Restless Giant, page 28
By the time this team left office in January 1993, a number of late-developing issues remained unresolved. One of these involved Yugoslavia, which imploded in 1991–92 amidst savage fighting between Eastern Orthodox Serbs, Roman Catholic Croats, and Bosnian Muslims. A host of outraged observers, including United Nations peacekeepers sent to the area in November 1992, reported evidence of massive “ethnic cleansing,” especially by Bosnian Serbs backed by the Serbian regime in Belgrade. Throughout 1992, stories about Serbian-run death camps and “genocide” appeared in American newspapers. By the end of the year it was estimated that more than 1.7 million Muslim refugees were scattered about onetime Yugoslavia and nearby nations. The Bush administration, however, was focusing at the time on the election campaign and was seriously distracted by a severe recession. It was also hoping to maintain cordial relations with Russia, which had historically supported the Serbs. NATO allies, moreover, opposed significant military action in the region. The United States and its Western allies placed an embargo on arms to the area, even though such a policy harmed the Bosnian Muslims, who had little in the way of economic or military resources, more than it did the Serbs or the Croats. Powell and high officials at the Pentagon feared that American military engagement in the region would lead to another disaster like Vietnam. For all these reasons, the Bush administration kept its distance from the Balkans.21
Bush left other foreign policies in an uncompleted state. In late 1992, his administration succeeded in negotiating a North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which proposed to eliminate tariffs between Canada, the United States, and Mexico. But when he left office in 1993, the agreement still needed Senate approval, which was expected to be difficult. In the last month of his administration, he sent 28,000 American troops on a humanitarian mission to help U.N. peacekeeping forces in Somalia, where famine threatened the population. Though the Americans were not expected to remain for long, they were still in the country when he departed from the White House. Dealing with the tense situation in Somalia, like gaining approval for NAFTA, fell into the lap of his successor.
In Latin America, however, the president was luckier than Reagan, who had been nearly ruined by the Iran-contra scandal. In February 1990, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua were badly defeated by a coalition of opponents in a free election. The United States then ended its trade embargo, and the contras ceased operations. By 1992, the civil war in El Salvador that had caused the death of 75,000 people in the 1980s—most of them peasants who had been fighting against their oppressive government—had finally come to an end. While savage battling continued in Guatemala, and while people throughout Central America continued to cope with widespread poverty, some of the warfare that had bloodied the region, and drawn the United States deeply into the area, had abated at last.
In late 1989, Bush acted to remove another source of turmoil in the region: Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega. Like many anti-Communist tyrants, Noriega had received generous American support over the years. Under Reagan, the CIA had provided his regime with military and economic assistance, in return for which Noriega had aided the contras. But when the Sandinistas began to weaken in the late 1980s, his usefulness to the United States declined. Moreover, Noriega was a cruel and corrupt dictator who had enriched himself through gifts from the CIA and through drug trafficking. In May 1989, he annulled a presidential election, after which his henchmen beat and badly bloodied Guillermo Endara, the legitimately elected candidate. Bush, well aware that the Panama Canal would come under Panamanian control at the end of 1999, also worried about what a criminal like Noriega might do if he were allowed to control such a strategic asset. In mid-December 1989, when Noriega’s men shot and killed an American marine lieutenant, beat a navy lieutenant, and beat and groped the naval officer’s wife in Panama City, Bush, Cheney, and Powell resolved to topple him.
The intervention, which Bush named Operation Just Cause, was the largest American military move since Vietnam. It featured the dispatch of 24,000 paratroopers who made a dramatic early morning assault on December 20 at key locations in Panama. Navy SEALs landed on the coast. After bloody street fighting, American troops quickly secured the Canal Zone and Panama City, only to learn that Noriega had taken refuge in the residence of the papal nuncio in the city. To roust him, American troops and tanks surrounded the site and blared earsplitting rock music twenty-four hours a day. Military vehicles gunned their engines to add to the racket. After a show of bravado that lasted until January 3, Noriega surrendered when elite American forces threatened to attack. A day later he was in jail in Miami.
