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Ground Zero
by Scott McConnell
Antiwar.com
January 22, 2002
Gulf War One � Reconsidered
Roughly eleven years ago, the United States began its aerial campaign
to force Iraq to withdraw its troops from Kuwait. A few weeks later,
General Schwarzkopf launched his famous flanking action on the ground
with stunning success. The rapid victory for American arms brought an
end to a vigorous debate which had begun nearly six months before,
after Saddam Hussein's military annexation of Kuwait, and President
Bush's rush of combat troops to Saudi Arabia to deter further Iraqi
aggression.
For the war hawks, Saddam was a new Hitler; and the lesson of the
1930s was that aggression could not stand. The entire structure of
the post-Cold War world depended on forceful American military action
against Iraqi aggr
ession.
But for the first time since the early 1950s, there were prominent pockets of antiwar
sentiment on the Right: the columns of Patrick Buchanan and Robert Novak and Rowland
Evans were widely read, and the three made TV appe
arances; Joseph Sobran, then a senior editor of National Review, was one of the
founders of Committee to Avert a Middle East Holocaust; military experts like Edward
Luttwak were skeptical that Iraq could be driven from Ku
wait without thousands, even tens of thousands of American casualties.
Centrist liberals like Arthur Schlesinger Jr. disseminated the unpleasant but
important truth that the Gulf Arabs whose nations and oil we were supposedly defending
held the United States in complete contempt. Scarcely a
week before the bombing began, Schlesinger quoted in the Wall Street Journal a
dispatch from Saudi Arabia: "You think I want to send my teen-aged son to die for
Kuwait? We have our white slaves from America to do that." A
nd, quoting a Saudi teacher: "The American soldiers are a new kind of foreign worker
here. We have Pakistanis driving taxis and now we have Americans defending us."
In the weeks prior to the beginning of the bombardment, the don't-go-to-war-party was
gradually winning the day. Polls showed public opinion almost evenly divided on
whether to "give sanctions a chance" or to attack Iraq.
The leaders of all the main Christian churches urged a negotiated solution to the
crisis.
While there were few antiwar demonstrations, there was serious argument among opinion
leaders at nearly all levels. Barely a year after the Soviet empire's collapse,
Americans, as one foreign correspondent put it, were de
bating seriously "what it meant to be an American in the world in the 1990s."
For most people, the rapid military victory seemed to vindicate the pro-war side. The
antiwar conservatives generally changed the subject. Saddam was ousted from Kuwait.
The much vaunted Iraqi Republican Guards had fled i
n terror. Iraqi troops surrendered by the thousands, sometimes to journalists armed
with no more than cameras. American casualties were measured not in the feared tens of
thousands, but in the hundreds. The only question
most asked was whether the US erred in assuming that Saddam would be toppled after he
was forced to withdraw.
Afterwards, a few skeptical essays appeared, wondering what, actually, had been won.
In the Atlantic Monthly, Christopher Layne argued that the Gulf War had not been in
the national interest: Washington, argued Layne, had
been manipulated by regional powers � Saudi Arabia, Israel and Egypt, principally �
and emerged from the conflict with an intoxicating but unrealistic belief in its
unchallenged power. Contrary to the Bush administration
's rhetoric, no "New World Order" had been brought into being, there was little
prospect for a durable Mideast peace, and great danger that the United States would be
tempted into further interventions, of a scope far wid
er than the Cold War containment of Marxist-Leninism had allowed. The apparent
"unipolar moment" brought about by the victory would, Layne said, prove fleeting.
Robert W. Tucker, writing in the conservative National Interest, noted the disparity
between the negligible American casualties and the possibly hundreds of thousands of
dead and wounded on the Iraqi side, and questioned
whether such a slaughter could be fit into any theory of a "Just War." He was
skeptical.
But generally, the feeling at the rapid collapse of the Iraqi forces was relief, even
glee.
The debate over the first Iraq war � whose surface this column has only skimmed �
didn't predict the future well, but any reader who delves into the periodicals of
eleven plus years ago will be rewarded by its openness an
d intensity.
And who really was right? It now seems arguably correct (as it did not seem to me at
the time) that the first Iraq war was ill-conceived. The United States action did
manage to stabilize the world oil market, and pump bil
lions of barrels from the Gulf in the roaring 1990s. As a result, SUVs now rule the
road in the upscale suburbs.
Balanced against the putative benefits of the triumph of the gas-guzzler, global
animosity towards Americans has increased tremendously. The decade of the 1990s saw
the escalation of terrorist attacks against American int
erests and citizens, culminating in September 11. There may be far worse in store.
No one (to my knowledge) accurately predicted the chain of events which actually
transpired: an easy American victory over Iraq, and the subsequent establishment of a
sort of military protectorate over the Gulf, that in t
urn led to a fundamentalist reaction in most Arab states against American power and
the American presence, thereby giving a fanatically anti-Western terrorist movement
tens of thousands of potential recruits.
But no sane person could look at the world today, nearly 11 years after America waged
its unnecessary war to ensure Kuwait's survival and the power of its corrupt ruling
family, and say that world is a safer place for the
average American because of it.
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