Background

The Gulf War may have been “the war to end all wars,” the last of the great theater campaigns. It may even have been the last “major” war ever fought.^[1] To western military planners the clash of armored divisions on a grand scale is obsolete. The usual scenario for conflict today is “low-intensity,” along the lines of the wars since fought in Somalia, Bosnia, Georgia and Haiti. When engaged, U.S. combat troops will be more liable to face either the drawn-out, pin-prick campaigns favored by “people’s armies,” or short, fairly brutal fights against various “National Guards.” These last aren't guerilla armies, but one step lower: formations of thugs armed and organized to terrorize and control a local populace. The model is the militias of Lebanon and Somalia, the Serbian armies in the Balkans, or Haiti’s military.

Those will be much harder wars for the United States, with its peculiar domestic political tensions, to fight. They smack of interference in the domestic affairs of the nations where they occur. It is easy to make the case (whether from the political left or the right) for the U.S. to mind its own business and avoid the costs of war: the casualties are potentially higher, the “campaigns” messier and less focused, the potential for coming away bloodied too pronounced. The constraints become not so much the military requirements of the situation but the internal politics of the United States.

Just as their approach to war was obsolete, so Saddam Hussein and his Iraq were atavisms. They were a throwback to the strutting dictators and conquering nations of the 1930s. Yet Saddam and Iraq also represent a prototypical danger to international stability for the 1990s and beyond. Even though World Communism is dead, yet there remain dozens of authoritarian regimes in the world, some of them even Communist. Saddam Hussein was merely the first in what could be a long line of assorted Great Leaders and Presidents for Life whose ambitions and egos extend beyond their borders. Sitting in the vacated Soviet seat, Saddam would, had he been successful in Kuwait, have been in a position to dictate, strut and bluster on a much grander scale than to only his 17 million Iraqis. He would have been buttressed by his fearsome armed forces, by his chemical and soon-to-be nuclear arsenal and by the vocal political and moral support of the Arabs. Rather than a U.S.-Soviet split, Saddam could see a Western-Arab balance of power, with the Arab half under his sway.

This is not a subtle concept. The rest of the world could see the same thing. That was a lot of power to be gathered into the hands of a small group of people, especially a small group of people who often seemed intent on proving themselves in ruthless opposition to all that the democracies stand for. The world had just come out of forty years of such a bipolar arrangement, and hadn’t liked it. The dangers inherent were too familiar for the Americans, for Europe or for other Arab governments to meekly acquiesce.

The world is also moving, however jerkily, from that crude bipolar ideological clash to a multipolar arrangement (albeit with its own set of clashes). Accomplishment in the marketplace, rather than rhetoric and brute force, is fast becoming the measure of a nation’s power and accomplishment. This does not leave a lot of room for dictators because while their regimes are usually economically “efficient” in theory, they are seldom economically effective. In today’s modern mass communication world there is much less room for the rhetoric of prosperity unbacked by results. Assigning blame only works for a certain amount of time. The lack of genuine accomplishment becomes too quickly evident. No matter how much blame the regime may cast elsewhere, the lack of bread in the people’s mouths is too concrete a fact to explain away when the rest of the world is worrying about getting too fat.

Despite the widespread participation of other countries, the Gulf War was in most respects an American war. With the exceptions of Kuwait and — possibly — Iraq, its most significant effects has been felt in the United States. The war’s primary fallout has been psychological and political. Vietnam and the 1960s had a deeply toxic effect on the American psyche. The nation’s soul was poisoned in a manner, the closest parallel to which would be the damage and division wrought by the Civil War. When the USA went into Vietnam it was the richest and most powerful country in the world. The country and its people moved inexorably from the prosperity and optimism of the 1950s and the first half of the 1960s, going in short order through domestic upheaval, to military and diplomatic defeat, to international and domestic disgrace.

