The American public, although pleased with the apparent end of the cold war, remained skeptical and puzzled, unsure if the new system in Russia could last. A decade after the fall of communism, there has not yet been a single national celebration over the success, nor a monument to the victory. Communism went out with a whimper, not a bang, hobbling the victory dance.
Even before the cold war embers had stopped smoking, Bush and the Democrats in Congress started spending the “peace dividend” they anticipated would result from the reduction of military forces. The demobilization that ensued, although smaller in scale than the reduction in force associated with any previous war, nevertheless produced economic and social turmoil. In a period of only a few years, aerospace and shipbuilding giants were nearly out of business; thousands of engineers, especially in California, received pink slips. Companies scrambled to get out of defense contracting. Soldiers, airmen, and sailors were laid off, or “riffed,” an acronym for “reduction in force.” Bush foresaw a new world order arising out of the ashes of communism’s defeat. His unfortunate phrase set off the paranoid at both political extremes, who for years had prophesied that a secret international United Nations–directed body would dominate the world’s affairs. Right-wing conspiracy theorists fretted about Bush’s involvement in the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations, whereas left-wing paranoids saw the new world order as the final triumph of a greedy oil cartel. Bush lacked the political imagination for such global nonsense. What the verbally challenged president meant was that the world agreed communism was doomed, and the developed nations (including Russia) had to think in terms of cooperation instead of conflict. To that end, he sought to bring many former East-bloc countries into NATO, and in 1991 Congress provided $400 million to help Ukraine and other fragments of the Soviet empire dismantle their nuclear weapons.
Saddam Hussein, Megalomaniac
Military leaders, having learned their lessons in Vietnam, had already sensed that the next war would not resemble the massive armored frontal battle in European forests or a Southeast Asian jungle planned for by strategists of the cold war. In all likelihood, new conflicts would involve a confrontation with a third-world power. The generals correctly anticipated the style of the threat, but they failed to anticipate the setting.
Communism had barely begun its collapse when Iraqi tanks rolled into neighboring Kuwait on August 2, 1990. Claiming that Kuwait was rightfully part of Iraq and illegally separated by international fiat, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein threatened all of the Persian Gulf with his large well-trained army. Hussein, who wore an army uniform, held the title of president, but he stood in a long line of third-world dictators like Idi Amin and Muammar al Qaddafi. Despite repeated warnings from American and Kuwaiti oil producers (who had witnessed the military buildup) and from the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, the Bush administration, preoccupied with Russia, was unprepared for the Iraqi invasion.
By invading another Arab state—rather than Israel—Hussein had the potential to capture and control large parts of oil production in the Middle East, creating a direct hazard to the free flow of oil at market prices. This danger, in turn, posed a clear risk to American national security. Hussein had the largest and best-equipped army and air force (aside from Israel’s) in the Middle East.
Bush saw the peril of Hussein’s control of the lion’s share of Mideast oil: if Hussein succeeded in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia would be next. Uncharacteristically, Bush acted swiftly. Despite stiff resistance from Democrats in Congress, Bush mobilized an international response in the diplomatic arena: the United Nations imposed economic sanctions and prepared for military actions. He allowed a reasonable time for the economic pressure to work, at the same time instituting a buildup of troops in Saudi Arabia. Persuading the Muslim Saudis to permit large contingents of foreign (largely Christian and Jewish) troops in their nation was a foreign relations coup for the American president. Under operation Desert Shield, the United States sent 230,000 troops to ensure that the Iraqis did not invade Saudi Arabia, a force General Norman Schwartzkopf referred to as a “tripwire.”
