Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, January 16, 1992 TAG: 9201160030
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JIM HOAGLAND THE WASHINGTON POST
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Long
WHAT WAR DIDN'T RESOLVE
Palestinian negotiators arrived in Washington to resume American-sponsored peace talks with Israel last week about the same time PLO leader Yasser Arafat quietly slipped into Baghdad to visit his old patron, Iraq's still-standing and defiant tyrant, Saddam Hussein."We have no idea why Arafat is doing this now," said one senior U.S. official monitoring Arafat's movements. "If you give him the benefit of the doubt, you would conclude that it is simple stupidity."
Such contradictory behavior by Palestinian representatives is indicative of the complex and untidy transformation that has swept the Middle East since American bombs began to fall on Baghdad one year ago. In many ways, the world that existed last Jan. 16 is gone, transformed in part by President Bush's decision to go to war against Iraq and the subsequent demise of the Soviet Union.
But equally striking is how much the war did not change. Few conflicts ever have accomplished so much so quickly and yet left so much urgent unfinished business.
Saddam not only survived but thumbs his nose at Bush. The Iraqi leader has scheduled mass celebrations in Baghdad to mark the anniversary of the beginning of the 43-day war. "We emerged triumphant from that war," Saddam told tribal leaders recently in unabashed revisionism.
The unfinished nature of America's war against Saddam invites conflicting interpretations of the significance of today's anniversary.
Ask an official from Israel, the multinational coalition's "silent" partner, what anniversary falls this week and he will say that it is the anniversary of the first Scud attacks on Israel, an event that naturally weighs more heavily on Israeli consciousness than does the American victory in Kuwait.
An Egyptian social scientist responds that today marks the beginning of the nakba, or calamity, a popular name for the Arab civil war that Desert Storm helped bring to a head. By rallying to fight with America against Iraq's seizure of Kuwait, Egypt and other Arab countries decisively rejected Saddam's brand of rabid Arab nationalism. But the Arab victors have not established a new balance of power or clear political direction for their region.
Weighing it out
On balance, Bush can conclude honestly that the accomplishments of Desert Storm have not been erased or eclipsed by the war's troublesome and at times tragic aftermath. He has fared far better than the pessimists predicted, even though he has not accomplished what he and the optimists hoped.
The presence in Washington of the Palestinian negotiators, a presence blessed by Arafat and his Palestine Liberation Organization, is proof of that. Predictions that the Arab world would explode into incendiary and irrevocable anger against America if the United States went to war against an Arab regime, even one as brutal and hated as Iraq's, were dead wrong.
Arafat and Jordan's King Hussein, Saddam's two chief Arab allies during the war, continue their ties to Iraq. But both have worked mightily to get back into America's good graces as well. When the four frontline Arab countries and the Palestinians yielded to prodding from Secretary of State James Baker to negotiate directly with Israel, the Middle East conflict was irrevocably changed.
In his balance sheet, Bush can emphasize the swift liberation of Kuwait, the war's immediate goal. He can say that the war helped Americans secure unimpeded access to Middle Eastern oil, at lower prices, over the past year. And he can point to the impact of Desert Storm in ending the long imprisonment of American hostages in Beirut.
"The United Nations did not change its formula for contact or release," says a U.S. official. "What changed was the environment. The Iranians, like the Arab states that joined the peace process they had rejected before, understood that the emergence of the United States as the unchallenged external influence in the region meant that they had to improve relations with us. And for Iran that meant returning the hostages."
The hostage drama concluded in late December when the remains of William Buckley, the CIA's Beirut station chief who died in captivity after torture by his captors, were left on a Beirut roadside. American officials saw this grisly delivery as another sign of Iran's resolve to move beyond the hostage problem.
The United States is prepared to discuss resuming diplomatic relations with Iran now that the hostages have been released. But Iran's demand that preliminary talks be kept secret has stalled the normalization process, according to one U.S. source.
American suspicions have been reinforced by reports that Tehran has bought significant amounts of arms from the disintegrating ex-Soviet army and is pursuing a nuclear research program with the help of China and other countries. A detailed account of the multibillion-dollar Iranian arms buildup that appeared last week was termed as "essentially correct" by a U.S. official.
"It is another example of the double-edged nature of the change that Desert Storm produced," the official continued. "With Iraq's military smashed, Iran is clearly intent on arming itself to be the dominant military power in the gulf over the next decade. It is not something to panic about yet, but it is something to watch, since it is obviously not in our interest to have any unfriendly local power dominate the gulf."
