Desert Storm has been strange from the start. The winner has been known from the start. Iraq is a Third World country with an extraction-based (oil) economy, lacking diversified industry and commerce, and sealed off by sanctions from resupply. America is “a gigantic boiler. Once the fire is lighted under it there is no limit to the power it can generate.” Churchill recalled that description the night of Pearl Harbor, when he “slept the sleep of the saved and thankful.” He knew his would be the winning side.
The Desert Storm forces, built to repel the Red Army in Europe, have been fighting an army that has barely fought back and is defended primarily by mounds of sand. America controls the air, seas and sands. However, Saddam controls the crisis, in this sense: Because America has linked the legitimacy of its assault to U.N. resolutions, Saddam can control the crisis by compliance with them. So America should (in Henry Kissinger’s phrase) disentangle Saddam’s conditions from his withdrawal. Giving his army only 72 hours to leave Kuwait might require it to abandon much equipment. And such a deadline would be a suitable exclamation point to Desert Storm’s primary lesson for Americans as well as potential aggressors: American force can be used with discrimination and effect.
Like the night vision devices the troops use, this war makes some things clear, such as the wisdom of the Reagan era’s rebuilding of America’s military. But much remains unclear. Perhaps, as some people seem sure, America will be profoundly changed by this war that the president calls “a defining hour.” Yet most wars that profoundly change great nations are protracted and exacting for the entire population: they require conscription, taxes and even rationing. A peculiar kind of patriot today says that by this war America “will get its pride back.” What, again? In 1984 Reagan carried 49 states saying it was morning again because America was “back and standing tall.” And since when has American pride derived primarily from military episodes? A nation that constantly worries about its pride should worry. It is apt to confect military occasions for bucking itself up, using foreign policy for psychotherapy.
Saddam’s initial peace ploy probably was the beginning of a process that will be perilous for America. He can still hope to pluck the flower of prestige from the nettle of humiliation. So it is too soon to say what good shall come of this at last. It will be no good if the only good is restoration of “the legitimate government of Kuwait.” (Gandhi, asked what he thought of Western civilization, said he thought it would be a good idea.) Eugene Rostow believes this crisis is a turning point comparable to Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and North Korea’s drive south in 1950. The West responded in 1950 because it had failed to respond in 1931 (or in 1936 regarding Ethiopia and the Rhineland). It is timely to remember that the Korean armistice talks (it was an armistice, not surrender) lasted longer than the war did, and U.S. troops are still there.
When wars end, new dangers emerge, not least from overreaching by idealists. Beware of Middle East analogies to Europe in 1815. Then, after the turmoil of the Napoleonic Wars the great powers at the Congress of Vienna took prophylactic measures against any new Napoleon, and produced a century of semipeace. But one man - Napoleon - had been much of Europe’s problem. The Middle East’s problems include comprehensive social and political underdevelopment. Europe in 1815 had sophisticated, homogeneous and cooperative elites. The Middle East’s fratricidal elites are part of the shambles.
Hence it is timely to distinguish between problems and messes. Problems are solved; messes are endured. The word “problem” implies, particularly to Americans, something solvable by engineering, including social engineering. America’s formative political problem was nation-building, and it both suited and shaped the American character. Is the problem a prairie? Put a railroad across it. A desert? Irrigate it. A bay? Build the Golden Gate Bridge.
Even the solutions to some of America’s political problems have had large technological components. Civil War? Fire up the foundries for railroads and cannon. Hitler has industrial Germany on the march? Defeat him with (among other things) radar and Norden bombsights. Bob Shrum, one of Washington’s last liberals and best wits, says liberals exaggerate the perfectibility of people but conservatives exaggerate that of machines. You can see why. But when machines have done their work, messes remain. One will be there when the dust raised by Desert Storm’s machines has settled.
To the question, Do we care which thug governs Iraq? the answer is, Not if Iraq’s military is radically reduced and resupply so restricted that Americans can think about other things. One reason for giving Iraq a 10-year task of picking up the pieces of itself is so the United States can give priority to more pressing problems. Such as? Such as Gorbachev’s Stalinist agenda of “socialism in one country,” and America’s deferred domestic agenda.
Perhaps Desert Storm is, as the president says, the start of something new - that New World Order, with America enforcing rules of minimal decency, including: Thou shalt not cross borders with armies. (It is remarkable how few of the many wars since the second world war have been like that.) But it is at least as likely that this war is the last of something old, the last great American exertion for an abstraction, at least for a long while.
The fact that a messy peace may leave the Middle East at least as messy as it was last Aug. 1 does not discredit Desert Storm. Neither does the fact that some rich nations have, in effect, rented America’s military. But it could become tiresome.