This shift in fortune, largely self-inflicted, was not a process most Americans enjoyed. It was a direct contradiction to the optimism which had come to be characteristic of American international relations starting with Woodrow Wilson. The Gulf War provided an end point to that downhill slide. It provided a sense of relief that the country had proven itself, not so much to the rest of the world as to itself. The war restored a large part of American self-confidence, tempered with real wisdom. For the first time in fifteen years the American people felt confidence in their own government, not because of what it said but because it had proven itself.

The U.S. government proved itself not only domestically, but also internationally. One of the most interesting and telling sidelights of the Gulf War involved a non-combatant Italian news cameraman, Alberto Calvi. He and his crew were travelling through western Kuwait in the last hours of the ground campaign when 25 Iraqi soldiers surrendered to him. He was “armed” with a video camera, but the defeated soldiers offered him no harm. He handed out water and cookies and the Iraqis took up a spontaneous chant: “George Bush!  George Bush!”

Along with Calvi’s 25 Iraqis, 89 percent of the American people supported the Bush administration in its war against Iraq, a consensus that would have been considered impossible the previous July. The significance of this was overlooked, dismissed, “reinterpreted,” or quickly forgotten by America’s fashionable left — the “politically correct.”  Even as the Iraqis were surrendering in droves, there were hundreds of people in the United States who were busy protesting the war, still convinced, apparently out of habit, that if the United States was doing it, it must be wrong. Their theme song was “No Blood for Oil.”

Especially among the press, the war caused a great weeping and gnashing of teeth over the horrors of military censorship, “pool reporting,” and what has been presented since as press-agentry on the part of the military. However, no war has ever been covered in so close to a “real-time” mode. The vast majority of the American people got their information raw, or nearly so, without the benefit of filtration through ideological strainers. When attempts were made to “interpret” the information we could see before us, they were more irritating than effective. More importantly, those doing the "interpreting" were seen as either crackpots or as sympathetic to the enemy.

This is not to claim that every bit of information that was presented was 100 percent accurate; far from it. Checking accuracy and assigning significance to facts are functions analysis and editing should fill. There are always inaccuracies in information gathering. The more raw the information, the more inaccuracies will be found, usually minor, occasionally major. But for good or ill, the information was presented to us as close to directly as we are likely ever to see. We saw it, often in pictures, occasionally live and in color. There was no way what we saw could be described as something other than what it was.

Through a process of natural evolution, between August 2nd, 1990, and the start of the ground campaign against Saddam Hussein the nation’s psychic stance shifted from a reluctance to point a gun at anyone to an acceptance not only of the necessity of war but also of its costs. Precisely because of our access to information, those who were protesting seemed to the rest of us to be divorced from the same reality we were experiencing. A sign hoisted in Kuwait City on the day of its liberation made the final cogent counter-argument in favor of the war: “Blood for Freedom.”

The roots of the Gulf War are just as complicated and tangled as those of any other conflict. There probably were no “pure” motives to be found in any quarter. The Gulf War was fought for reasons both practical and idealistic. It opposed a Bad Guy against whom most of the American people could unite. It defended a Little Guy who had been blatantly victimized, who could even be described as “plucky” in his attempts to fight back. At the same time, the war was fought to preserve the nation’s access to oil and its freedom from economic blackmail. These are reasons which can be manipulated, if one is so motivated, into crassness and self-service.

Regardless of the motivations for the war, the benefits have justified the costs. The end results have included not only the restoration of Kuwait, but the cutting of the Gordian knot of Middle East politics — however intent subsequent efforts to retie it. Domestically, it has even included a healthy narrowing of the political mainstream, even leading to achievable domestic consensus in other areas. The Gulf War, coupled with the collapse of the Soviet Union, has thrown the further reaches of the American and the world left into confusion. The hysteria and the edge of didacticism remain, but that end of the political spectrum had to go onto the defensive — had to actually start to think if it wanted to preserve its very existence. Political correctitude itself even came under attack; given a few more years, if we are all lucky, it will fall into the same category as other discarded fads: platform shoes, disco, goldfish swallowing and boo-boo-pa-doo. The eclipse of the antiwar keystone of the radical left is as interesting a story as the demise of Iraq’s army of occupation.

