Reaction

The immediate international response to the invasion of Kuwait was limp. While the U.S. immediately moved to position three of its aircraft carriers in the region, President Bush said at first that the government was not “discussing intervention.” The Arab League met for a full day and was unable even to come up with an expression of concern. Senator Sam Nunn, of Georgia, the powerful chairman of the Armed Services Committee, gave his opinion that the proper response should be economic and political pressure, not military action.

Bush did say he would not rule out a counterstrike and warned that the U.S. considered Saudi Arabia to be a “vital interest.”  The Arab League then publicly rejected foreign interference, but did somehow manage to condemn the invasion and demand that Iraq pack up and go home. Eight of its 21 members abstained or voted against even that pallid measure.

Saddam’s ears must have perked up when the U.S. and the Soviet Union issued a joint communique decrying the “brutal and illegal” Iraqi attack. Such a move probably would have been impossible a year before, unthinkable two years before. The two superpowers called on all nations to join in an arms embargo.  The dictator probably regarded it as some sort of aberration, which would sort itself out in a few days.

The U.S. went further. The day of the invasion, Bush signed two executive orders freezing Iraqi and Kuwaiti assets in the U.S. The freeze was soon followed by a boycott of Iraqi oil. The European Community followed suit, banning arms sales to Baghdad and boycotting Kuwaiti oil, since it was controlled now by Saddam. Kuwaiti assets were frozen in both the U.S. and the European Community to avoid the Iraqis getting their hands on them, and Japan asked its banks to follow suit. The UN Security Council demanded immediate and unconditional withdrawal by Iraq—Resolution 660—and threatened to impose its own sanctions. Only Yemen, Iraq’s lap dog, voted against the measure.

Opinion in Jordan was already against even these moves. Amman’s Jordan Times warned that a boycott would drive the price of oil up to $50 a barrel. Yemen’s two ruling parties issued a joint communique condemning the sanctions as clear evidence of “pre-planned aggressive intentions against the nations of the Arab world.”  These two countries were to provide Iraq's primary non-domestic support throughout the crisis.

Other Arab governments, however, were more concerned with the invasion, the closer to the scene the higher the concern. The Saudi newspaper Okaz rejected the principle of occupying other lands by force, whether by Arabs or others. Qatar’s al-Arab called it “wrong by any standard.”  In the United Arab Emirates, Dubai’s Gulf News said that Iraq “must be brought to its senses.” The Egyptian newspaper al-Akhbar suggested that Saddam read more than just the first few pages of the history books to learn the fate in store for “tyrants who violate the independence of nations,” and al-Ahram reported that 120 Iraqi officers had been executed for questioning the wisdom of the invasion.

The Iraqis blustered. They warned the U.S. that they were not Grenada, then announced that a new Kuwaiti army was being established which would enlist Arabs of any nationality “who wish stability for Kuwait in its new age.”  About 140,000 Iraqis had already volunteered, which would produce an army six or seven times the size of the one Kuwait had maintained under the Emir—and that was before signing up anyone else, to include the stray Kuwaiti who might want to join. Most significantly, the riches of Kuwait were promised first to the citizens of Iraq, then “to the Arab masses.”

Two days after the invasion Baghdad announced that the “young revolutionaries” had set up a new government, headed by nine Kuwaiti military officers. The prime minister, commander in chief, minister of defense, and minister of the interior was a certain Colonel Alaa Hussein Ali. In Tunis, the Kuwaiti Embassy pointed out indignantly that Col. Ali wasn’t even a Kuwaiti, but was in fact Saddam’s son-in-law.^[12] 

Once Kuwait was stabilized, the Iraqis claimed, they would withdraw, leaving the country under the control of the “revolutionaries” and the new Pan-Arab army. A little later there was television footage of Iraqi hardware moving back to the north.

The Iraqis assured the world that their forces were not poised to attack Saudi Arabia. In Washington, Ambassador al-Mashat denied it “emphatically and categorically.”  It was probably a hard statement for the ambassador to make with a straight face, since its wording was so similar to the Iraqi disclaimers of designs on Kuwait only a little over a week before.

In fact, Saudi Arabia was safer than it was believed by the Bush administration at the time. It was not that the Iraqis had no desire to continue south, where there were so many more riches guarded by another small army; there were definite intelligence indications that they originally planned to continue on, probably to a line south of Dhahran. As it turned out, they were unable to do so. Saddam’s logistics were inadequate to support any further offensive. Fuel and munitions had to be shifted from within Iraq. Armored units suffered a high rate of breakdowns because of poor maintenance procedures. The armored vehicles shown in the news films being loaded on transporters to go back to Iraq were those which had broken down en route. Throughout the entire crisis and the war, in fact, Iraq’s logistics and maintenance system was marked by slap-dash planning and inattention to essential detail of the sort that would have American, British, French, or Russian commanders on the carpet—and shortly thereafter looking for a new line of work.

