By Janice Gross Stein. Janice Gross Stein is a professor of political science at the University of Toronto and a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. She recently edited (Getting to the Table: Processes of International Prenegotiation).
Every war generates lessons and spawns myths. Even though it is still early, several myths already have been created in the euphoria of victory in the Gulf War, and preliminary lessons can be drawn about the management of international conflict. The myths are misleading and the lessons cautionary.
Two lessons emerge from the period that preceded the war: deterrence and compulsion both failed. A strategy of deterrence uses threats to prevent an adversary from taking an unwanted action--"don't do that or else." Compulsion involves using the threat of force to convince an adversary to do something he does not wish to do. Both strategies assume as a minimum condition sufficient military superiority to make the threat credible. Despite its unquestioned military advantage, the United States practiced a flawed strategy of deterrence in the two weeks preceding Iraq's invasion of Kuwait on August 2. From the invasion until the onset of war on January 16, the American-led coalition vigorously attempted to compel Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait. Neither strategy of conflict management succeeded. Why?
Confused messages
In the weeks immediately preceding Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, Washington sent ambiguous messages about its likely response to a use of force by Saddam Hussein. At the now infamous July 25 meeting in Baghdad, Ambassador April Glaspie told Hussein that "...we have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait." Glaspie subsequently testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that, during that meeting, she had also warned several times that "we would insist on settlements being made in a nonviolent manner, not by threats, not by intimidation, and certainly not by aggression...I told him orally we would defend our vital interests, we would support our friends in the Gulf, we would defend their sovereignty and integrity."
At worst, in the critical two weeks when Saddam was considering the use of force, the United States sent a weak and confused message about its likely response, should Iraq use force. At best, to the extent that Washington did try to deter, the warning was not credible. The president of Iraq doubted not the capability but the resolve of the United States to defend Kuwait. American resolve was in question not because of inept strategy by the American ambassador, but because of confused policy. In the last several years, the United States had courted Iraq as a counterweight to Iran and turned a blind eye to evidence that Hussein might be considering aggression against his neighbors. Under these conditions, it was difficult for the United States, irrespective of its military capability, to make its threats credible.
The second lesson is unambiguous. Compulsion did not work. Despite the best efforts of the Bush Administration to manipulate the risk of war and its unquestioned military superiority, Saddam Hussein did not back down. This time, signals were clear, unequivocal and overwhelming, but the strategy still failed. Several factors explain the failure to avoid war.
Saddam continued to doubt American resolve, not on the basis of U.S. military capability but rather on the basis of its willingness to suffer casualties. In discussing the battle of Fao, which had been decisive in the Iran-Iraq war, Saddam told Ambassador Glaspie that, "Yours is a society which cannot accept 10,000 dead in one battle." Drawing an analogy to the withdrawal of American Marines from Beirut, President Hussein was persuaded that the American public would not tolerate large numbers of casualties in a ground war.
More to the point, Saddam's calculation of the costs and benefits was different from that of the United States. One probable interpretation of his refusal to retreat is that he could not accept the political costs; after the first week, once he was condemned by fellow Arab leaders at the summit in Cairo, the loss of pride and honor and the humiliation of backing down were intolerable. Saddam preferred to fight and lose than to pay the personal and political price that retreat involved.
The success of threat-based strategies of conflict management depends not only on superior military capabilities, but on an understanding of the other side's decision criteria. George Bush and Saddam Hussein could not cross the cultural divide to understand the basis of the other's calculation. In the Gulf, threat-based strategies failed to prevent both crisis and war. These are cautionary lessons for the future management of international conflict.
Smart weapons and talking heads
The war, fought from January 16 to February 27, spawned other lessons on the management of international conflict in the post-Cold War era. Two stand out in importance. First, smart weapons, especially used from the air, greatly reduced the political costs of conventional warfare. "Smart" weapons thus make it easier for great powers to fight conventional wars against middle and smaller powers in the Third World. Analysts suggest that international cooperation may grow as the cost of military technology escalates. If "smart" weapons are easily available over the next decade, they may undercut peaceful settlements of a myriad of disputes in the Third World and make some kinds of north-south wars more likely.
Second, the political constraints operating on President Bush during the war, as distinct from the prewar period, were overestimated. Although the war was high tech, its coverage was not. Management of the media and control of information were carefully planned by the Pentagon before the fighting began. Due to what leaders thought they had learned from Vietnam, this was the first radio war in two generations, in which home TV coverage was largely restricted to "talking heads." In part because the public saw very few visual images of death and damage in the fighting, and because the war was brief, President Bush conducted the war virtually free of political constraints. This lesson has been well learned by military leaders in Washington as well as other Western capitals. Electronic wars and radio coverage make war more, rather than less, likely as a future instrument of international conflict management.
New world order?
In the post-war period, several dangerous myths have already been accepted. The first and most important is that the orchestration and management of the war confirm "American hegemony" or the emergence of a "unipolar system" dominated by the United States. Some critics allege that the United States, working under the guise of collective security to preserve a hegemonic order, went to war to secure strategic resources in the Gulf and to protect its client regimes. Others insist that the most striking feature of the post-Cold War world is its unipolarity, with the United States unchallenged at the center of world power. The first group sees continuation, the second fundamental change in the system, but both agree on the preeminence of the United States in the post-Cold War international system.
This analysis of a unipolar hegemonic order as demonstrated by the performance of the United States in the war in the Gulf mistakes the shell for the substance. The war occurred under very specific conditions that are not likely to be replicated. President Saddam Hussein was widely feared and hated in his own country and beyond his borders in the Middle East. Although his political agenda received wide support in the Arab world, he personally had almost no constituency. In addition, Iraq sat close to the largest proven reserves of the world's oil, upon which the industrialized economies generally depend. This created a uniquely shared perception of threat and common interest among the major powers at the United Nations. It is inconceivable, for example, that a Syrian invasion of Lebanon, or an attack by Libya against Chad, would evoke the same response.
