The Bush Buildup Could Lead to Iraqi Attack Instead of Withdrawal

By Richard H. Curtiss

"I believe that the president is trying to use the threat of war to prevent war. "

—Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell (D-ME), Dec. 10, 1990

The Gulf crisis is the best illustration in modern history of the danger of judging events by television "soundbites." These are generated by all governments so that the chief of state and his top officials will appear prominently on the evening television news. No one makes the news by counseling moderation or reporting that "nothing happened again today. "

Similarly, "military experts ... .. area specialists" and "informed former government officials" used to have to write a book or two to achieve those appellations. Now they become media stars by putting a sensational interpretation on new developments, and then building a case for it.

That certainly leads to high ratings for the networks using them, and lucrative lecturing for the "consultant, " but it reduces the public dialogue to babble. It's the exact opposite of explaining what's really going on, which used to be the role of the media.

Now, as one leader creates soundbites to convince his own public that he will be as tough a leader in peace negotiations as he would be as commander-in-chief in war, his opponent may mistakenly interpret the posturing as a prelude to attack. War really can break out by accident, just as used to happen before the age of cable and wireless.

Predicting Events in the Gulf

One way to predict what might really happen in the Gulf, however, is to look past the soundbites and examine similarities and differences between George Bush and Saddam. Hussain. The writer once had two foreign service colleagues famous for their flamboyant abrasiveness. When people talked about them, it was in terms of related phenomena, like thunder and lightning. Yet the two bureaucrats were very different.

One planned his every fiery outburst in advance. The other, seemingly, had no idea when he leaped out of his chair in anger where he was going, but woe betide the first subordinate or rival who happened to cross his path.

Saddam Hussein: Top Speed Toward an Unknown Destination

Iraq's President Saddam Hussein, we think, is a leader on the latter pattern. He is impulsive, acting forcefully on ideas whose time has passed, and, because he has surrounded himself with yes men, remarkably unpredictable and uninformed.

The result is consistent failure. In power now for some 20 years, he chose the wrong economic system for a country with the world's second largest petroleum reserves. His people today are not a great deal better off than when they started pumping oil more than 30 years ago.

Even as his Eastern European socialist economic models collapsed, one by one, Saddam. Hussein has been too preoccupied by wars of his own making to make obviously needed corrections.

As for those wars, he launched the first on the basis of outdated territorial claims against Iraq's age-old enemy, Iran, when the latter was politically fragmented in the wake of the Shah's overthrow. The Arabic-speaking people in the oil-producing area the Iranians call Khusistan and the Arabs call Arabistan were supposed to welcome Iraqi troops and consolidate permanent Iraqi control. Instead, the attack unified Iran and healed the breach between its army and the quarrelsome Khomeini government.

Within less than two years, Iraqi forces were thrown back onto their own soil. For the next six years, only consistently massive financial help from the other Arab oil producers of the Gulf, and, finally, US naval protection for the tankers of those Gulf Arab states, saved Iraq from the consequences of Saddam's folly.

Another Wrong Conclusion

Inexplicably, Saddam then drew another wrong conclusion from the US actions in his favor, plus a sudden surge of renewed area wide anti-Americanism last May after the US vetoed a UN Security Council resolution to protect the Palestinians from massive persecution by their Israeli occupiers. The Iraqi president decided he could drive a wedge between his erstwhile Arab and American protectors, and get away with a lightning occupation of Kuwait, again on the basis of long-dormant territorial claims.

The result was to bring into the Arabian peninsula massive American forces to support some of the very Arab states that had been most disillusioned with the US. Saddam Hussain had miscalculated again, impulsively embracing an idea whose time had passed.

Now, the economic embargo is tightening its noose around his fragile economy. US and other armed forces are massing for possible offensive action after January 15. And Saddam Hussein is alternating defiant soundbites with desperate public signals that he is ready to withdraw if he can keep the tiny portion of the vast Rumaila oil field that underlies Kuwait; or if he can be assured access to uninhabited Bubiyan and Warba islands, useless to Kuwait but affording Iraq access to the sea. He has also indicated he might docilely withdraw if the US would agree to a UN Middle East peace conference to take up Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands.