At least as important at this stage as logistics, the Iraqis were also distracted by their looting of Kuwait, and by the Kuwaitis themselves. The Kuwaiti air force managed to keep operating, flying A-4K strikes, for three days after the invasion, despite the loss of their base. They used a road alongside it as a runway, bringing fuel and ammunition from the base buildings as required, under Iraqi artillery fire. They stopped operations when they ran out of fuel and ammunition.

In the West and among the Arab governments surface indecision masked a feverish round of behind-the-scenes activity.  Part of it was involved with putting together a coalition opposing the naked aggression. In recent years there have been wars over border disputes, there have been interventions to establish friendly regimes in neighboring countries, there have been punitive ethnic wars. Outright invasion and occupation was a different story. It smacked too much of Hitler dismembering Czechoslovakia.

There were still many who expected that a peaceful solution could be bought, in spite of the invasion: “The Saudis have enough cash to solve this situation,” one Bush aide, apparently not one at the center of the decision-making process, told Newsweek cynically. “Somebody will write a check and it’ll be over.”

Bush himself didn’t think so. He spent two hours in Aspen, Colorado, talking to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who was both a colleague and a friend whose opinion Bush trusted. There can be no doubt that Bush had arrived at the opinion that Saddam must be stopped on his own, but it was probably good for him to hear Thatcher echoing his thoughts.  He probably felt less naked when she agreed to send Royal Air Force planes.  "Remember, George," Bush later recalled she told him, "this is no time to go wobbly."

Men of Bush’s type are an increasingly rare breed in politics today. He was a man sprung from old money, in public service out of the conviction that it was his duty to serve, rather than because it represented financial opportunity. The tradition is more that of John Quincy Adams or Franklin D. Roosevelt. He grew to manhood as a Navy pilot in the Second World War—another time when he did his duty—and he saw the damage inflicted on the world when an earlier generation tried to accommodate the dictators of the 1930s. Whatever his strengths and weaknesses as an administrator, he was in almost every respect the opposite of Saddam Hussein, but he could understand his motives only too well. He could dislike the dictator personally as well as officially.

Up until the invasion of Kuwait, the Democrats had gotten quite a bit of political mileage out of “the Wimp Factor,” their assessment that Bush lacked the manhood to handle tough decisions, despite his outstanding war record, despite his accomplishments in public life. The Wimp Factor was soon replaced by an equally inaccurate caricature of Bush the Macho Gunfighter, intent on nothing more than “kicking ass.” Ignoring the cartoonists, verbal and graphic, the president remained steadfast and principled throughout the crisis—and the Democrats alternately dithered wimpishly or took transparently  self-serving potshots at him.

Bush convened a meeting of the National Security Council at 8 a.m. the day after the invasion to formally review the national interest. There were a number of important points to be considered and discussed: danger to oil supplies, Iraq’s nuclear weapons program, the security of Israel, and the threat to U.S. credibility as the sole remaining effective superpower. All were decision-making factors, some were constraints.

Almost 200 years ago, Karl von Clausewitz pointed out that an aggressor really wants peace, not war. Rather than to fight, his desire is to march into his neighbor’s country unresisted. He has already made his decision as to whether the aggression is worth the risk, leaving the burden of choosing to resist on the shoulders of the victim and those of the victim’s friends. They are the ones who have to make the hard decision of whether the costs are worth the potential gain. The American left harped throughout the crisis on the fact that the U.S. had not rushed to the aid of Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, Cambodia under Pol Pot, and so on, ad nauseum. In the first two cases, the potential costs included ground war in Europe, the destruction of nations, and a likely culmination in nuclear annihilation. In Cambodia, the costs included an instant replay of Vietnam, before the mud had dried on the boots of the troops we had so recently withdrawn, using armed forces that were in the throes of restructuring and reorientation.

Kuwait was a different story. The United States was not particularly close to that country, but relations were better than they were with a lot of others in the Middle East. The potential benefits included not only a lot of oil, but also the restoration (and perhaps even readjustment) of the regional balance of power. There was from the first a core of public support for intervention; Iraq helped in building and maintaining it as the atrocity accounts filtered out.

The Emir’s government had set up shop in the Saudi resort town of Taif and was determined to somehow evict the invaders. They were ready to do their part financially, diplomatically, and, using both the resistance and the refugee armed forces, militarily. Despite the country’s internal quarrels over the interpretation and implementation of the 1962 constitution, opposition figures unanimously rejected the Iraqis. There would be time enough for internal squabbling when they were gone and the factions again had something to squabble over.