Besides “No Blood for Oil,” the antiwar people attacked on a second front, familiar to prosecutors in rape cases: they attacked the victim. Kuwait was a corrupt feudal regime, this line ran, “just as bad as Iraq.”  It could not possibly be considered free, and could not possibly be worth the expenditure of American lives. This angle was palatable to those who wanted to believe, but it alienated many others from the first. It was simply too much at odds with the observable facts. While most Americans had little detailed knowledge of either Kuwait or Iraq when the crisis began, it was impossible to suppress or to seriously distort the differences once our collective attention was directed upon the two countries.

Kuwait was not an American-style representative democracy at the time Iraq invaded, but neither was its regime a bloody-handed autocracy. It was not a perfect country, but its people were not oppressed; the ruling family cared about them and for the most part had their respect. At the time of the invasion, Kuwait had the highest per capita income in the world, and one of the highest standards of living. The country’s faults lay in its people’s enjoyment of the good things in life that a lot of money can buy — comfortable housing, servants, expensive cars, and trips to Monte Carlo. Rather than rattling sabers at its neighbors, it wrote checks and made them jealous. Human nature being what it is, many of those who gloated the most when the country was prostrate in the dust were those who had received the benefit of its philanthropy.

Why did Iraq invade? Iraq’s regime was in the hands of the Ba‘ath (Arab Renaissance) Party, and the Ba’ath Party was in the hands of Saddam Hussein and his family. It was literally the bloody-handed autocracy Kuwait was not.

Saddam had fought a vicious eight-year war with Iran, expecting to conquer the oil-rich province of Khuzestan. He ended up in 1988 with enormous losses and a small amount of territory. Both Iraq and Iran were almost literally bled dry in the war as the Iraqi forces were pushed back, then attacked inside their own territory. Nonetheless, Saddam claimed a great victory for having contained the spread of Islamic fundamentalism and he claimed credit for defending the eastern flank of the Arab world against the Persian invaders.

The Kuwaitis had financed a part of Saddam’s war, and they had aligned with him politically. They provided support primarily because of their fear of Iran’s fundamentalist regime. Iran’s greatest sin had lain in its determination to export its Shi’ite religious revolution. Its leadership periodically stated its intention of overthrowing of the country’s neighbors and setting up similar regimes. They used money that could have gone to care for their people to finance subversion.

The Iranians had not only overthrown the Shah, but they had hunted him and attempted to degrade him afterward. Abandoning norms of both international and Muslim behavior, they represented a personal danger to the members of the ruling classes. The Kuwaitis, the Saudis and the other Gulf States understandably regarded this as a Bad Thing. These countries are primarily populated by Sunni Muslims. Their governments are established, for the most part old-fashioned and stable. They took a wary view of religious-tinged bully boys who were going to move in on their territory.

Complicating matters even further, the inhabitants of the Gulf States and of Saudi Arabia are also Arabs and the Iranians are Persians. The Iranians speak a language that belongs to the Indo-European group, the same as English, Russian, German, and many of the languages of India. The very word Iran is linguistically identical to “Aryan” — both to the linguistic and anthropological concept, and also to the Nazi pseudo-pscientific concept. The roots of Persian culture are different from those of the Semitic Arabs, for all their convergence since around 1500 BC. The Arabs could accept the Iranians as a center of power in the Gulf; they had long since gotten used to that. They could not accept them as the preeminent power there. Saddam’s Iraq, for all its faults, was seen by his neighbors at the time as the lesser of two evils.

