Diplomatic crises with Israel and angry bouts with terrorists and their patrons did not exhaust American travails in the Middle East. The Iran-Iraq war only enmeshed the Reagan administration in deeper commitments in the region, especially with Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. To the degree that the United States had a favorite in the Iran-Iraq conflict, it was Iraq, which received Western military assistance while Iran did not (officially). But Iraq hardly looked like a constant friend. Its armed forces and those of Iran attacked oil tankers and other neutral ships in the Persian Gulf as early as 1981, and by 1987 those attacks, the majority by Iraqi warplanes, totaled 451. The attacks menaced oil shipments to the West and Japan from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. From a long-term perspective, Saudi Arabia appeared to be the logical (and wealthiest) successor in the pro-Western regional role that Iran had played until 1979. For the Saudis, money talked, and Americans generally liked the message. First, the Saudis had some leverage over Egypt, Syria, and Jordan and through them on the Palestinians, and Saudi diplomacy and money supported negotiations and moderation. Next, the Saudis provided money and military assistance to the Afghan rebels; with the bombing death of Pakistani President Zia ul-Haq in 1988, probably at the hands of dissident Pakistanis, the United States needed additional influence from a Muslim ally to keep Pakistan secure as a base of operations against the Russians in Afghanistan. Moreover, the Saudis could and would spend money—some $22 billion between 1981 and 1990—on American arms. In addition, the Saudis allowed the United States to spend the profits from arms sales on base construction in Saudi Arabia. By 1990 Saudi Arabia had the base capacity for an air force five times larger than its own. Project PEACE SHIELD (1985) gave it an air control and defense system that rivaled those of NATO. Its modern port facilities could handle shipping well above commercial needs. To keep the alliance with Saudi Arabia and Kuwait secure, the United States government believed it could not let the 1985 surge in incidents in the Persian Gulf go unanswered.
Early in 1987 the United States Navy, soon joined by special-operations air-ground units from the Army and Marine Corps, moved into the Persian Gulf in combat strength. Rather than its small normal patrol force, the Navy’s task forces in the Gulf and the Arabian Sea increased to thirty warships, among them carriers and battleships. The mission was to ensure free passage for Kuwaiti tankers, some of which were switched to American registry. The Navy launched retaliatory attacks on Iranian ground-based missile sites, missile gunboats, and minelayers. In 1988 it easily destroyed much of the Iranian gunboat navy and extended its attacks to nautical guerrilla bases on Iranian oil platforms in the Gulf. An omen for the future, the worst loss came from an Iraqi aircraft that fired two Exocet missiles into the frigate Stark, killing thirty-seven and wounding twenty-one American sailors. The most annoying effort the Iranians could mount was seeding the Gulf with floating mines, which took their toll on the tankers and one Navy frigate. The Navy admitted that its mine-clearing capabilities had limitations, a traditional lament that had not been acted on since World War II. The Navy also discomfited the administration when an advanced-technology air-defense cruiser, Vincennes, accidentally shot down an Iranian airliner, killing all 290 passengers. Frustrated in its ground war and concerned about the American intervention, the Iranian government accepted a UN-negotiated ceasefire in July 1988. Palestinian radicals with Iranian assistance, however, extracted their warped idea of revenge, blowing up Pan American Flight 103 over Scotland in December 1988. The violence in the Middle East had not ended; even the death of the charismatic Ayatollah Khomeini the following year did not end the fear that Iran would overthrow its Arab foes in the cause of a purified form of Islam.
Although the Reagan administration had barely dodged some real and political bullets foreign and domestic, the president had reason to believe that he would depart office leaving the American military “standing tall” and in the hands of his former vice president, George H.W. Bush, an easy winner in the presidential election of 1988 over a liberal Democrat, Michael Dukakis. The central strategic relationship with the Soviet Union showed several signs of improvement. The INF treaty, ratified by Congress in 1988, had created a favorable momentum for more START negotiations and NATO-Warsaw Pact conventional-forces reductions discussions. Symbolizing the new spirit of détente, American and Russian defense and military officials began visiting each other’s military forces.