A major disappointment for the administration has been the failure of Saudi Arabia and other conservative gulf states to agree on regional security arrangements that American planners had hoped would lead to an effective Arab deterrent force. U.S. officials concede that their efforts have produced only accords that will increase U.S. prepositioning of equipment and access rights in some of the gulf states.
The State Department's top Middle East expert, Assistant Secretary Edward Djerejian, acknowledged when he appeared before a House subcommittee on Nov. 20 that Desert Storm had not transformed the underlying security situation of the gulf. Asked to justify increased U.S. arms sales to Saudi Arabia, Djerejian said:
"Even after Desert Storm, Iraq retains a considerable military capability which could pose a threat" to Saudi Arabia. Noting that the gulf "remains a dangerous neighborhood," Djerejian said at another point that "the present force structure of the Iraqi military is much larger than that of the Saudi, even after Desert Storm."
"But I thought we won the war," a startled panel member said to Djerejian in a comment that is increasingly heard from Americans who contemplate Saddam's continuing survival and his continuing brutality to the Kurdish tribes of the north and to the Shiites of Iraq's south. An early December poll taken by the Americans Talk Issues Foundation recorded that 82 percent of those polled now think the United States should have continued to fight until Saddam was driven from power.
On the eve of today's anniversary - and the U.S. election season - administration rhetoric on Iraq has again toughened. Bush last week used an interview with Cable News Network to call on the Iraqi people to "take matters into their own hands and get [Saddam] out of there. We would take a leadership role in trying to help Iraq if you figure out how to get him out of there."
To give the rhetoric credibility and to spook Saddam, the White House also mounted a two-month-long review of its Iraq policy, which is essentially complete. A covert action program to help Saddam's opponents is expected to be strengthened and the Pentagon's Joint Chiefs of Staff, who initially responded to the idea of any new U.S. military involvement against Saddam by dragging their feet, have been told to find ways to contribute to the effort against Saddam.
Disorder remains
The larger hopes that Bush and his advisers held for the meaning of the swift victory in Kuwait also have proved elusive. When Bush went before Congress on March 6, he outlined the meaning of Operation Desert Storm in terms that are almost painful to recall, as more than 800,000 Kurds remain homeless in northern Iraq and Saddam continues to conceal nuclear weapons material and chemical arms from U.N. inspectors:
"Now we can see a new world coming into view. A world in which there is the very real prospect of a new world order in which the principles of justice and fair play protect the weak against the strong. Our success in the gulf will shape not only the new world order we seek but our mission here at home," where the economy was poised for strong recovery, Bush said.
But the new world has proved to be closer to a vision projected about the same time by Harvard professor Samuel Huntington, who foresaw "a more jungle-like world of multiple dangers, hidden traps, unpleasant surprises and moral ambiguities" replacing the black-and-white, bipolar world of the Cold War. An estimated 10,000 people - 20 times the number killed in Iraq's invasion of Kuwait - have perished in Yugoslavia's civil war in recent months.
"Americans were not simply introduced to the new world, they were immersed in it" by the Persian Gulf crisis, adds Rep. Les Aspin, the Wisconsin Democrat who is chairman of the House Armed Services Committee and one of the chief congressional architects of the force that carried out Desert Storm.
In a set of incisive speeches over the past three weeks, Aspin has faulted the Bush administration for not following up on victory in Kuwait and on the demise of the Soviet Union. Aspin outlined both a new approach to Iraq - where he favors a more confrontational U.S. approach on weapons inspections and destruction and the feeding of Iraq's starving population by the United Nations - and to U.S. strategic thinking.
"This ambiguous, complicated and changing security environment is not a comfortable one for Americans," Aspin says. "The post-Soviet world bumper sticker, `Less Threatening, More Complicated' offers no clear-cut guidance. . . . The Persian Gulf war highlighted the most important threats of the new era - the spread of nuclear weapons, terrorism and regional powers." It did not resolve them, even in the case of Iraq, Aspin argues.
A year after the bombs started falling on Baghdad, Bush can proudly say he won the war. But as the world settles into an era of fragmenting power and moral ambiguity, the "peace" that has followed is proving to be far more difficult to master than the marching heroes and endless parades of Desert Storm once seemed to promise.