Bush’s handling of the situation in Panama bothered some critics, who pointed out that civilians died in the fighting. Civil libertarians later complained that Noriega was imprisoned for more than a year while awaiting a trial in the United States that could hardly be fair. In April 1992, Noriega was convicted on eight charges, including cocaine trafficking, money laundering, and racketeering, and sentenced to forty years in federal prison.22 But Bush’s Panama operation energized his administration: With the Cold War ending, America, at last, had carried out a large-scale military operation. It was highly popular in the United States. The fighting killed 23 Americans and wounded 394. Endara was immediately sworn in as the legitimately elected president of Panama. Though he struggled during his five-year term, he and his successors managed to promote democratic institutions, including an independent press and judiciary, competitive political parties, and fair elections. Given the sad history of American military intervention in Latin America, these were heartening results.23
While dealing with conflict in Latin America, Bush had to cope with events that arose from the sudden and stunning collapse of Communism in the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe. Some conservatives, having chafed at Reagan’s accommodation with the Soviets, urged him to take a harder line with Gorbachev, who, while remaining Communist, was struggling to keep several nationalistic Soviet republics from breaking free and declaring their independence. Advocates of human rights also pressed Bush to act firmly against the Chinese Communists—the “butchers of Beijing” who killed hundreds, maybe thousands, of pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square in June 1989.
Bush and his advisers moved cautiously to manage problems such as these. At first he maintained a wary distance from Gorbachev, and he threatened to toughen trade policies involving the People’s Republic of China unless it released dissidents and embraced more moderate policies. By 1990, however, he had forged a fairly satisfying personal relationship with Gorbachev, and the historic developments of 1990–92—the reunification of Germany within NATO, the independence of the Baltic states, the removal of Soviet troops from the satellite nations of Eastern Europe, the sovereignty of Soviet republics, the fall from power of Gorbachev and the rise to authority of President Boris Yeltsin of Russia—took place with minimal loss of blood. Bush also worked to patch up relations with China, which had become an important trading partner. After the administration worked out a deal with the Chinese that provided amnesty for several hundred Tiananmen Square protestors, Sino-American relations improved slightly.24
This did not mean that advocates of a tough American foreign policy disappeared from the scene. Defense Secretary Cheney, among others, believed that the United States must step vigorously into the vacuum that was developing after the disintegration of the Soviet Union. In 1992, Cheney joined Paul Wolfowitz, his deputy undersecretary for policy, in supporting staffers who had drafted an ambitious plan, the Defense Planning Guidance, concerning America’s international obligations. It stated that the United States in the new post–Cold War world must “discourage [all other nations] from challenging our leadership or seeking to overturn the established political and economic order.”25 Though aimed in part at potential competitors such as Japan and Germany, the document was more broadly a statement that the United States must maintain unrivaled superpower status as a colossus against all comers. Then, as in later years, it remained a guiding document of American foreign and military policy.26
In keeping with this prescription, the Bush administration maintained fairly high spending on defense—thereby angering liberals who were seeking a “peace dividend” to be used for domestic social programs. Though expenditures for defense—and for overseas intelligence—did decline a little over the four years of Bush’s presidency, Cheney and other high-ranking officials continued to embrace the Powell Doctrine, which, carried over from the Reagan years, maintained that the United States must maintain a high level of military readiness so that if it ever had to fight a war, it could do so with overwhelming force, thereby protecting American soldiers from the risk of Vietnam-like casualties.27
For the most part, the president and his advisers acted prudently in dealing with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. In 1991, Bush concluded an agreement with Gorbachev that led to the removal of most tactical weapons from overseas positions and reduced the alert status of nuclear arsenals. In START I, negotiated in mid-1991, the two leaders agreed to cut back their nuclear weaponry—from 13,000 warheads in 1990 to 9,000 in 1992 and to 7,000 by 1995.28 Shortly before leaving office in 1993, Bush and Yeltsin negotiated START II, which placed the top limits for each side in the future at between 3,000 and 3,500 warheads. This agreement showed that the United States and its once most powerful enemy were building on the breathtaking advances accomplished by Reagan and Gorbachev. Most observers of American foreign policy gave Bush good marks for his diplomacy with Moscow, for his role in advancing the reunification of Germany, and for his attempts to involve Western allies in efforts to assist the fragile new states that were replacing Soviet republics as well as the Soviet Union’s formerly Communist satellites in Eastern Europe.29
WITH ACCOMPLISHMENTS SUCH AS THESE, Bush might well have expected to go down in history as one of America’s more skillful presidents in the management of foreign policy. By the time he left office, he was especially well remembered as the president who led a carefully established and formidable international alliance into a war against Iraq. Though the war did not prevent instability from returning to the deeply troubled Middle East, the coalition swept to triumph after triumph in the fighting itself.