He desperately wants to avoid returning to his long-suffering people, empty-handed again. What happens if he doesn't get even a fig leaf? Think again of the abrasive bureaucrat running down a corridor determined to ruin someone's, anyone's, day. If unpredictable Saddam Hussein launches a similar impulsive move, he has at his disposal a stockpile of powerful weapons.

George Bush: Uncertain Course to a Predictable Destination

George Bush sticks with the ideas of his formative years, and the values of his youth. An American of his own generation knows pretty much what to expect, as do the loyal and extraordinarily competent followers he has gathered into a tight and leak-proof inner circle that is the sole repository of executive branch power in Bush's Washington.

The fact that Saddam Hussain would cross Kuwait's borders and expect to get away with it is incomprehensible to Bush. There will be no public dealing before Iraqi forces pull back, completely, across Kuwait's borders. There may, however, be promises that, with Iraqi forces back home, everything that was on the table before can go back on the table. Nor would Bush have a problem with anything worked out among the Arab states concerning Rumaila or the islands, so long as it happened after Iraq's pullout.

Nor would he personally have a problem with a UN conference to address all of the outstanding problems in the Middle East, despite his foolish and manifestly incorrect statements that there is no "linkage" between the military occupation of Kuwait and that of Palestine. Obviously there is linkage, since there would have been no Iraqi invasion of Kuwait had Saddam Hussein not hoped to capitalize on the fierce resentment in every comer of the Arab world of the continued Israeli occupation of Palestine, and its subsidization by the United States.

For Bush, what he might call the linkage thing" is a matter of form, that Saddam Hussein get no credit for the conference, rather than substance, the Palestinians' right to some measure of long-overdue justice.

George Bush's Magnificent Bluff

In fact, George Bush has accomplished what most Americans hope is a magnificent bluff, and most Iraqis fear is a serious threat. Both are right, by their own lights, and this gets to the heart of one difference between Americans and Arabs.

Americans have inherited from the British a tendency to attribute significant historical events to Murphy's Law—anything that can go wrong will go wrong.

The Arabs, like Sherlock Holmes, are accustomed to observing seemingly random phenomena and then constructing elaborate theories to link and account for them.

Bush's massive reaction to Iraq's misguided invasion of Kuwait and to Saudi Arabia's appeal for protection suggests to some "have not" Arabs that Bush must have lured Saddam, their champion, into making the initial mistake.

The same evidence suggests to the American mind that Bush compounded Saddam's stupidity by stupidity of his own, over-reacting by sending too many US troops to the Middle East. In doing so he possibly set in train a series of events that can lead to the ultimate stupidity: an unneccessary war between an Iraqi leader too stubborn to admit he's licked, and an American leader trapped by his own words into a war he doesn't want or need, and which he knows will create even more intractable problems for the US and its allies in the Middle East.

The truth, in fact, is neither of the above. It was predictable that Bush would act decisively against the kind of over-the-border aggression he almost died fighting in World War II. It was a case where principle and economic interest converged. In acting as he did, Bush may have saved the oil fields of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates from being overrun as well.

Their Arab owners believe it, because the "have" Arabs, who don't believe Bush conspired to trap Saddam, do believe Saddam conspired to take what belongs to them all at the same time he was plotting to take what was Kuwait's.

When enough US and other forces were on the scene to prevent Iraq's strongman from thinking about further incursions, George Bush went about getting UN authorization for the measures he had already taken. Seeing the world ganging up to roll him back, Saddam began to think about defending himself from possibly imminent US aerial attacks. Thus the seizure of the hostages.

