From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (148 page)

While these dramatic events unfolded, the second phase of Soviet-American detente proceeded apace. A December 1989 "seasick summit" aboard warships off Malta in the stormy Mediterranean marked in important ways the end of the Cold War. Bush and Gorbachev bonded. By this time, the possibilities of future collaboration exceeded the dangers of
future conflict. "We don't consider you an enemy any more," the Soviet leader frankly conceded.
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A meeting in Washington in May of the following year made quite clear the radical changes in the balance between the two superpowers since Gorbachev's last visit in 1987. To this point, the Soviet leader had held the initiative, but with the fall of Eastern Europe, the certainty of a united Germany in NATO, rebellion in the Soviet republics, and increasingly pressing domestic problems, Gorbachev was obviously on the defensive. Kremlinologists now questioned whether he was even in control and how long he might last. He came to Washington desperate merely to secure a trade agreement with the United States. The administration at first took a hard line, tying trade to freedom for Lithuania and the lifting of restrictions on emigration. Once assured of Soviet approval of German membership in NATO, however, Bush offered a trade agreement while making clear it would not go to Congress until the crisis in Lithuania was resolved. In December 1990, by executive order he waived the Jackson-Vanik amendment to permit Export-Import Bank credits. The two nations made no progress on strategic arms reduction, but they did work out expanded student exchanges and pledged to reach agreement on reducing land arms in Europe. Bush and Gorbachev established a close, even intimate working relationship. The question now was the value of agreements with a dynamic leader whose days seemed numbered.
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A short and seemingly decisive war in the Middle East in early 1991 underscored the dramatic changes in the international system and fixed the contours of what Bush would call a "new world order." On August 1, 1990, Iraqi dictator and onetime Soviet ally Saddam Hussein caught the world off guard by sending three divisions in a lightning strike into neighboring Kuwait. Until 1961, the smaller Arab kingdom had been part of Iraq. Saddam coveted Kuwait's long coastline and access to the sea. Short of cash from his eight-year war with Iran, he accused the Kuwaitis of exceeding production quotas and driving down the price of oil. The United States had also supported Iraq during much of its war with Iran. In a colossal miscalculation, the Bush administration reckoned that despite his bluster a war-weary Saddam would refrain from rash actions. It went out of its way to avoid pushing him in that direction. He was likely encouraged in his daring move by a July 25 conversation in which ambassador April Glaspie assured him that the United States sought better relations with
Iraq and had "no opinion" on its border dispute with Kuwait. Iraqi forces quickly seized the capital of Kuwait City, giving Saddam control of 20 percent of the world oil supply.
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Saddam also miscalculated. Much as with Korea forty years earlier, the United States responded quickly, forcibly, and after remarkably little internal debate. Among the president's top advisers, only JCS chairman Gen. Colin Powell opposed the use of force. Deeply scarred by his two tours in Vietnam as a junior officer, he vigorously promoted adherence to what was now called the Powell Doctrine, insisting that the nation should go to war only to defend its most vital interests and then only as a last resort. He downplayed the importance of Kuwait. He insisted that U.S. objectives in the region could be achieved by containment and economic sanctions. The general stood alone. Top officials feared that an emboldened Iraq might threaten Israel and Saudi Arabia. Cheney doubted that sanctions would work and worried that absorption of Kuwait would give Iraq a stranglehold over Middle Eastern oil. As Truman and Acheson had done vis-à-vis Korea in June 1950, Scowcroft viewed Saddam's actions broadly in terms of the "ramifications of the aggression on the emerging post-Cold War world." To do nothing would send the wrong message to bad guys across the globe. Bush concurred. "This will not stand," he avowed, "this aggression against Kuwait."
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While hoping to cow Saddam into submission, the administration prepared, if necessary, to drive him from Kuwait with force. It imposed economic sanctions and applied diplomatic pressure but in full recognition that war might be necessary. Bush used his famous Rolodex and his personal ties with world leaders to assemble a broad coalition, including Syria, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, to remove Iraq from Kuwait. Gorbachev was the key, and his assent left Saddam isolated. Throughout the fall of 1990, the United States mobilized in Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf an awesome array of air, sea, and land power, the fruits of Carter's and Reagan's military buildup. On November 29, it gained UN Security Council approval of a resolution authorizing the use of "all necessary means" if Iraq had not left Kuwait by January 15, 1991. The possibility of war provoked vigorous opposition in the United States, a revival in many ways of the Vietnam anti-war movement. The president wisely rejected Cheney's argument that congressional approval for war was unnecessary
and might not be won. On January 12, after a heated debate suffused with references to Vietnam, Congress endorsed the use of force to uphold the UN resolution, 250–183 in the House, 52–47 in the Senate.
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Drawing the wrong lessons about Iraqi military prowess from his recent war with Iran and about U.S. willingness to fight from Vietnam, Saddam remained defiant to the end.