In the eyes of Bush—and of many other heads of state—the major source of trouble in the region was President Saddam Hussein of Iraq. After taking power in 1979, Hussein had come to imagine himself as a modern Nebuchadnezzar who would lead the Arab world to magnificent heights. Among his idols were Hitler and Stalin. Over time he built a string of lavish palaces for himself and his family. Statues and portraits of him proliferated in the country. In 1980, he opened war against neighboring Iran, a far larger nation. The fighting lasted eight years, during which Hussein used chemical weapons against the Iranians, before the war sputtered to an inconclusive end in 1988. During this time Hussein supported efforts to manufacture nuclear bombs, and he murdered hundreds of thousands of his own people, most of them Kurds and Shiites who were restive under the oppressive rule of his tightly organized clique of Sunni Muslim followers.30 In March 1988, he authorized use of chemical weapons in the Kurdish village of Halabja, killing 5,000 people in one day.
Reagan administration officials, believing Iran to be the bigger threat to stability in the Middle East, had turned a mostly blind eye to Hussein’s excesses and had cautiously supported his regime between 1980 and 1988. Hussein benefited during the Iran-Iraq war from American intelligence and combat-planning assistance. As late as July 1990, America’s ambassador to Iraq may have unintentionally led Hussein to think that the United States would not fight to stop him if he decided to attack oil-rich Kuwait, Iraq’s neighbor to the south. But the Iraqi-American relationship had always been uneasy, and it collapsed on August 2, 1990, when Iraq launched an unprovoked and quickly successful invasion of Kuwait. Bush, sensitive to memories of the quagmire of Vietnam, and conscious of the potentially vast implications of military intervention, was taken aback by Iraq’s bold aggression. Britain’s “Iron Lady,” Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, was said to have tried to stiffen his spine. “Remember, George,” she was rumored to have warned, “this is no time to go wobbly.”31
In fact, Bush needed no stiffening. Quickly imposing economic sanctions on Iraq, he emerged as the strongest voice within the administration against Hussein’s aggression. Declaring, “This will not stand,” the president overrode warnings from advisers, notably Powell, that war against Iraq would be costly and dangerous. Cheney and Powell estimated at the time that as many as 30,000 American soldiers might die in such a conflict.32 Sending Secretary of State Baker on a host of overseas missions, Bush succeeded in enlisting thirty-four countries in a multinational coalition that stood ready to contribute in some way to an American-led fight against Iraq. In late November, Bush secured passage of a U.N. Security Council resolution authorizing the use of force to drive Iraq from Kuwait if Hussein did not pull out by January 15, 1991. The resolution passed, twelve to two, with the Soviet Union among the twelve. China, one of the five nations with a veto power, abstained. Only Yemen and Cuba dissented.33
From the beginning, however, Bush realized that Hussein, who claimed Kuwait as Iraqi territory, had no intention of backing down. Like Carter, who had pronounced that America would go to war if necessary in order to prevent enemies from controlling the Persian Gulf, he was prepared to fight against aggressors in the region. So while the wheels of diplomacy were turning, he energized the Powell Doctrine. No longer fearful of Soviet military designs on Western Europe, he pulled a number of American troops from Germany in order to bolster what soon became a formidable coalition fighting force. The coalition, which had the nervous support of several Muslim nations (including Pakistan, Afghanistan, Egypt, Syria, and Turkey)—and which was to rely heavily on the willingness of Saudi Arabia to serve as a staging area—ultimately included troops from five Arab states. More than 460,000 American troops, 1,500 aircraft, and sixty-five warships moved to the Persian Gulf region.34
As Bush prepared for a conflict that he believed to be inevitable, he was reluctant to seek the approval of the heavily Democratic Congress. In January 1991, however, he succumbed to political pressure urging him to do so. As he had anticipated, most Democrats opposed him. Some charged that the president, who had made millions in the oil business, was eager for war in order to protect wealthy oil interests in the United States. Others argued that Hussein should be subjected to further economic and diplomatic pressure, which, they said, would force him to come to terms. Some foes of war worried that the president might authorize an invasion and takeover of Iraq itself, thereby miring the United States in a drawn-out, potentially perilous occupation.