Soviet interest in cooperating with the United States was also extraordinarily high. It can be explained in part by Soviet expectation of Western economic and technical assistance critical to the reorganization of its economy. But if a politically weakened President Gorbachev cannot resist the renewed political importance of the military, the KGB, and the conservative constituencies in the Foreign Ministry, the Soviet "moment" that created the myth of unipolarity may well have passed.
Finally, a hegemon in a unipolar system traditionally bears a disproportionate share of the burden to persuade would-be free riders to join; it does not ask others to pay unless it is in decline. But even before the fighting began, Washington exacted pledges from the Gulf states to finance more than half the costs of the war. Again, that the threat was directed principally against the oil-wealthy made it relatively easy to arrange multilateral financing of an American-led coalition. Interestingly, the contributions of the strong industrialized economies--Germany and Japan--were small proportional to the cost of the war. Without the multilateral financing provided largely by Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, the impact on the American budgetary process would have been severe, with real political costs. As it has done with its debt, the United States was able to extort most of the costs of the war to those most directly threatened by unchecked aggression.
In short, a historically specific and unique set of conditions permitted the United States to engineer a series of steps that were all necessary to move down the path to war. It is dangerous and misleading to generalize from this single case, however. The United States did not so much "control" the international agenda as it carefully, at considerable risk, crafted and led a coalition to shape the agenda. Washington was extraordinarily skillful in deploying the resources it commanded. The role of the United States in conflict management in the decade ahead will be shaped more by its diplomatic and political skills than by its economic and military power.
Israel's trauma
A second myth is that wars create new opportunities in their aftermath. Creative leadership can restructure once-frozen political forces and resolve long-festering conflicts. What is remarkable is how little the war has changed the world. War, generally associated with great uncertainties and unpredictabilities, changed little in the political geography other than to eliminate Iraq as a threat to its neighbors for the rest of the decade.
The Gulf War has also made it more, not less, difficult to resolve the Israel-Palestinian conflict. It strengthened the governments of Syria and Israel and badly weakened the leadership of the Palestinians. President Hafez-al-Asad used the opportunity provided by the Gulf War to consolidate formal control of Lebanon and to end his isolation of more than a decade in the Arab world. Syria's troubled economy is also receiving substantial help from Saudi Arabia in the wake of Syrian participation in the war. Despite declining Soviet military assistance and diplomatic support, Syria is now in a far better position to shape the agenda and the terms of Arab-Israeli negotiations than it was before the war in the Gulf.
In Israel, the war had contradictory consequences. Now that Iraq is no longer in a position to join a coalition against Israel, the most serious strategic threat to Israel has been removed for a decade. Syria, which poses the remaining serious threat to Israel, is less likely to attack alone than in conjunction with an Arab coalition; consequently, a large-scale war involving ballistic missiles and counter-city warfare is far less likely than it was a year ago. Israel is therefore relatively more secure than it was a year ago.
On the other hand, the war was a traumatic experience for Israel. Its civilian population was sent night after night into sealed rooms and forced to don gas masks. For many among that population, it brought back traumatic memories. From left to right across the political spectrum, there was a deep reaction against pictures of Palestinians chanting for Saddam Hussein to use chemical weapons against Israel. Even the peace movement in Israel, which had long urged negotiations with the PLO, now expresses deep disappointment with Arafat.
The government of Yitzhak Shamir comes out of the war strengthened in Israeli public opinion. Shamir was able to persuade the Israeli public, under extraordinarily trying circumstances, that restraint was the wisest course of action. Given public support of the government, it is going to be very difficult to persuade the governing coalition of the urgency of the concessions.
Yasir Arafat has been crippled in the Arab world by his open and strong support of Saddam during the war. Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, as well as some of the smaller Gulf states, were the principal source of funds for the PLO. These funds have now been cut off and are not likely to be renewed as long as Saddam is in power in Iraq and Arafat is chairman of the PLO. Political support for the PLO has also been decimated within the Arab world. Iraq can no longer provide meaningful political or military support to Arafat, and the leaderships of all the Gulf states are now angered and embittered by Arafat's position during the war. Only Egypt, the pivotal state in the politics of the Middle East, offers lukewarm political endorsement of the PLO. Within the Arab world, Arafat's support is now restricted to North Africa, Yemen, and Libya. It is no coincidence that at the recent Arab summit meeting, no mention was made of the PLO in the resolution dealing with the Palestinian question.
Finally, the changed international context works against immediate resolution of the Palestinian-Israel conflict. For almost three decades, the Arab-Israeli dispute was embedded in the larger Soviet-American conflict. The United States moved vigorously in the 1970s in large part because it feared that the conflict could explode and draw the United States into a dangerous confrontation with the Soviet Union. That fear has largely evaporated.
The last, most tentative, yet most revolutionary outcome of the war may lie in its ending. The international community's intervention in the internal affairs of a member state in response to the creation of a massive number of Kurdish refugees is unprecedented. Whether the refugee camps and the safe havens that have been created in Northern Iraq are protected by foreign or UN troops, Iraq's sovereignty has clearly been violated. Although the intervention grew out of the war and is therefore historically specific, the response of the international community nevertheless sends a strong message about the acceptable limits of the treatment of minorities in the Middle East. This may be a more important bellwether of the kinds of international conflict--and solutions--likely to dominate the rest of this decade than a war begun to defend the principle of state sovereignty and the legitimacy of state borders.