Attending to the Peace: Optimism and Despair

"Five hundred oil fires burning across the horizon, air pollution in downtown Kuwait City so thick that at noontime you think it's midnight. You're not there for more than an hour and there's oil in your mouth, oil on your skin, oil on your clothes." —House Majority Leader Richard Gephardt (D–MO), upon returning from Kuwait, March 22, 1991

"The destruction that [Saddam] wrought to Kuwait and to the environment ... makes one think that he is a totally evil person, and I hope that he does not survive." —Sen. John Chafee (R–RI), upon returning from Kuwait, March 17, 1991

"I bet I'm the only American ambassador in the world with pro-American graffiti on my walls." —US Ambassador to Kuwait Edward (Skip) Gnehm, quoted March 18, 1991

"I expect anarchy [in Iraq] to spread ... On the whole, the country is coming apart at the seams." —Iraqi expatriate journalist Samir Al-Khalil, March 11, 1991

"The military is the only force that can hold [Iraq] together in any kind of cohesive way. Beyond that there are no Thomas Jeffersons out there. —Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Sam Nunn (D–GA), March 17, 1991

"If you remove all power from the center of Baghdad, the Shiite take over, and the... sheikhdoms in the Gulf. . are going to be threatened ... George Bush fought this war to preserve the status quo, and he could well have unleashed the forces in that area which will quickly bring down the status quo." —syndicated columnist Patrick Buchanan, March 8, 1991

"There is no doubt at all that Iran is deeply involved in the insurrection in the south of Iraq." —Hans Withern Longva, Norwegian ambassador to Kuwait, quoted March 20, 1991

"Nothing will happen in the region without us being involved." —Turkish President Turgut Ozal, quoted March 8, 1991

"The destruction of Iraq is going to be an ugly scar that will continue to bleed for some time and create a deep sense of guilt in the hearts of the Arabs." —Mahmoud Sherif, editor of the Jordanian newspaper Al Destour, quoted March 10, 1991

"We are a part of the Moslem world, Moslem culture. And what is happening in the Persian Gulf matters to us greatly. Indeed, Iraq is not only one of the great states of the Middle East, it is one of the centers of the thousand-year Moslem culture." —Askar Akaev, president of the Soviet Republic of Kirghiz, quoted March 18, 1991

"As friends and allies of the US, those Arabs have a special task to impress on the Americans that they cannot be less enthusiastic about the freeing of the Israeli–occupied territories than about Kuwait. Little else will help their credibility with the Arab masses." —Senior Jordanian government official, quoted March 8, 1991

"Americans always come to the Middle East in times of crisis and make lots of promises ... Remember the Rogers Plan? The Reagan plan? The Baker proposals? All were excellent ideas. But gone is the crisis and gone are the Americans." —Walid Khazzahia, economics professor, American University in Cairo, quoted Feb. 24, 1991

"We must meet the challenge of peace with the same clarity and unity of purpose with which we met Saddam's aggression." —Gen. Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, March 19, 1991

"The single biggest contribution to peace in this area is going to have to be a just settlement of the Palestinian question. So long as the Palestinian question is around, it's going to be a cause that divides the Middle East and causes people to side on one side or another, and it's going to be a constant source of conflict." —Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, commander of US Gulf forces, March 11, 1991

"American officials can be too impatient for a solution, which is a ... prescription for a bad peace." —Thomas Dine, executive director of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), quoted March 21, 1991

"A US Administration that knew how to persuade Israel to refrain from military action although its citizens were in mortal danger should be able to prod it into accepting a new territorial stand for peace; this is the issue on which any US initiative will succeed or miserably fail. Arab-Israeli accords are so crucial to a new Middle East order that, with this building block missing, any ambitious strategy for pacification of the region will tumble down." —Gideon Samet, editor of the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz, Feb. 23, 1991

"Even the most faithful supporters of Israel openly question Shamir's sincerity about seeking peace. A major factor preventing an open break is an equal or possibly stronger feeling that President Bush does not wish Israel well and that the Jewish state needs to be protected from a hostile administration." —former AIPAC political director Douglas Bloomfield, March 7, 1991

"If [there is] a continuation of the status quo in Israel, or things like bringing Moledet into the cabinet, Israel will unilaterally give up whatever advantages it has accrued. This is not the time to circle the wagons. It's a time to be out there with new ideas and proposals." —David Cohen, co-director of the Center for Israeli Peace and Security, quoted March 8, 1991

"I believe in the Land of Israel the way it is. This is not an obstacle to peace." —Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, quoted March 7, 1991

"Shamir is not holding out, looking for a better deal on the occupied territories of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. For Shamir there is no better deal than the one he has, and he wants to go down in history as having preserved complete control over the Palestinian inhabited territories." —Washington Post columnist Jim Hoagland, March 12, 1991

"[Israel] is a nation governed by men—yes men—of stunted imagination: Constricted, petty men whose political relevant vocabulary is limited to the word 'no.'. . . Israel is going to have to make a fateful choice. It is either going to have to give up its claim to the whole West Bank ... or it is going to destroy the process of integration [of Soviet Jews] ... For it is inconceivable that America ... will simply dole out the necessary guarantees, while Israel continues to resist a resolution to the West Bank problem." —Leonard Fein, columnist for the Forward newspaper, March 15, 1991