Real defense spending had fallen off by 10 percent in 1986–1989, but from levels so high that the services and defense industries had thus felt only slight pain. In 1988 the administration finally admitted it had a problem and actually submitted a “no real growth” budget, with much of the savings to come from reducing commitments to strategic weapons and shipbuilding. The MX missile program came to a halt with fifty, not two hundred, missiles and not a mobile one among them; the complementary program for a smaller, mobile missile—“Midgetman”—still existed, but only in the talking stage. The B-1 bomber program halted just short of 100 aircraft, overtaken in Air Force enthusiasm by the B-2, a flying wing with radar-deflecting or “stealth” characteristics. The Air Force, more or less in secret, already had a stealth attack aircraft, the F-117A.
For all the ominous predictions about a major collapse in the political support for defense spending and high-tech weapons, the armed forces had every reason to view the future with modest optimism. Uniformed personnel strength stood stable at 2.1 million, and the officer corps, career enlisted force, and first-termers all looked outstanding by every measure of skill, commitment, and trainability. All the services had virtually rearmed themselves in the 1980s, even though they all had much-coveted weapons, aircraft, and vehicles still in the development stage. Serious training and crisis deployments had given the military valuable experience. A much heralded congressional initiative, the Goldwater-Nichols Defense Reorganization Act (1986), demanded that the services educate their officers and train their forces for more effective joint operations.
In January 1989 Ronald Reagan snapped off one of his best Hollywood salutes and rode off into the sunset—aboard a Marine helicopter and Air Force One—to retirement in California. The armed forces had given him one last present: two Libyan MiGs shot down on January 4 over the Gulf of Sidra. To the degree that enhanced military capability had relevance to American foreign policy and an unsteady pattern of international relations, Reagan had certainly left the defense establishment more capable than he had found it. Unfairly portrayed by his critics as a pliable Washington functionary whose ambition consistently outstripped his performance, George Bush, a former Navy pilot who had seen real Japanese bullets in World War II, assumed the role of commander in chief and immediately plunged into a maelstrom of crises. The results could only have bedazzled the most imaginative writer of Washington political novels or the high-tech “shoot-’em-ups” that had become so fashionable in the 1980s.
The Bush Administration Confronts Regional Crises
Like deer frozen in the headlights of an oncoming car, the Bush administration, much of Congress, and the American armed forces found themselves barely able to respond to the rush of events that marked the end of the Cold War in 1989–1991. The administration’s policy immobility had nothing to do with its human talent. The president himself, who continued to dodge charges that he was a collaborator in the Iran -contra affair, had been an important participant in national security affairs for almost twenty years. Secretary of State James Baker had eight years of hard service in the Reagan administration. And although Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney had no special experience in defense matters and had dodged military service in the Vietnam era, he proved a quick learner, an aggressive advocate for the military, and a political realist, a quality he had learned as the chief of staff of Gerald Ford’s White House organization. The national security adviser, retired Air Force Lieutenant General Brent Scowcroft, had served Ford in the same role. Admiral William Crowe, a cerebral submariner with a Princeton Ph.D., served out his term as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of S
taff, then turned the empowered position over to General Colin Powell, who became the first Army ROTC graduate, youngest, and first African-American to hold the post. More relevant, Powell had ample Washington experience in the White House and on Caspar Weinberger’s staff, as well as a respectable record as a field soldier in Vietnam and Europe. The political appointees on the National Security Council staff, in the State and Defense Departments, the CIA, and other organizations with national security responsibilities were also strong on experience and public-service commitment. Their intellectual preparation and political savvy, however, would be sorely tested in the next four years.