The U.S. could not afford to fight a war without financial help, despite its position as the single remaining superpower. The Americans had “won” the Cold War not by military action, but by military procurement. The arms race had continued unabated for over forty years, with both sides spending billions routinely. Both had maintained huge military establishments, consuming an inordinate percentage of gross national product. The arms race had gained an almost unstoppable momentum during the Brezhnev years, and with the presidency of Ronald Reagan the costs of the new systems proposed were absolutely dizzying. The armed forces of both countries were re-outfitted almost from the ground up and from the underwear out. The Soviets had finally been spent into the ground, to the point where their economy, based on rigid Marxist pseudoscience, had simply been unable to sustain the expense. The Berlin Wall came down because the Eastern Bloc literally could not afford to keep it up.

But economic war produces casualties just as surely as does shooting war. In the process of spending the Soviets into collapse, the U.S. had done almost the same thing to itself, like two prize fighters battling until neither can lift a glove. The U.S. budget deficit was huge, its internal economy grotesquely distorted toward the defense sector. The full range of domestic social programs that Europeans could afford were beyond its reach. For U.S. citizens, for example, the savings of a lifetime could be—and routinely were—wiped out by a single major illness. The banking system was beginning to fail. Manufacturing was uncompetitive with the Far East and Europe. The only sector of the economy which was still healthy was defense. To make matters worse, after the relative boom of the Reagan years, brought on by lowered taxes and renewed public sector (defense industry) spending, the business cycle had wobbled around to the beginning of a downturn and we were in the first throes of recession. The U.S. economy, not the more melodramatic issues which the left was to adopt, was the biggest factor against helping Kuwait and defending Saudi Arabia.

Probably the biggest factor in favor of decisive action was the fact that the invading Iraqis had moved to within five miles of the Saudi border. Intelligence said they wanted to keep going and they appeared to have the capability to do it. The Saudis have billions of dollars worth of military hardware, but they have only 65,000 men under arms. They have a lot of real estate and a lot of oil. They even have a fairly substantial population, given their country’s arid condition: 14.8 million, versus Iraq’s 17 million. However, unlike Iraq, Saudi Arabia is a peaceful country, not one that has been heavily militarized. If Saddam was to move south, he would be in a position to control half the world’s proven oil reserves with little effective resistance, with resulting havoc not only on the U.S. economy, but the world.

The holdup to concrete action was the Saudis themselves. They were closest to the situation, they had the most to lose—and they were intensely sensitive about irreligious foreigners setting foot in their country. Bush, Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell met with Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador, to discuss the U.S. role. The prince had his doubts that the Americans would do all it would take to drive Saddam back. Jimmy Carter had sent a laughably token force during an earlier flare-up, a handful of unarmed F-15s. Bush had more in mind than sending Saddam a “signal.” Instead of unarmed tokens, the ambassador was shown a plan that called for the deployment of two and a third U.S. divisions, an air wing, and a carrier task force. They would be armed, too. Bandar said that if the Americans meant business, he thought the royal family would welcome the American troops.

Later that same day, Powell advised Bush to “draw a line in the sand,” to send enough troops to make an Iraqi attack on Saudi Arabia an attack on the United States.

Bush talked next with General Norman Schwarzkopf, the CENTCOM—Central Command—commander. XVIII Airborne Corps and the 82nd Airborne Division had already been placed on alert. Schwarzkopf gave the green light. Then Bush called King Fahd of Saudi Arabia. He told him he was firmly committed to defending that country. The U.S. had no desire for permanent bases and he would withdraw U.S. troops whenever the king thought the time had come for them to leave. Finessing with Prince Bandar’s arguments, he advised the king not even to ask for troops if all he wanted was a token force.

On August 6th, the Security Council imposed an economic blockade on Iraq, forbidding all trade except for medicine and food “in a humanitarian context.”  The vote was effectively unanimous, though Yemen and Cuba abstained. Transshipment of Iraqi or Kuwaiti oil was banned. Loans and financial aid were cut off. The rulings were binding on all UN members. The Iraqi government called the sanctions “an act of war.”  Saudi Arabia and Turkey both shut down Iraq’s oil pipelines, the latter after a good deal of agonizing; Turkey is not a rich country.

Within a few days of the invasion, Iraq had 150,000 men in Kuwait—two armored, one mechanized, and three infantry divisions, plus support formations, plus the secret police. By August 8th, Saddam had quit pussy-footing and annexed Kuwait as his country’s 19th province, an act duly approved by Colonel Ali, who thereupon faded from the picture.

Iraq began transforming the country into its 19th province. Kuwait City was renamed Kadhima, and a new district was established in the northeast, apparently solely so that it could be named after Saddam. The main airport was renamed after the dictator as well, as were al-Sabah Hospital and a number of other sites. With becoming modesty, his posters were plastered along the streets and on buildings and his photos were hung in all government offices. The inscriptions read “Saddam Hussein—Hero of War and Peace and Extraordinary Leader.”  Huge statues were put on order, lest anyone not notice who was in charge. Streets were renamed. New maps were printed and old ones altered. “Kuwait has gone into history and out of geography,” said Saadoun al-Janabi, an Iraqi Ministry of Information official.