Launched on January 16, 1991, Operation Desert Storm unveiled to the world a dazzling display of modern, high-technology military power. For five weeks, the air force and navy pounded Iraq with cruise missiles from B-52 bombers flown on thirty-hour round trips from Louisiana, Tomahawk missiles fired from ships in the Persian Gulf, and laser-guided bombs dropped by Stealth F-117 aircraft. The attacks first targeted Iraq's communications networks, electrical power, and air bases. The bombing was not nearly as precise as portrayed on television. The collateral damage and civilian casualties were much worse than believed at the time. But the air war crippled Iraq's ability to fight. Coalition aircraft next "softened up" Iraqi troop concentrations in Kuwait. The second phase of the war began on February 24 when U.S. Marines from bases in Saudi Arabia attacked Iraqi forces in Kuwait. Army units then executed a "left hook" across the western desert to catch the enemy in a trap. Coalition forces inflicted huge losses on already demoralized Iraqi ground troops. Within a hundred hours, the fighting had stopped, apparently a resounding victory for the coalition and especially the United States.
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War is seldom so neat, however, and Desert Storm proved at best a partial success. Although Bush had publicly likened Saddam to Hitler, the administration declined to exploit its enormous military advantage to depose him. Regime change was never a goal, Scowcroft later admitted, simply a "hopeful byproduct."
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The U.S. military permitted much of his Republican Guard forces to escape, thus facilitating his retention of power. The military command allowed him to keep his helicopters, which he used with lethal effect to suppress domestic opposition. As is customary in war, after the shooting had stopped, frustrated U.S. officials blamed each other, and there was plenty to go around. The United States, for good reasons, never seriously considered pushing on to Baghdad to topple Saddam's government. Such a move might have cost the support of Arab states, crucial to the coalition. Iraq's total defeat would leave a huge power vacuum in an especially volatile part of the world's

most explosive region, enhancing the position of Iran. United States forces might be tied down in an extended occupation and entangled in Iraqi politics in ways that made Vietnam look easy. "Once we cross over the line and start intervening in a civil war . . . ," Cheney admitted, "it raises the very real specter of getting us involved in a quagmire figuring out who the hell is going to govern Iraq."
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United States officials reasoned that destruction of a large part of Saddam's army would limit his capacity to make mischief and perhaps weaken his hold on power, but they did not even pursue this goal aggressively. Military commanders expected the Iraqis in Kuwait to stand and fight, and when they fled north instead the coalition did not adjust quickly enough. The army was slow to execute the left hook, permitting sizeable enemy forces to escape across the Euphrates. The United States agreed to end the ground war after that mere hundred hours—partly because the number had a "nice ring," also because television's depiction of a "turkey shoot" of fleeing Iraqis along the "highway of death" had created a public relations problem; continuing the slaughter would not be "chivalrous," Bush observed. Even then, whether destruction of all the Republican Guard forces in Kuwait would have been enough to topple
Saddam is doubtful. The main problem was the naive view shared by top U.S. officials that destroying just a part of Saddam's army would be enough to get rid of him.
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The Bush administration hoped that Saddam's crushing defeat would provoke a military coup, and they encouraged Iraqis to rebel, but when Shiites and Kurds rose up and Saddam brutally suppressed them during the cease-fire with mass murder using helicopter gunships and poison gas, the United States did nothing. Powell and the military wanted U.S. troops out as quickly as possible. Civilians worried that a Shiite Iraq might tilt toward Iran and that the Kurds' secessionist dreams could threaten Turkey. They most feared the disintegration of Iraq. Once again, order triumphed over freedom, the guiding principle, in Scowcroft's word, being "geopolitics."
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The administration in truth never resolved its ambivalence about Saddam. It hoped to get rid of him but feared the consequences. The men who planned the military campaign with such meticulous care devoted scandalously little attention to what would happen when the war ended. They "failed to exploit the benefits that accrue to those who exercise overwhelming power."
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The full import of these failures would become obvious only later, and for the moment Americans relished a smashing and redemptive victory. A nervous nation had gone to war still haunted by Vietnam, and the thrashing administered to a supposedly formidable foe with minimal U.S. casualties brought forth enormous pride. The new volunteer army had proven its mettle; the performance of air power evoked awe. "The ghosts of Vietnam have been laid to rest beneath the sands of the Arabian desert," Bush himself crowed when it was over (prematurely, as it turned out).
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The Gulf War put on graphic display America's military primacy in the post–Cold War world. The Soviet Union, only recently a superpower and once Iraq's sponsor, was relegated to the sidelines, involving itself only through several last-minute and ineffectual efforts to prevent war. Bush hailed a new world order in which Wilson's vision of maintaining peace through collective security would be accomplished by the instrumentation of a United Nations working as its framers intended under enlightened U.S. leadership. A grateful nation hailed its heroes with ticker tape parades.

The finale to the upheaval of 1989–91 was the summer 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union itself, an event as momentous in its ramifications as it was anticlimactic in its occurrence. A visionary and dreamer, Gorbachev had hoped that reforming the Communist Party and the Soviet state would shake the USSR from its doldrums, stimulating political regeneration and economic revival. In fact, his reforms loosened the glue that held the vast Soviet empire together, unleashing powerful ethnic and nationalist forces among the diverse peoples that comprised the USSR. The dominoes fell from one end of the empire to the other, beginning, ironically, with a declaration of independence in June 1990 by the Russian republic. Humiliated by the "loss" of Eastern Europe, the reunification of Germany, the Gulf War, and the disintegration of the USSR, Soviet hardliners on August 18, 1991, two days before the signature of a treaty giving the remaining republics greater autonomy, placed Gorbachev under house arrest at his vacation spot in the Crimea and moved to take over the government. It was a bungled effort, halfheartedly executed by incompetents and drunkards. Hoping to restore the Communist Party to power and preserve what was left of the Soviet state, they accomplished the opposite. The flamboyant Boris Yeltsin, president of the Russian Republic, mounted a tank to rally anti-coup demonstrators in Moscow, outmaneuvered the plotters, and took power. An increasingly impotent Gorbachev hung on for a short time longer. In early December, Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus replaced the USSR with a loose Confederation of Independent States. Gorbachev resigned on Christmas. That day the hammer and sickle came down from atop the Kremlin for the last time and was replaced by the red and blue flag of the Russian Republic. "Never before," philosopher Sir Isaiah Berlin intoned, "has there been a case of an empire that caved in without a war, revolution, or an invasion."
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