The collapse of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact came in a rush, with the first erosion of Soviet power most dramatic in the Baltic republics, Poland, East Germany, Hungary, Romania, and Czechoslovakia. Leading the revolt, in late 1989 the East Germans destroyed their Communist leadership and security organizations in a mass revolt that bullets could not stop. The Berlin Wall and the fence that marked the “Iron Curtain” came down, and in November 1990 the Warsaw Pact dissolved as a military alliance amid cries of “Russians Go Home!” NATO scrambled from its fortieth-anniversary celebration in 1989 to participating in the negotiations the following year that produced a unified Germany in September 1990, which became a member of the alliance. The Bundeswehr painted Iron Crosses on Russian-made combat vehicles and moved to the Polish border, which the Germans pledged to respect. Gorbachev, with American encouragement, struggled to survive. He pledged political liberalism and capitalism at home and presided over the official dissolution of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in early 1990. He signed a conventional-forces agreement in November 1990, and a START agreement in July 1991. In August 1991 a cabal of Russian party and military leaders staged an unsuccessful coup that folded (despite the fact that Gorbachev was held captive) because the Russian army and security services would not fire upon the thousands of enraged comrades who rallied to Boris Yeltsin, newly elected president of the semi-autonomous Russian republic. The anger of 1917 had returned to Russia, but this time the Bolsheviks were not the beneficiaries. By the end of 1991 the Soviet Union had passed into the dustbin of history, replaced by a commonwealth of independent states whose loose unity was soon more honored in the breach than in the observance. The rest of the world watched with wonder.
The Bush administration, hectored by the Democratic majority in Congress and nudged by its NATO allies, began to review the uncertain international security environment in 1989. The following year it admitted that its defense plans, which projected a return to real growth budgets, had been overtaken by events. In 1990 Congress ordered a 13 percent reduction of defense spending over the next five years. Bush then proposed a modest and phased reduction of the armed forces that might cut active operational units, especially those assigned a NATO role. The administration accepted a postponement of varied NATO nuclear and conventional modernization plans and a reduction of allied defense spending on the order of 4.7 percent a year, pleading that murky developments outside Europe precluded unilateral disarmament, already underway in the remnants of the Soviet Union. Under the guidance of General Powell, the Joint Chiefs of Staff drew up an array of plans to cut spending and reduce the force structure as much as one-third, the most dramatic adjustment since the beginning of the Cold War. The individual services found these reductions unimaginable, since the most dramatic effect of such cuts would be the end of quality recruitment and the draconian release of career officers and noncommissioned officers in order to produce a force as small as 1.8 million.
Ever skeptical that the rash of democratization and demilitarization would usher in a “new age” military, the armed services did not have to wait long for new missions. Continued chaos in Lebanon and an abortive popular revolt in China in 1989 did not produce U.S. military intervention, to no one’s dismay except the Lebanese and the Chinese reformers. In the Philippines, Corazon Aquino survived with American military assistance both the insurgency of the Communist New People’s Army and rebellion in her own armed forces, but she lost the popular mandate to former general Fidel Ramos. Nationalism, Filipino greed, and a volcanic eruption in 1991 drove the Americans from their Subic Bay naval base and Clark air base, but this retreat from empire had little meaning in the grand rearrangement of American forward deployments. With existing bases in Korea, Japan, and Guam, the military could still maintain an adequate presence in the western Pacific.
The Central American War (1979–1992) had provided the Reagan interventionists with their greatest victory at a bearable cost in American lives: Fewer than 100 in over a decade. The central strategic challenge was to isolate the Salvadoran insurgents from external aid from Nicaragua, Mexico, and Cuba, the latter a conduit for Soviet arms and American weapons shipped from Vietnam. Using bases in the Canal Zone and a new base structure in Honduras, U.S. air and naval forces basically blockaded Nicaragua, which had no land border with El Salvador. Honduras provided a sanctuary for U.S.-sponsored counterinsurgency forces. The permanent U.S. military presence, Joint Task Force Bravo, never numbered above 6,000, but U.S. Southern Command rotated “exercise forces” of up to 10,000 in and out of Honduras, which reduced Nicaraguan overland supplies to the FMLN and protected the counterinsurgents.