Democrats opposed plans to liberate Kuwait, raising the specter of another Vietnam. Senator Ted Kennedy and Congressman Richard Gephardt (Democrat of Missouri) warned of “80,000 body bags” returning U.S. dead from the Persian Gulf if a war broke out—a number greater than the entire toll of dead in the ten-year Vietnam conflict. But some isolationist conservatives, such as Nixon and Reagan speechwriter and presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan, also bitterly condemned Bush’s actions as unchecked internationalism. A small antiwar movement organized, brandishing signs saying no blood for oil and bury your car.10
The administration, however, had no intention of being sucked into another protracted conflict, and in fact intended to apply the lessons of Vietnam, which strategists and military theoreticians had studied for years. Moreover, Bush followed Reagan’s rules for engagement. Bush and his strategic leadership team of Joint Chiefs chairman Colin Powell (the highest-ranking African American soldier ever) and Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney ensured from the outset that three critical differences would separate the war against Iraq from the failed Vietnam experience. First, Bush mobilized an international alliance such as the world had never seen. After securing authorization from the United Nations to repel Iraqi aggression, Bush persuaded (among others) Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, and most of the NATO countries to send military forces totaling 200,000. More impressive, he gained assurances from Israel that if the Iraqis launched missile or air attacks on the Jewish state, Israel would refrain from counterattacks, which could have caused all the other Muslim members of the alliance to quit.
Working with Russian leaders, Bush also obtained promises that Russia would not sell weapons to Iraq or offer other military assistance. This was remarkable in itself: it was the first time since the cold war had begun that the two superpowers were aligned on the same side of a fight. Finally, although Japan’s pacifist post–World War II constitution prohibited it from sending ground troops, Bush gained a commitment for substantial Japanese funding of the effort. Since Japan had to import 100 percent of its oil, the Persian Gulf conflict clearly affected Japan’s national security. All in all, Bush had accomplished a stunning diplomatic coup by aligning virtually the entire world against Hussein, even to the point of neutralizing the Israeli-Arab antagonisms.
Second, Bush’s team was committed to not repeating the incrementalism that had characterized American involvement in Southeast Asia. Instead, in the Persian Gulf the United States followed the Reagan rules of identifying a clear objective, then deploying overwhelming force and sufficient matériel to accomplish the task. Whereas it took years to build up American forces in Vietnam to the 565,000 level, allied forces in the Gulf numbered 430,000 after only a few months. Moreover, the allies did not act until they had massed sufficient forces.
Finally, Bush established a clear exit strategy: liberate Kuwait (and force the removal of all Iraqi troops) and significantly diminish Iraq’s ability to threaten her neighbors again. Although critics complained about the word “significantly,” the objectives given to Allied Commander General Norman Schwartzkopf set specific reduction levels in tanks that would leave Iraq with no more than a “foot-soldier” army. As Powell had told his staff early on, “I won’t be happy until I see those tanks destroyed…. I want to finish it; to destroy Iraq’s army on the ground.”11
“Cut Off the Head and Kill the Body”
Air power as a decisive (strategic) factor in war had been hotly debated since World War II’s “strategic bombing survey.” After Vietnam, criticism of air effectiveness escalated, to the point where the air force, army, and navy each undertook internal studies of the use of air power and engaged in planning for joint operations in which units of the different services would work together on the battlefield.12
Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait offered a battlefield test of air power and its new doctrines
. Here was a modernized enemy force, complete with top-level Soviet fighter planes, thick air defense around a major city, and troops who were dug in and (according to the prevailing views of strategic bombing in World War II) relatively safe from attacks from the air. Yet allied air strikes so effectively eliminated enemy opposition that the United States suffered fewer ground troops killed than in any major conflict in history, and the majority of those who perished were killed in either incidents of friendly fire or from a single long-range Scud missile attack on a barracks. Actual combat losses to the Iraqis were minuscule: 148 killed in the actual course of fighting.13
