The war itself resulted in many fewer American deaths and casualties than had been feared. Far from the 50,000 wounded the armed forces had planned for, fewer than 750 Americans died or were injured, including 121 deaths in noncombat incidents. After thirty days of incessant B-52 bombing of Iraqi positions, the coalition ground campaign took only one hundred hours to liberate Kuwait and drive the Iraqi forces back across their border. The pictures of Kuwaitis reclaiming their country were compelling. Their nightmare was at least partially over. We could take great satisfaction in the superb performance of our military, and we could celebrate the validation of the principle that countries will not get away with invading and conquering their smaller neighbors as a way to resolve their mutual problems. The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait was a brazen case of armed robbery, pure and simple.
The war also established the blueprint for the post-Cold War New World Order. For the first time since the Korean War, the world had engaged in a conflict sanctioned by international law. In the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall, America’s foreign policy establishment understood that the next generation’s war would not be of the World War II variety, with huge mobilizations of national assets and a fight for survival among the major powers; it would instead consist of small, bloody conflicts that would best be dealt with by a coalition of the willing operating under the mandate of the United Nations.
Our challenge would be to ensure that the United States did not become the world’s policeman, a costly and enervating task, but rather used our power to mobilize coalitions and share costs and responsibilities. In my mind, Desert Shield and Storm were case studies of how to manage both the diplomacy and the military aspects of an international crisis. We were successful in obtaining international financing to cover most of the costs of the war, we were successful in putting together a coalition force with troops from more than twenty nations, and we were successful in obtaining an international legal mandate to conduct the war. It was, in every way, an international effort driven by American political will and diplomatic leadership. Even as I lamented the need to resort to military action to achieve our goals, I was proud to have been part of the team that executed the policy and the war.
We expelled Saddam from Kuwait, but we did not remove him from power or take the battle all the way to Baghdad. Although I was no longer involved in the issue—I was still in the Caribbean when General Schwarzkopf negotiated the cease-fire with the Iraqi generals at Safwan in southern Iraq—the question I am still asked most frequently about this period is, why had we not done so?
As satisfying as it would have been to go on to Baghdad in 1991, there were many reasons to stop where and when we did. The goal that had been agreed upon within the international community was Saddam’s expulsion from Kuwait. There was no legal authority to proceed further. Since the concept of the New World Order depended on international agreement and material support as we faced these smaller conflicts together, it was vital to establish from the outset the parameters for action and then adhere to them. Admittedly, stopping at Kuwait’s border and leaving Saddam in power was not the ideal outcome, given the brutality of his regime. But international approval for his removal by force was never going to be achieved.
Quite naturally, governments are wary about approving the overthrow of other governments, however vile they might be. The principle of noninterference in the internal affairs of a sovereign nation has always been one of the pillars of the international community and was actually one of the principles that invalidated Saddam’s claim of sovereignty over Kuwait. In order to attract more nations to the cause of liberating Kuwait, it had been necessary to narrow the objective to one that a large bloc of countries would support. The more limited the objectives, the broader the coalition of nations who agreed to support them. Had the objectives been broader, fewer nations would have stepped up to support the effort.
Additionally, if we had crossed into Iraq and moved on toward Baghdad, much Arab suspicion of our motives would have been confirmed, and the support we had enjoyed in Arab countries would have evaporated with each mile we pushed deeper into Iraqi territory. Intellectually, many Arabs understood the need to repel Saddam’s aggression but feared that the United States would use the invasion of Kuwait to invade and occupy their lands for other reasons. Their chief concern was that all we wanted was to get our hands on their oil.
The credibility that we later enjoyed—which permitted us to make subsequent progress on Middle East peace at the Madrid Conference in October 1991, and through the Oslo process, launched in September 1993—was directly related to our having honored our promises and not exceeded the mandate from the international community.
Moreover, proceeding to Baghdad would have meant largely going alone, as our Arab partners would surely have deserted the coalition at that point, as might have the Soviets, Chinese, French, and others. It would have guaranteed that there would never again be a U.N. consensus on use of force to combat a violation of its charter. The New World Order would have been stillborn as an operating principle.
The last days of the liberation of Kuwait included the devastating destruction of many Iraqi forces along the so-called Highway of Death. The Iraqis were fleeing Kuwait when we hit their retreating troops in an awesome display of firepower. Pictures of this encounter gave the impression of a massacre. Such pictures might well have become the norm had we pursued the Iraqi army up the Tigris and Euphrates valleys, and would have turned international opinion against us quickly. What had been the nobly undertaken liberation of a small country would have come to be seen as an ugly moment when retreating troops were shot in the back. That is not the way Americans like to think of their country waging war.
The road to Baghdad might have been swift, though we had not planned or equipped our forces to make the trek. But it might also have been arduous and deadly for American troops. Iraqis had fought fiercely against Iranian invaders, and while we brought far more force and professionalism to war-making, a rear-guard guerrilla war in the cities could well have thwarted our drive to rout the regime.