Without the expansion and concurrent reform of the Salvadoran armed forces, the interdiction of supplies to the FMLN from abroad could not alone defeat the insurgency. Members of Congress, outraged by human rights abuses (real enough) by the Salvadoran army and police, curbed some funding and restricted the members of Military Group El Salvador to fifty-five. The U.S. Army-Marine training mission sent teams to six different regional commands, enough to retrain six different battalions. The key to success in improving the Salvadoran security forces rested on the use of Honduras to train Salvadoran battalions, which fell into the hands of 180 trainers with $8 million per battalion to execute an eight-week program. The same training teams, built around Special Forces soldiers who spoke Spanish, trained the Nicaraguan contras, a coalition of expatriates and oppressed Miskito Indians, who then mounted operations against the Sandinistas. Big dollars also work wonders in small countries. Financed by the U.S., the Salvadoran armed forces increased from 11,000 to 56,000—and cut rural atrocities and corruption. Military and economic aid to Central America was $3.7 million in 1979 but increased to $200 million a year by 1985. Aid to Honduras and El Salvador between 1980 and 1990 topped $1 billion.
The Central American War never excited widespread domestic opposition because of regional disinterest and the lack of American military deaths, fewer than fifty in a decade from all causes. Polling in 1982 showed that Americans disapproved of intervention, but they did not know who the United States supported. Over time and at the cost of 75,000 deaths, the FMLN shrank to below 5,000 guerrillas, although it could make spectacular raids. Rightist “death squads” with ties to the Salvadoran security forces and the ARENA political party of ex-Colonel Roberto D’Aubuisson confused the effort to pacify the countryside by massacring suspected guerrillas or moderate reformers, including Catholic Church leaders. Under American pressure an elected, reformist government gradually purged the military. The first break came in Nicaragua. With 25,000 deaths and eroding power in the rural areas, the Daniel Ortega regime agreed to supervised elections in 1990 if the United States would stop backing the 12,000 armed contras. To his surprise, Ortega lost the election to a political widow, Violeta Chammoro, a woman of impeccable nationalist-reformist credentials. After two years of negotiations, the FMLN, stripped of foreign aid, agreed to disarm (slowly) and enter the Salvadoran electoral system. In 1992 the war faded away, and the Central American states began to demobilize.
Manuel Noriega of Panama and Saddam Hussein of Iraq made the case that the United States still required combat-ready armed forces of wide capabilities. After the death of his patron, General-President Omar Torrijos, in an air crash in 1981, General Noriega, chief of intelligence of the Panamanian defense forces and an addict of
money, sex, and voodoo, used his management of violence and graft in the security establishment to create a de facto dictatorship behind a facade of constitutionalism. While maintaining a relationship with the American intelligence establishment through his usefulness in the anti-Communist crusade in Central America, Noriega also developed ties with Fidel Castro and Latin American drug-dealers, who found Panama a useful entrepôt for arms, money, and drugs. Ignoring a free election in May 1989 that had defeated his candidate, abusing Americans in Panama, and winking at the police murder of a Marine officer, Noriega challenged the United States to do anything and even declared war. Outraged, President Bush in December 1989 ordered the execution of Operation JUST CAUSE, the largest military posse in recent memory, which was organized to serve a Florida indictment against Noriega for drug-dealing. Launching a major joint operation from bases in the Canal Zone and the United States, 26,000 American troops ruined the Panamanian defense forces in an eight-day (December 20–28, 1989) campaign and cornered Noriega in the residence of the Papal Nuncio, where he surrendered. JUST CAUSE showed that the armed forces could do a Grenada-type operation with much greater deftness. The real victims of the battles in Panama City and Colon were Panamanian civilians, caught in gunfights and fires and victimized by the gangs of thugs and released prisoners that Noriega called “dignity battalions.” Losses for the Panamanian military ran to 314, with civilian deaths calculated between 200 and 300. American losses were 23 killed and 322 wounded. The level of physical destruction, designed and accidental, caused a postinvasion crisis, and there is little question that arrangements for public security and civilian affairs operations could have used more attention. Nevertheless, JUST CAUSE could be reckoned a success.
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