Bush publicly called Saddam a “liar and a mass murderer,” and compared him to Hitler. This resulted in further potshots from those who feared he would offend the dictator’s delicate sensitivities, and from those who claimed he overstated the case. In a sense, the niggling was correct; it would have been more accurate to compare Saddam to Jean-Claude Duvalier, assuming the Haitian dictator had done something along the lines of invading and annexing Santo Domingo, but Bush was trying to raise support. Calling him “an Arab Papa Doc” would not have conveyed quite the same emotional impact. The problem will be easier in the future; we will be able to compare Bad Guys to Saddam Hussein.^[13]

The Security Council also invoked Article 51 of the UN Charter, which opens the way for “individual or collective self-defense,” the first successful invocation since the Korean War. Watching, perhaps warily, Tariq Aziz blustered that, “The Americans have prepared the ground for a war of aggression. If the Americans think this is a vacation like they had in Panama and Grenada, this will be a bloody conflict and America will lose and be humiliated.”

Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney visited Saudi Arabia. King Fahd demanded that if there were a fight Saddam must be beaten up severely enough that he would “not get up again.”  Cheney returned and as of the 8th of August U.S. troops were on their way, the same day Saddam annexed Kuwait. “Desert Shield” had begun.

As of the 11th, the Los Angeles Times still did not expect to see a large commitment of American troops:

Hundreds of thousands of American fighting men are not going to be put into the ferociously hostile environment of Saudi Arabia. That won’t happen because (1) Congress would refuse to approve such a commitment; (2) the American people wouldn’t support it; (3) the Saudis would not invite or tolerate it; (4) probably no senior military official would propose it; and finally, (5) President Bush if for no other reason than that he faces re-election in 1992 would not request it.

In fact, the actual sequence was exactly backward from what the Times had laid out. (5) Bush did order—not request—the large-scale deployment, had in fact already done so by the time the editorial appeared. (4) Generals Powell and Schwarzkopf already had a good idea what needed to be done. (3) The Saudis went along with it because their own real estate and their own safety was on the line, and they saw that the United States was, for once, serious. (2) The American people supported the moves, not because they wanted to see a war in the desert, but because they could see the need for stopping unprovoked aggression. And finally, (1) Congress came around slowly, timidly, fearful of falling into the Gulf of Tonkin and drowning.

Senator Sam Nunn set the tone for congressional opinion when he publicly stated his hope was that the U.S. role would be confined to protecting air bases. Perhaps the American troops could be used to mine highways from Kuwait along which Iraq might send tanks into Saudi Arabia, he said. (That would stop them, by gum.)

A worried President Mubarak called for an Arab peacekeeping force, rather than a multinational one, and pledged Egyptian troops. Syria, also worried but for different reasons, was of the same opinion and also pledged troops; the Damascus newspaper al-Ba’ath suggested that the issue should be solved among the Arabs, by Arab leaders, to protect against “foreign and Zionist greed.”  On August 9th Mubarak called those Arab leaders to Cairo and appealed to Saddam Hussein to withdraw from Kuwait, as he had promised. Iraq responded with rhetoric and stayed put, in effect pushing its neighbors into supporting the deployment.

The first American troops sent were a brigade of the 82nd Airborne, along with two squadrons of F-15 fighters. The Saratoga battle group, which included the battleship Wisconsin, with its 16-inch guns and cruise missiles, was expected on station the 11th or 12th of August. The carrier Independence was at the mouth of the Gulf. The Eisenhower was on its way to the Arabian Sea. In all, about fifty American ships were involved. By the end of August, they had been joined by British, French, and even Soviet ships, enforcing the embargo against shipping.

Scheduled to follow the 82nd’s “ready brigade” was a 16,500-man Marine amphibious brigade with heavy armor—M-60A3 tanks—aboard its pre-positioned ships. The 19,000 troops of the 101st Airborne Division would follow the 82nd and the Marines, and after them the 12,000 of the Army’s 24th Infantry Division.

Saddam responded to the 82nd’s arrival by sending two divisions to the Saudi border. His air force began to ostentatiously load its bomb racks and deploy forward. But it was clear that Bush’s decision to commit American troops had taken him by surprise.

The dictator had assumed that the Paper Tiger would talk tough but not do much. If Bush did try to do much, Congress would, as the Times had predicted, stop him. Given enough time, the embargo would start to leak. Perhaps in even less time, the allies would begin to squabble among themselves. The American antiwar movement would end the whole thing. Saddam had guessed wrong on the first premise—perhaps it was the “Wimp Factor”—and now must grit his teeth and wait for the rest of it to come about.