However simple or difficult the invasion, occupying Iraq would have been a different proposition altogether. We would have inherited all the problems of governing a difficult nation without the global, or even American, political will to do so. And we might not have easily found Saddam. Every day in Iraq would have been a drain on our resources, stripped of the coalition support that had propelled the liberation of Kuwait. It was a scenario replete with potential nightmares.
Finally, there were also those who argued that the overthrow of Saddam would have left a void into which Iraq’s neighbors, especially Iran, would have stepped. An Iranian-dominated Iraq would have threatened the oil-rich Gulf States to the south with their large Shia populations.
None of the conditions that made the decision not to drive on to Baghdad in 1991 the correct call changed in the years following, right up to the second Gulf War in 2003.
Saddam was the ultimate survivor. He truly believed in “L’état, c’est moi,” and to prove he was the supreme being, he was willing to sacrifice tens of thousands of his citizens in the fruitless prosecution of a war he could not possibly win militarily. With impunity, he regularly tortured and systematically killed anyone who dared to challenge him and any ethnic group that rebelled against his rule. Because he equated himself with Iraq, and the machinery of state was so totally identified with him, as long as he survived he believed that Iraq survived, no matter how many of his fellow citizens had to die. It was that sense of personal privilege and right that drove the ruthless crushing of the Shiite and Kurdish rebellions in the aftermath of the Gulf War. The Shia and Kurds sensed that the tyrant was vulnerable and, encouraged by a statement from President Bush, launched an assault on Saddam.
“There is another way for the bloodshed to stop,” Bush announced, “and that is for the Iraqi military and the Iraq people to take matters in their own hands, to force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside, an
d to comply with United Nations resolutions and then rejoin the family of peace-loving nations.”
Unfortunately for the rebels, they did not realize that, despite all the casualties suffered in Kuwait, the Iraqi army was still strong enough to put down domestic disturbances, and, largely Sunni, it remained loyal to the regime. The rebellions were doomed when Schwarzkopf failed to prohibit Iraqi military use of helicopters, and later when the administration declined to provide military support to the insurgents.
In the spring of 1992, President Bush nominated me to serve as his ambassador to two African countries, the Gabonese Republic and the Democratic Republic of São Tomé and Príncipe. My nomination would require Senate confirmation, the first time any of my diplomatic appointments had required me to undergo this congressional ritual. At my hearings, I appeared with several other nominees for African posts, all of us to be questioned by Senator Paul Simon, Democratic senator from Illinois and chairman of the Africa subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (SFRC), and Republican Senator Nancy Kassebaum from Kansas.
My colleagues at the hearing included nominees to South Africa and Ghana, far more important to American national interests than the countries I was slated for. While Saddam’s abuse of the human rights of Iraqi citizens had always been a grave issue for the U.S. government and for anyone in the Foreign Service posted in Iraq, I had every reason to believe that my fellow foreign service officers would get the tough questions and I would breeze through unscathed. Senators generally focus on the future and not the past.
The hearing took place in the committee’s formal chamber, with the senators sitting high on the dais behind a carved wooden front, looking down on us in the well. Despite the warm welcome and the positive tone of the senators, the setting was intimidating, even for somebody who within the last year had been through the experiences I’d had in Baghdad.
On my way into the hearing room, I ran into Peter Galbraith, still a senior staffer to Senator Claiborne Pell, with whom I exchanged pleasantries. I was mildly surprised when a half hour later, just as the senators turned to question me,the door behind Simon opened and Galbraith appeared. He handed Senator Simon a sheet of paper, which I realized pertained to my session when Simon looked down at me and said, “Mr. Wilson, now I’d like to ask you a few questions about your previous job.” A few turned out to be fourteen, designed to produce responses from me that could be potentially embarrassing for Secretary of State Baker. The questions were clearly designed to establish the fact that the embassy in Baghdad had advised the State Department that Saddam Hussein was engaged in the systematic abuse of the human rights of its citizens. This was trigger language for cutting off U.S. financial assistance to Iraq through the Agricultural Commodity Credit Program, but the implication was that the State Department, in its turn, had failed to act.
Simon was kind enough to ask me only two or three of Galbraith’s questions before he stopped and suggested that I provide written responses for the record to the rest of them. I asked the State Department to help me prepare the responses and was told that since these were questions for me, I had to answer them myself. They were not for me, of course, but through me to the administration, and the unwillingness to assist in the preparation of responses struck me as short-sighted and unwise, given the leading nature of the inquiry.
I went ahead and submitted my responses, drawing extensively on our human rights reports for the three years of my tenure in Baghdad. The human rights report is a study of the human rights practices of foreign countries; it is mandated by Congress and submitted annually. My answers emphasized that, yes, Saddam systematically killed and tortured people, and that the embassy had discharged its responsibilities in a timely fashion, reporting to Congress through the annual report. Congress had received all the information it needed to assess whether Iraq had engaged in such egregious behavior as to warrant sanction.
Thus, I lobbed the ball back into Congress’s court.
I was confirmed at the end of June and sworn in as ambassador in a private ceremony at our consulate in Marseilles, where I was on vacation at the time President Bush signed my orders.
