is written, will it still be considered an American triumph? Some 55 percent of those questioned in a recent NEWSWEEK Poll said the gulf war was not a victory because Saddam is still in power. There’s still relief at getting Saddam’s forces out of Kuwait, and pride in the achievements of American forces. And the war clearly satisfied the primary goals: to restore Kuwaiti sovereignty and cripple Iraq’s offensive capability. But on more sweeping war aims, both stated and unstated, President Bush’s haste to go to war-and to wrap Operation Desert Storm up quickIy-has left an incomplete victory. A scorecard:
Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf’s ground forces could easily have marched to Baghdad and done the job themselves. But no one in the White House wanted to be in the position of installing a regime Arab nationalists might call “illegitimate.” For all of Bush’s disparagement of the “Vietnam syndrome,” he was influenced by two of its central tenets: that any long-term military involvement is a potential “quagmire” and that the Third World will inevitably view U.S. forces as occupiers.
The White House hoped the Iraqi Army would turn on Saddam. But Saddam kept his generals busy fighting the insurrection. The administration accepted the fears of its regional allies about the “Lebanonization” of Iraq, apparently without clarifying U.S. interests on the issue. “A Germany divided was worse than Hitler?” demands a House Republican aide. As things now stand, Bush may get both Hitler and a quagmire. Creating a haven for the Kurds has drawn American and other coalition forces ever deeper into northern Iraq. Meanwhile, in Baghdad, Saddam is shoring up his position. “If the rebellion had not occurred, Saddam would have been sulking in his tent and vulnerable,” says Peter Rodman of the Johns Hopkins Foreign Policy Institute. “But by crushing this rebellion he comes out of this more formidable. He’s vindicated.”
Outside of Iraq, which is being forced by the United Nations to destroy its unconventional-weapons stocks, arms control-both conventional and unconventional-looks all but dead in the Mideast. Bush hopes to announce a major arms-control initiative for the region soon. But both the Israelis and the Arabs, encouraged by the arms-dealing countries, have concluded that their security lies in matching their neighbors weapon for weapon. The Bush administration can claim some success in laying the foundation for a gulf security structure-a relatively easy accomplishment given the gulf Arabs’ obvious interest in outside protection. Immediately after the war, the eight Arab states in the anti-Saddam coalition agreed to a regional security force of Syrian and Egyptian ground troops, funded by the gulf states. America’s role is still unclear: it would maintain a sea and air presence, but size and location are still sensitive topics.
An opening for Mideast peace: The “new world order” is off to a shaky start. The United States’ Arab allies broke many taboos by fighting with Americans against Saddam, Administration officials assumed that this would set the stage for further breakthroughs in Arab attitudes toward Israel; during the war the gulf states hinted at peace with the Jewish state after the war. The State Department expected Israel, too, to be in the mood for some concessions.
After three trips to the region, Secretary of State James Baker has found little real change. His attempts to engineer such mutual confidence-building gestures as a freeze on Israeli settlements in the territories in return for an end to the secondary Arab boycott of Israel foundered. Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir must placate the hard-right wing in his own shaky coalition government; Assad argued that Israel would simply pocket any concessions by the Arab states and give nothing in return. Baker is now trying to arrange a one-day conference to kick off substantive peace talks between Israel and the Arab states, and between Israel and Palestinians. But the Saudis demurred. Syria and Israel can’t yet agree on ground rules.
Meanwhile, the United Nations is rapidly moving in to replace U.S. troops along the Iraq-Kuwait border. The Americans are expected to be out of southern Iraq within another week. Substantial U.S. forces remain in Saudi Arabia, but they are being withdrawn at a rapid clip. If he can stabilize the Kurdish situation, and get the United Nations to take it over, then Bush may yet make good on the promise that clearly matters to him: to get all American ground forces home by the Fourth of July.