Using antiradar missiles, the coalition forces, in a matter of hours, eradicated all of Iraq’s ability to “see” allied aircraft.14 Without enemy radar to contend with, coalition aircraft losses dropped to one aircraft per 1,800 sorties, a rate fourteen times lower than during Vietnam’s Linebacker II.15 And nowhere was that total control more evident than in the air war against armor and men. Even the hunkered-down, dug-in Iraqi armor was helpless against the air campaign. One crew of an F-111 bomber summed matters up in a nutshell: “If armies dig in, they die. If they come out of their holes, they die sooner.” Another likened the Iraqi army to a “tethered goat.”16 Using synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and other radar systems, virtually every vehicle that moved could be identified and tracked. “It was mind-boggling,” one coalition radar operator marveled: “Sometimes there were so many [vehicles] you couldn’t even count them all…. Then all of a sudden you don’t see any more traffic…. [and they] left the road or stopped. Then you use your SAR and shazam! All of a sudden, we’ve got the exact number of vehicles, where they would be parked and we would relay that information to fighters and the Army….”17
Mind-boggling was a good term for the carnage of Iraqi armored vehicles that followed. Over the course of the war, to February 14, 1991, the radar-supported bombers decimated the Iraqis, “plinking” 1,300 out of 6,100 tanks, and even increasing that rate, taking out 500 per day at the peak of operations! Using the advanced radar systems, high-altitude aircraft would simply “paint” an armored vehicle or tank with a laser, and attack craft would launch fire-and-forget laser-guided weapons that would lock onto the targets while the plane looked for another menace. Powell’s prophecy—that he would “cut off the head and kill the body” of the Iraqi army—had been fulfilled.18
Schwarzkopf’s daring February twenty-third offensive, which he called the Hail Mary, called for a feint into Kuwait where the Iraqi defenses were thickest, followed by a second fake by amphibious troops at the coast. Then he would use the cover of night to conduct a massive and unprecedented shift of tanks, troops, helicopters, and, most important, fuel and supply vehicles, far to the Iraqi flank in the desert. The war was over before it began: the Iraqis lost 76 percent of their tanks, 55 percent of their armored personnel carriers (APCs), and 90 percent of their dreaded artillery in approximately one hundred hours.19 Iraqi soldiers, starving and mercilessly pounded by air strikes, surrendered to CNN newsmen, armed only with microphones, and deserted at rates of 25 to 30 percent.20 Sensing they would be slaughtered if they remained anywhere near their vehicles, Iraqi drivers and gunners abandoned thousands of trucks, tanks, APCs, and scout cars on the famous Highway of Death leading out of Kuwait City. Estimates of Iraqi troop losses, although not entirely reliable, put the enemy death toll at 100,000, and the wounded at an equal number. Air power had proved so thoroughly destructive that the army only had to fire 2 percent of the 220,000 rounds of ammunition it had ordered for the theater.21 The allied effort was a classic example of what Victor Davis Hansen called the western way of war, “all part of a cultural tradition to end hostilities quickly, decisively, and utterly.”22
On February twenty-eighth, Hussein agreed to allied terms. Unfortunately, at no time did the United Nations resolution or American objectives include taking Baghdad or overthrowing Hussein, leaving him as a malignancy in the region for another decade. At the time, however, Bush’s advisers feared such an action would have deployed American troops as “peacekeepers” in the middle of violent factions fighting for control of a Saddam-less Iraq. The experience in the Reagan administration when the marines were killed by a suicide truck bomber in Lebanon remained fresh in the president’s mind. Meanwhile, Democrats at home used every opportunity to warn of a quagmire or another Vietnam. Coalition partners, especially Islamic states like Egypt, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia, feared that a fundamentalist Shiite regime might arise out of a Hussein-less Iraq. In short, from the perspective of 1992, there were compelling reasons to quit. These were reasons that—even with the hindsight of the later attacks of 2001—one must conclude seemed sound at the time.23
“A Kinder, Gentler America”
Successful prosecution of the Gulf War propelled Bush to unparalleled levels of popular support—but only briefly. The public quickly forgot his overseas accomplishments when a brief recession ended the decade-long Reagan boom. In 1991 and much of 1992 the economy slowed. Historically, it was a mild recession, but the media and the Democratic contenders for president in 1992 made it out to be the worst economy in the last fifty years, a phrase Bill Clinton used repeatedly in his campaign.
Bush had himself to blame. From the moment he took office, he believed the media “gloomsters” and Texas millionaire Ross Perot, who warned that the federal budget deficits had reached intolerable levels. When considered in real constant dollars, the deficits were slightly higher than in past decades, but hardly dangerous. Quite the contrary, the nation’s GNP had grown faster than the deficits, reducing the real level of deficits-to-GNP throughout the Reagan/Bush years. But Bush had surrounded himself with Keynesian advisers who saw tax increases as the only solution to rising deficits.