After more than fifteen years in the Foreign Service, I was thrilled to be selected to serve as an ambassador, and excited to return to the continent where my career had begun.
Chapter Nine
All in a Diplomat’s Life—from Gabon to Albania
IN AUGUST 1992, I ARRIVED IN LIBREVILLE, the capital of Gabon, as the newly minted ambassador, one of the youngest ever appointed from the career ranks. As honored as I was, it was not lost on me that surviving Baghdad had catapulted me to the head of the ambassadorial line. And if I forgot, my friends in the Foreign Service were quick to remind me what a great career move it had been to be in Iraq during a war. The solicitous concern that I might not survive the experience had given way to good-natured kidding about the career benefits of having lived through it after all.
Gabon is best known internationally as the site of the leper hospital and mission of Nobel Peace Prize winner Albert Schweitzer, in Lamberene. The country sits astride the equator on the west coast of Africa. On the north side of the equator, water goes down the drains counterclockwise; on the south side, clockwise, and on the equator itself, straight down, a phenomenon easily tested by driving just an hour from Libreville. A mere flush of a toilet would tell you which hemisphere you were in—that is, if you could find a proper flush toilet in the lightly populated nation. Gabon has only about a million people in a country the size of Colorado. It has a long coastline along gentle seas and is heavily forested. The climate is tropical, hot, and very humid. Clothes were wet and clinging within minutes of stepping outside. The two seasons are hot and dry and hot and wet, with monsoons dumping huge amounts of water on the country and flooding the streets of Libreville regularly during the rainy season.
Libreville is built on an estuary that serves as the country’s principal port, and with a population of over 400,000 people, it is far and away the largest and most important city. The country’s wealth comes from its oil production, from logging of its forests, and from some mining. But as a Gabonese once told me, “We live in paradise. If I want food, I put a line in one of our rivers or in the ocean and catch a fish within minutes, or I go into the forest and hunt or trap one of the many species that inhabit it. If I want to drink, I cut into a palm tree and let the juice that drains from it ferment for three days and I have a potent brew. I have no need of elaborate housing in the tropics, and little need of clothes. I don’t need to work hard to survive, so why should I?”
Unlike those West Africans who have a long history of trade between and among tribes, Gabonese are from hunting and gathering groups, among whom contact was always difficult, owing to the dense forests. It was not until the opening of the forests to commercial logging during the colonial period in the nineteenth century that the various tribal groups living in what would become Gabon began to know each other. In fact, according to tribal lore, the first marriage between a Fang from the north along the border with Cameroon and a Myene from the southern coast did not take place until 1954, and was still widely spoken about by members of both tribes when I began my tenure in the country.
I first learned about this infamous marriage from a Fang woman at a dinner. She related the tale and concluded with the comment, “We did not understand how one of our sons could marry a woman from a tribe known to be immoral and lazy.” She believed that the Myene had been spoiled by more frequent and intimate contact with European colonists, and that a Myene woman would have been less motivated and unable to toil in the fields as well as the tougher Fang ladies.
A couple of weeks later, my dinner partner was a Myene woman who recounted a similar story. She explained to me that the Myene were appalled that one of their young ladies could possibly want to marry into a tribe suspected of practicing cannibalism. “Eaters of men,” she derisively called the Fang.
Listening to these opposite versions of the same
event—the marriage—which had taken place the same year that the Supreme Court of the United States finally acted to integrate American schools in the Brown vs. Board of Education decision, it struck me that we were not alone in finding it a lengthy process to overcome blind prejudice.
My orders read that I would serve concomitantly as ambassador to São Tomé and Príncipe, as well—but without additional compensation, they spelled out—giving me responsibility for American relations with a second African nation, in addition to Gabon.
São Tomé and Príncipe is a single sovereign state that comprises two main islands and four islets about 120 miles off the coast of Gabon in the Atlantic Ocean. The islands lie on an alignment of once-active volcanoes with rugged landscapes, with dense forests, dramatic mountains including volcanic plugs that look like spires rising from the valley floors, and crystalline coves perfect for snorkeling and skin-diving. The smallest country in Africa, the population totals about 120,000 people, with 6,000 of them living on the tiny island of Príncipe.
I only visited Príncipe once—by helicopter, landing in the middle of the town’s soccer field on a rainy day. It was just the second time in local memory that a helicopter had landed on the island, a moment that was not to be missed by local residents, the vast majority of whom swarmed to the field to look at and touch the strange flying machine that had descended upon them. After my tour of the small island, I returned to find muddy hand- and footprints all over the fuselage from those who had touched the machine. Moving them away before departure was a chore, since there was no understanding of the force or power of the helicopter among a population that was barely familiar with automobiles. Once the craft was fired up and the noisy props were turning, the locals scattered and we were able to lift off. For people who had no experience with such modern vehicles, and who had no television and only intermittent electricity, it was quite an event.
The Politics of Truth_Inside the Lies That Put the White House on Trial and Betrayed My Wife's CIA Identity Page 19