Bush got what he wanted from the Hill, though by narrow margins. By heavily partisan votes, Congress passed a joint resolution authorizing war pursuant to the U.N. resolution of November 1990. The vote in the House was 251 to 182, with Republicans approving, 165 to 3, and Democrats opposing, 179 to 86. In the Senate, which decided on January 11, the tally was 52 to 47, with Republicans in favor, 42 to 2, and Democrats against, 45 to 10. Among the handful of Senate Democrats who voted for the resolution was Al Gore Jr. of Tennessee. Among those opposed was John Kerry of Massachusetts.35 This was the closest senatorial vote on war in United States history.
There was no doubting that Hussein’s conquest threatened Western oil interests. It was estimated at the time that Iraq produced 11 percent, and Kuwait 9 percent, of world supplies. Neighboring Saudi Arabia, the leading producer, accounted for 26 percent. The Persian Gulf area had more than half of the world’s proven reserves. The United States, having become increasingly dependent on overseas production, at that time imported a quarter of its oil from the Gulf. Fervent supporters of the war, such as Defense Secretary Cheney and Wolfowitz, were keenly aware of the large economic assets that Iraq’s conquest had threatened.36 In defending his position, however, Bush insisted that the key issue was Iraq’s naked aggression, which must not be tolerated. He also maintained that Hussein was secretly developing the capacity to make nuclear bombs.37 He displayed special outrage at Hussein’s cruel and murderous treatment of his own people. Hussein, he charged, was “worse than Hitler.” When the U.N. deadline of January 15 passed, he wasted no time in going to war, which started on January 16.
The coalition attack featured two phases. The first entailed massive bombing of Kuwait, Baghdad, and other Iraqi cities and installations. This lasted thirty-nine days. Coalition aircraft fired off 89,000 tons of explosives, a minority of them laser-guided “smart bombs” and cruise missiles, at these targets. The bombing was frightening, causing the desertion of an estimated 100,000 or more of the 400,000 or so Iraqi troops that were believed to have been initially deployed. It was also devastating. The air offensive destroyed Iraq’s power grid and sundered its military communications. A number of contemporary observers thought that the bombing created severe food shortages, damaged facilities guarding against water pollution, provoked outbreaks of cholera and typhoid, and seriously disrupted medical care.38
Some of this air war was featured on network television and on Cable News Network (CNN), which since its creation in 1980 had established itself as a successful network providing twenty-four-hours-a-day news of events all over the world. CNN offered mesmerizing coverage from Baghdad of streaking missiles and flashing explosions. Iraqi Scud missiles were zooming off toward targets in Israel and Saudi Arabia, and American Patriot missiles were shooting up to intercept them. Though one of the Scuds (of the eighty-six or so believed to have been fired during the war) killed twenty-eight American military personnel in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, most of them did no serious damage. American claims to the contrary, later studies concluded that the Patriots had relatively little luck hitting the Scuds. The Scuds, however, did prompt a widely told joke: “Question: How many Iraqis does it take to fire a Scud missile at Israel? Answer: Three, one to arm, one to fire, the third to watch CNN to see where it landed.” President Bush avidly followed CNN, which he said was a quicker source of news than the CIA.