What followed was one of the most incredible political meltdowns in history. In 1990, pressure built on Bush to compromise with Democrats in Congress to raise taxes, ostensibly to reduce the deficit. Yet Democratic congresses for thirty years had been comfortable with constant deficits, most of them proportionally higher than those existing in 1990. Only when it became a political weapon did they suddenly exhibit concern about the nation’s finances, and then only in terms of raising taxes, not in terms of cutting massive federal expenditures. Bush agreed to cut spending in return for a $133 billion in new taxes—the largest tax increase in the nation’s history. The agreement slammed the top rate back up to 31 percent from 27 percent; imposed so-called sin taxes on tobacco and alcohol, which penalized the poor; and eliminated exemptions. Most important, it put Bush in the position of reneging on his “read my lips, no new taxes” convention pledge.
Bush sorely underestimated the public resentment of a bald-faced lie, especially the reaction of conservatives. Worse, he overestimated the veracity of the Democrats in Congress, where no substantive spending cuts took place. In the hinterlands, however, the Republican base was outraged, especially since Bush had marketed himself in 1988 as Reagan’s successor specifically on supply-side principles. read my lips: i lied, blared the New York Post’s front page.24 Many abandoned the GOP in disgust.
Bush had put himself in a hole: having sided with the Democrats and their tax increases, Bush could not tout tax cuts as a means to end the economy’s slide. In addition, he seemed out of touch with the lives of ordinary Americans and unwilling to embrace Reagan’s legacy. Whereas Reagan had come into office eager to abolish the Department of Energy and the Department of Education (and had failed to do so), Bush had no such prejudices against big government. His campaign theme of a “kinder, gentler America” seemed to agree with Democratic criticisms that Reagan’s America had been mean and harsh. Bush celebrated a “thousand points of light,” a phrase that referred to the good deeds of millions of individual Americans who could privately shoulder some responsibilities carried by Uncle Sam. But he lacked a clear vision and obviously did not have Reagan’s communication skills to enable him to go over the heads of the Washington/New York media elites, straight to American citize
ns.
Even when Bush took positions that were far to the left of his conservative base, such as pushing through the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and stricter environmental laws, he won no praise from the media, but instead was criticized for not doing enough. When Thurgood Marshall, the only African American on the U.S. Supreme Court, retired, Bush nominated Clarence Thomas, a black conservative federal judge with an impeccable record. Instead of praising Bush’s racial sensitivity, Thomas was nearly “borked” at the Senate hearings when a University of Oklahoma law professor, Anita Hill, claimed Thomas had sexually harassed her. After a high-profile Senate hearing Thomas was confirmed and became an outstanding and consistent justice.
Thomas was representative of a new class of African Americans who had become successful and prosperous with minimal, if any, aid from government. As such, he represented a significant threat to the civil rights establishment, whose central objective remained lobbying for government action on behalf of those it claimed to represent. Men and women like John Johnson, Michael Jordan, Herman Cain, and Oprah Winfrey illustrated by their success within the market system that political favors played almost no part in economic achievement for blacks. At the same time, a new class of conservative black intellectuals arose—Thomas himself and men like Shelby Steele, Walter Williams, Glenn Loury, and Thomas Sowell—that was at odds with the entrenched civil rights leadership, yet were deliberately ignored and trivialized by the media.
Episodes of racial injustice—no matter how unusual or atypical—turned into opportunities to once again mobilize black political support around civil rights themes. One such event occurred in April 1992, when four white Los Angeles police officers attempted to stop a black motorist who had run from them at speeds of more than a hundred miles per hour. The driver, Rodney King, repeatedly resisted the officers, and the police suspected he was high on a narcotic, possibly PCP (psychoactive drug phencyclidine), which diminishes pain receptors. When King did not respond to oral commands, the police beat him with their clubs and hit him with a Taser stun gun. A witness taped the entire episode with a video camera, and King sued the Los Angeles Police Department for violations of his civil rights. Tried in Simi Valley, a northern Los Angeles suburb, the officers were acquitted by an all-white jury, some of whom stated that when viewed in context, the tapes showed that King had appeared dangerous as he continued to resist.
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