TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/012191/0121010.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 9KB | 187 lines

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                                                          THE GULF, Page 22

The Moment Of Truth


If war breaks out, it will not be an accident. Both sides are
ready, and each would rather fight than switch its position.

By MICHAEL KRAMER


    These are the longest days. Time moves in slow motion. An
entire world waits with shallow breath, and the news never
ends. Snippets of hope are dashed almost as quickly as they
appear, only to be succeeded by fresh rumors of a peaceful
exit. In a sense, it is all familiar. End games fascinate. In
school, where we studied them attentively, the chapters were
invariably titled "The Drift Toward War." The conclusions, too,
were nearly uniform: If only there had been more time; if only
the antagonists had understood one another better; if only the
crisis had been nipped in the bud before it escalated.

    However historians eventually judge the rush of events in
the Persian Gulf, few will fairly conclude that what occurred
was a failure to communicate. For months, George Bush has
agonized that Saddam Hussein has not got the message. Tariq
Aziz buried that illusion last week in Geneva. That was no
dialogue of the deaf, as some have labeled it. Clarity reigned.
James Baker detailed the horror that awaits Iraq if peace dies.
Aziz undoubtedly knew the truth of the Secretary of State's
assertions. But Aziz knows his boss too, and probably knows as
well that no matter how unambiguously a person sees the light,
in the end he cannot be saved from himself.

    If clarity has been assured, only tragedy remains. Both
sides, it seems, are ready for war because neither is willing
to suffer a supposedly worse fate -- the humiliation that
capitulation, or its perception, implies.

    "Don't go to war in response to emotions of anger and
resentment," said Dwight Eisenhower, who regularly counseled
the courage of patience. But if war begins, anger and
resentment is what it will have come down to. "It is about
power and commitment," says Fouad Ajami, director of Middle
East studies at Johns Hopkins University. "On both sides, the
greatest fear is being seen to be a wimp." The best analogy is
perhaps literary. In "Shooting an Elephant," George Orwell's
colonial functionary kills a rogue elephant because those
watching him expect it. "It is the condition of [the white
man's] rule," Orwell has his character say, "that he shall
spend his life trying to impress the `natives,' and so in every
crisis he has got to do what the `natives' expect of him . .
. To come all that way, rifle in hand, and then to trail feebly
away, having done nothing -- no, that was impossible. The crowd
would laugh at me." George Bush "has drawn his rifle," says
Ajami. "He cannot back down."

    And neither, it appears, can Saddam Hussein. The fig leaves
Saddam could seize to justify withdrawing from Kuwait have been
available from the beginning. The Kuwaitis themselves have
consistently said they are willing to negotiate over Iraq's
grievances. Even the international peace conference that Saddam
posits as a price for leaving Kuwait is possible -- or at least
the promise of such a meeting is. The U.S. desire to avoid
linkage is basically a semantic exercise, and the offers of
explicit linkage carried by middlemen like the French and the
Algerians could at any time be used by Saddam to save face.
Were he to decide to leave Kuwait, the list of creative ways for
the Iraqi leader to portray himself heroically is virtually
limitless -- and some in Washington indicate that an attack may
not occur for several weeks, in the hope that Saddam will
finally come to his senses.

    Through a Western prism, Saddam's behavior appears insane:
How could a man facing certain defeat and quite possibly his
own annihilation choose war? Three answers are possible. One
is that Saddam believes his enemies will cave in. He has said
as much on innumerable occasions, and he still "seems to
believe that we lack the will," says a Bush Administration
expert on the Middle East. Another possibility is that Saddam
honestly believes he can win. "The Americans will come here to
perform acrobatics like Rambo movies," Saddam declared last
Friday. "But they will find here real people to fight them. We
are a people who have eight years of experience in war and
combat."

    A third, more ominous answer is that Saddam knows he will
lose but views defeat as preferable to surrender. "Even if he
loses militarily," says a Bush adviser, Saddam may calculate
that "he will survive and will have won for having stood up to
the U.S." -- a political victory like Nasser's in 1967. This
last, apparently quite real, possibility confirms a Bedouin
proverb: "A jackal is a lion in his own neighborhood." It is
"increasingly obvious," says Ajami, that "Saddam sees himself
as the avenger of the Arab nation, history's instrument to
redress the slights visited on Arabs for milleniums."

    In retrospect, there was a road not taken. A trip-wire force
could have been lodged in Saudi Arabia, to serve America's
initial goal of deterring an invasion, and the sanctions
continued nearly forever. Kuwait would be remembered, but its
liberation would not have become the high-profile litmus test
of U.S. resolve. That option existed until November, when the
allied presence was characterized as an offensive force and the
United Nations deadline of Jan. 15 was imposed.

    It is impossible to separate those two events. They form a
package. Once the rifles were truly drawn, once the liberation
of Kuwait, no more than a rhetorical goal during the first days
of the crisis, became the real objective of policy, an
ultimatum was shrewd strategy. "The advantage of having a
deadline is that it creates the maximum pressure for a peaceful
solution in the last days," says British Foreign Secretary
Douglas Hurd. Now the deadline is upon us, and it cannot be
ignored. If it is, nothing will ever work.

    It is pointless to second-guess Bush for not taking the
other path. It is even more futile to wonder how the Middle
East might look after an allied victory. Unintended
consequences are a by-product of any action. The only certainty
is that nothing could be worse than for Saddam to prevail. The
possibility of other bad actors filling a postwar power vacuum
will simply have to be met later on a case-by-case basis, or
perhaps through the eventual convocation of a peace conference
that would address both the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and
the region's massive overarmament.

    Ideally, a fine-line war would be waged, a battle that
leaves Iraq powerful enough to defend its own borders but too
weak to threaten its neighbors. But attempting to craft such
an outcome in advance is asking too much. War is never as clean
as planned. More important, if such plans were drawn and
executed, a key strategic goal could be crippled. If Saddam is
reckless enough to "take" a war, then he will have proved his
insanity and his ability to wage battle again ought to be
eliminated. Thus the scenario that envisions Saddam suing for
peace after absorbing a first blow is best rejected. As in 1967,
when the Arab nations that fought Israel ran to the U.N. for
a cease-fire resolution as soon as Jerusalem's superiority was
manifest, such a resolution must await a complete military
victory. In the present case, that means the destruction of
Saddam's chemical, biological and nuclear war-fighting
capabilities. To leave those intact after punishing Saddam into
withdrawing from Kuwait would be folly.

    How unreal it all feels. Never before have Americans waited
for a war scheduled to begin on or close to a certain date,
knowing too that they will watch its horror during prime time.
How discouraging as well, after the freedom that swept Eastern
Europe following 40 years of communist dictatorship. Because
of that transformation, the possibility of massive war was
supposedly lifted: the nukes were being destroyed. We were not
totally lulled. We knew that madmen still held sway, messianic
tyrants riveted by the Nietzschean principle that power is a
good in itself. We felt bad for those subjected to such belief,
but we felt ourselves immune. We were wrong -- and now it again
falls to Americans to set matters right. Railing against the
truth will not help. The fact is that if the U.S. does not check
Saddam, no one else will.

    Survival is not a trifling virtue. But those who make
survival the supreme value declare that there is nothing they
will not betray. Saddam would undoubtedly agree with this
proposition, but because he misses the point, he must be
stopped. If he is not, what will survival be worth?