The Iranian government’s connivance at the occupation of the American embassy in Teheran in the days of the Carter administration had been a minor sin in the eyes of the Gulf States. Pulling Uncle Sam’s beard was a popular pass time in that part of the world. At about the same time the U.S. embassy in Iran had been occupied, a mob in Kabul had killed an American assigned to the embassy there; it took the Soviet invasion to put a stop to the riots and make the Americans into nice fellows to the Afghans, at least for awhile. Similar disturbances had occurred in Pakistan, in Libya and in a number of other places. It was something to do on a Friday afternoon, after going to the mosque.

To the Muslim world, the U.S. made the perfect enemy. It was rich. It consistently sided with Israel against what were seen as Arab interests. The war in Vietnam and the immediate post-Vietnam period had shown the world a series of administrations that were well-intentioned but inept; an army that had started fairly well, faded over the long haul, and was falling apart by the time Saigon fell; and a populace that viewed its own government with contempt. It was fun to pummel a straw giant, large and fearsome-looking but with no real power or influence. Most importantly, it was safe.

This role as the Great Satan is one the USA always accepted, without being quite sure why.  Americans find Israel much easier to understand, much easier with which to sympathize.  The two cultures are much closer, and it is always easier to relate to the familiar.  As American society  evolves toward a true balance of power between the sexes, Islamic—and particularly Arabic—society's male-dominated and male-oriented culture becomes even more alien and inhospitable. As western culture becomes less dominated by religion, so Islam's dominance of culture by religion seems a more and more fantastic concept. As western culture becomes more tolerant, Islam's becomes less so. As European-rooted culture has grown to place more value on truth and honesty, so has the Big Lie and the conspiracy theory become the expected in Arab-rooted culture. 

And finally, with the exception of wealth derived from oil, the Arab countries of the Middle East and North Africa are uniformly impoverished. The Arabs assign the blame for this to colonialism and to international conspiracies against them. In the eyes of the West these areas were poor and mismanaged when the colonial powers took over, and they didn't get any better under colonial control.

These are all currents in the American perception of the Arabs.  Added together, they represent a society which is antithetical at root to American and Western European views.  Americans feel misunderstood, and often intentionally misunderstood, by the Arabs. And because he sees a society which he regards as basically unpleasant, the American feels no urge to make the extra effort required to understand the Arab. The only time he really cares one way or the other is when the Arab guns down another busload of innocents or throws someone off a ship in a wheelchair in the name of some obscure aspect of his politics. The American seldom feels any sympathy for the gunslingers, and his government's policy is usually based on some perception that one of two evils is lesser, but not much so.

The conflict between Iraq and Iran provides a textbook example of this hypothesis.  There the Americans were placed in a situation in which there was no right answer. There were only three choices open: they could support Iraq, they could support Iran, or they could remain neutral. Remaining neutral could be eliminated without much hesitation; neutrality amounted to de facto support for Iran, which was assessed as having the greater capability over the long haul. Its population is larger, its industrial base better developed and more stable, and it possessed a 3 to 1 advantage in the number of combat forces. But Iran was then — and still is now, to only a slightly lesser degree — active in its hatred of all things American. Additionally, the takeover of the U.S. embassy in Teheran was still fresh in the American people’s minds. Had the U.S. provided support for Iran, even the small support of strict neutrality, there would have been a huge public outcry, and rightfully so.

That, in effect, left only the option of support for Iraq. This was nearly as distasteful as the alternative. Saddam was a pretty foul specimen, even before launching SCUDs at downtown Teheran, before gassing both the Iranians and his own people. He was in the wrong in the war — he had dramatically abrogated his country’s agreement with Iran on their mutual borders by tearing it up on television — and right and wrong are concepts that Americans take very seriously.

Contrary to repeated assertions that Iraq was a creation of U.S. weapons exports, the Americans did not arm the Iraqis.^[2]  What support the U.S. did provide was minimal, enough to keep the Iraqi regime hanging on, but not enough to allow Saddam to achieve his goals of conquest. Containment of the Iranians was considered important enough to cause the government to overlook the Iraqi Exocet missile attack on the USS Stark, in which 37 sailors died.

