TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/010692/0106101.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 7KB | 140 lines

                                                                                NATION, Page 54

THE PRESIDENCY

'Twas a Famous Victory


By Hugh Sidey


    George Bush is giving 1991 a bittersweet goodbye kiss.
He's lost 40 points in his ratings and gained 10 times that
many gray hairs. But he's got his feet up on the desk in an
Oval Office flooded with December sunshine, and for 30 minutes
he is remembering when he played the ultimate chess game --
Desert Storm -- and won brilliantly. The afterglow of that
triumph has faded now, but not his granite conviction that what
he did was right. Back a year, the tension was real and he
talked more at night with Barbara and hugged his grandchildren
with more feeling as he pondered two of his huge problems:
Saddam Hussein and the U.S. Congress.

    The problem with Saddam was not his military might -- the
President never doubted that the U.S. had the power to prevail
in combat -- but the possibility that the Iraqi leader might
withdraw from Kuwait at the last minute, keeping his menacing
army and maniacal intentions intact. "I mean, this was worrying
me," says Bush. "What happens if he does just haul all this
armor back along the border, unpunished, unrepentant, faced down
by what he knows is a superior army?"

    As complex a problem in many ways was the one on Capitol
Hill, where critics argued for a say in how and when force was
to be committed. But Bush took the bold step of moving U.S.
combat troops to the region without seeking congressional
approval. His reasoning: "If I had ever conveyed to this
Congress that I wasn't going to do anything unless I had their
endorsement . . . I really believe Saddam Hussein would still
be there." The President now concedes that his action carried
enormous political risks -- including a possible impeachment
attempt if Desert Storm had failed. "They would have had
impeachment papers out there in a hurry -- no question about
that -- for violating my constitutional authority, for leading
our country into a quagmire."

    Bush wanted to make every effort at a peaceful solution
but was determined to line up enough force to win a war if it
came to that. He focused his argument on the Iraqi strongman:
"I tried to make very clear from the beginning that it was not a
battle with the people, but with this dictator." As the Jan. 15
deadline approached, Bush concluded that Saddam had badly
misjudged the situation. "Somewhere along the line," the
President recalls, "I realized that he felt we were bluffing,
and that he also felt another thing where he was just as wrong:
the Nasser parallel -- he doesn't have to win to win. He can be
seen as standing up against this onslaught, the West, the
Yankees, and be seen as a victor ((even)) if he sues for peace."
Saddam, thinks Bush, misread American newspaper editorials and
arguments on television. "He was still living back in the
Vietnam days. He didn't know we had a different ball game on
here, different levels of technology, a different military
force, a different President."

    For all his confidence in an ultimate allied victory, Bush
now admits that he had some doubts about the U.S. forces'
ability to carry out his intentions with the devastating
efficiency his commanders claimed. "I've got to confess that I
wondered, when ((Air Force Chief of Staff)) Tony McPeak came up
to Camp David and briefed me on what we could do with air power.
I turned to ((National Security Adviser)) Brent Scowcroft or
somebody; I said, `Does this general know what he's talking
about? I mean, this is awesome.' " Later, after McPeak had
visited the U.S. staging ground in Saudi Arabia, Bush summoned
him to a private lunch at the White House. "I said, `Tony, I
just want to be sure how you feel now that you're back. And I
remember what you told me up there and these things that air
power can do.' He said, `I'm more confident now than I was.' "
Thus reassured, Bush never considered drawing up any "doomsday
kind of scenario" to allow for a U.S. stalemate or retreat.

    But other specters haunted Bush's thoughts. Chemical
weapons worried him: "All the plans were predicated on
((Saddam's)) using chemical weapons because he'd done it
before." Bush was also haunted by the ubiquitous images of body
bags that appeared in the press early in the crisis. It seemed
almost as if the dead were being counted before any battle had
been fought. "Body bags," Bush mutters. "The charge by the
opponents . . . was that `you're going to have on your hands,
Mr. President, the lives of the 30,000.' We'd ordered 50,000
body bags. I think that was the figure they used. That'll show
you. They had a picture in one of the magazines of endless
numbers of graves that had been dug somewhere."

    Once he unleashed his forces against Saddam, Bush was
astonished by how smoothly things went and how few allied
casualties there were. "I was surprised that it literally worked
out -- in spite of the predictions -- as quick as it did," says
Bush. "The system worked, so I wouldn't change one thing in the
way the decision making worked."

    Saddam is still in power, of course, and there has been
much debate about Bush's decision not to send his tanks to
Baghdad and topple the Baathist leader. But the President
insists that the chastened and defanged Iraqi dictator is no
worldly threat today. "The Republican Guard units, some of them,
have been dismantled," he says. "Most of them are 50% strength.
And it's a different army. They aren't capable ((of projecting))
aggression the way they did before."

    A common criticism of Bush is that the decisive leadership
he showed in Desert Storm has not been duplicated in his
budgetary and domestic policy efforts. When confronted with this
charge, the President suddenly begins pointing around the empty
room at imaginary members of his war staff and giving orders as
he did in the thick of the gulf crisis: " `Colin, you do this.
Dick, you're responsible for this. Have Colin, the Chairman, and
General Schwarzkopf do this. Brent, here is what I want to do'
-- something happens. And in dealing with the domestic economy,
you're dealing with every subcommittee chairman and somebody
that has got a different outlook . . . It is very, very
different than when you're dealing with a Congress ((dominated
by)) another party in a different setting."

    In his chair in the Oval Office, brow furrowed, glasses in
his restless hands, Bush is in some ways a far different man
from what he was three years ago when he began his presidential
odyssey. His wariness, his caution, are evident. But much of his
regular routine is unaltered. He gets through these tough days
-- just as he did the tense weeks and months of the gulf crisis
-- by trying to remain human. "Exercise and try to, you know,
lead a normal life," he says. "Going to Camp David, the whole
concept of having your kids around. I mean, it's funny with
something that big -- some things as mundane as family love and
a grandchild running in or the dog here or all the common little
things . . . I'd hate to be in this job and not have family."