As a result, American public support for Bush's actions, already overwhelming, solidified. It was only after all this, on Nov. 8, that Bush surprised not only his fellow Americans but the entire world by ordering a second huge movement of 200,000 US troops to join the 230,000 already in the Mideast.

This made the weight of US forces so top heavy and potentially destabilizing to the lightly populated and deeply conservative Arab countries in which they were stationed that it was obvious the US would not and should not maintain such a huge force there for long. Meanwhile, on Nov. 29, backed by the successful and single-minded diplomacy of his secretary of state, Bush got UN backing for the use of force after Jan. 15, if Saddam Hussain's forces were still in Kuwait.

The effect on Saddam Hussain was sobering. With so many troops pouring into the Gulf, the path of least resistance for Bush clearly was war. Instead of providing protection against its outbreak, Saddam Hussain's hostages were a potential catalyst that made war by accident almost inevitable.

He let the hostages go on Dec. 6. Score one for Bush's magnificent bluff. But the vast buildup also generated powerful counterforces in Congress. The administration had said, as late as October, that the economic sanctions already were squeezing Iraq.

Suddenly, in November, the US was ostentatiously preparing for an early war. Partisans of Israel had been calling for such a war from day one, to the quiet alarm of other Americans. Now the Israel lobby was openly joined by the Kuwaiti government-in-exile—and probably by other less visible Middle Eastern special interests.

Congress sprang into action, not by taking a position but by positioning itself to say "we told you so" if things turned out badly. Senate and House committees held extensive hearings.

What they produced, at least initially, was awesome unanimity among former chiefs of staff and former secretaries of defense, among others, that war would be unpredictable and was unnecessary because economic sanctions would force Saddam Hussain to withdraw from Kuwait. Further, most witnesses pointed out, sanctions and war are not either-or propositions. After six months or a year of sanctions, if the anti-Saddam coalition lost patience, Iraq's military machine would have been considerably weakened by the sanctions. War then would be less costly in lives than war now.

The Balance Sheet

At this writing, Saddam Hussein is in a weakening position, and knows it. His only remaining hope is to crack the coalition facing him or extract a fig leaf to cover the humiliation of withdrawal.

If there is to be no fig leaf, one way to shake the coalition is armed action, no matter how futile, against Israel. It would invite instant, enthusiastic Israeli retaliation. It almost certainly would also bring tremendous military punishment upon the Iraqi people, not from Israel but from the US.

But it is also possible that such a gesture against Israel, whose actions are so deeply resented throughout the Arab world, could transform Saddam Hussain's war from Arab "have nots" versus Arab "haves" into a symbolic war of all the Arab people against Israel and its US mentor, and thus a debacle for the United States and its Arab allies.

George Bush probably understands all this. Just as his campaign-winning slogan I read my lips, no new taxes" trapped him into economic immobility for the first year and a half of his administration, however, his vow that there will be no "linkage" between protecting Kuwaitis from their Iraqi occupiers and protecting Palestinians from the Israelis who have occupied their lands far longer has trapped him again.

An American pledge, or a United Nations pledge not vetoed by the United States, to open a conference to deal with both problems after an Iraqi withdrawal would provide the perfect fig leaf for Saddam Hussain, while enabling Bush to insist on withdrawal first.

Other players not to be overlooked are the other Arabs—all of them. Too divided to take a united stand when it first was needed in the face of the Iraqi invasion, they were given another chance to come up with an "Arab solution" by Bush's announcement that there would be US contacts with Iraq.

Neither the US nor Iraq wants war. Logically, therefore, there should be no war, despite the deplorable diplomacy by soundbite conducted by both. There surely will be war, however, unless Iraq gets some assurance there will be a conference, or Kuwait, under Saudi tutelage, gives Iraq a wink and a nod about the islands. Such a war is just as likely to be initiated by a desperate Saddam Hussain as by Bush.

Either way, one consequence is predictable. When the smoke clears, the US and its Arab allies, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf states that follow the Saudi lead, will face even more difficult problems than they did before the fighting began.