It was a classic lose-lose situation. The U.S. was, despite the continuing criticism it receives from the domestic left, as close to even-handed in its treatment of the belligerents as was possible under the prevailing circumstances. The minimal nature of the support it did provide did nothing to win Iraqi friendship, while the fact of any support at all had the net effect of making the Iranians all the more vocal in their (organized and directed) anger.^[3]

If the United States provided support to anyone in the war, it was to Kuwait, whose tankers were re-flagged and escorted by American warships. Even here, the Kuwaitis had to first waltz almost into the arms of the Soviets in a dance of low-grade blackmail before the United States came through. The tankers and their escorts came under attack periodically by Iranian aircraft — in one mistaken incident an airliner was shot down, for which the U.S. made apology and restitution — and by Iran’s tiny naval forces. The “profit” the U.S. received from this hefty investment of men and materiel was the continued flow of oil from the Gulf.

Saddam’s military machine, as the networks, the news magazines and the papers continually reminded us, was the fourth-largest in the world,^[4] with 900,000 men under arms. With mobilization, this figure could be raised to two million — fully 75% of all men between the ages of 18 and 34. The Iraqis' tank force was larger than that of any European state.

Saddam’s war, and supporting the machine that fought it, took money, and lots of it. Rich in oil in its own right, Iraq had poured its riches into arms and conquest. Kuwait, meanwhile, was frittering away its money on domestic programs, philanthropy — some of it directed Iraq’s way — and in establishing a basis for wealth which was not based on oil, which the ruling family recognizes is an exhaustible resource. As much of Kuwait’s income comes from investments overseas as from oil. With the war with Iran essentially a stalemate, and his debt load enormous, Saddam decided that since one of the richest countries in the world was right next door, and since its military was tiny, it would be to his advantage to gobble it up.

The United States and Western Europe are very dependent on the unrestricted flow of oil from the Middle East at reasonable prices. That had been the reason for reflagging the Kuwaiti tankers in the first place. Their economies, and through them the world’s, had been devastated by the two embargoes of the early 1970s. Even the majority Democrats, who had basically forsworn war in the aftermath of Vietnam except in response to demonstrable and glaring danger to the national interest, had used the example of a threat to the nation’s oil supplies in the Persian Gulf as one of the few scenarios in which they would support the use of force.

The phrase “No Blood for Oil” brought to mind visions of young Americans dying to defend the profits of Exxon and Mobile but that was nothing more than a simple-minded slogan. Oil was a vital concern to the United States, and the economics of energy are an intricate web, as the upheavals of the ‘70s had demonstrated. The 1973 embargo had set off almost a decade of “stagflation,” radical shifts in employment and demographic patterns, and even Jimmy Carter’s “malaise.” It might even be argued that the meteoric rise in the cost of energy and transportation had killed America’s manufacturing base. At one point there was even a glass shortage; as long as there is sand, there is the raw material to make glass, but the other component required is heat, which is produced by energy, which was in short supply.

Once started on the collision course, the momentum toward war built, slowly at first, in fits and starts, then increasingly with a will of its own. By January 16th, 1991, it had become inevitable. War brought out in the American people qualities of patriotism, dedication, understanding, and compassion that we had forgotten we possessed. It showed us a half million young men and women going about their duties in a cheerful, disciplined matter-of-fact manner. It gave us something to be proud of, and it renewed our feelings of competence.

It also brought out of the woodwork a wide variety of crackpots, nut cases, carpers and gold brick salesmen, some of them in prominent positions. It held up to the harsh light of public gaze the dim-bulbery of many of those to whom we had previously listened with respect. It gave the antiwar movement and the domestic left in general the chance to publicly shoot itself in the mouth. The war united the country even while highlighting some of its deepest divisions. It was a very interesting war, and the period of its aftermath promises to be even more interesting.