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 olin Powell's
first sortie as secretary of state has been widely and justifiably
criticized. There was no obvious
reason
for him to race to the Middle East (his early suggestion that it
was merely a "fact finding" trip was unconvincing, since our diplomats
and spooks flood Washington with digital oceans of facts every day),
and his constantly changing message — beginning with a call
to tighten sanctions on Iraq and ending with a promise to ease the
sanctions — suggests that he felt more obliged to put his chop
on foreign policy than to advance a clear strategy. He may well
have been driven by an understandable desire to show his face and
his flag.
One false step does not a legacy make, but it is urgent that he
recognize that it was a fiasco, and take steps to avoid future embarrassments.
This may not be easy, for Powell sometimes sounds as if he has sold
himself on a false vision of the Middle East, including its recent
history. If he and our other policy makers continue to believe
it, the false vision will undermine any effort to craft a sensible
Middle East strategy.
Over and over again, Powell and some of his colleagues from the
Elder Bush days tell us that they really had no choice but to leave
Saddam in power in Bagdad, mostly because our allies were against
it. According to this version of the latter days of the Gulf War,
both the Saudis and the Turks feared that the fall of Saddam would
lead to the breakup of Iraq (which might threaten Turkey because
of Kurdish strength in the north of Iraq), and the attendant expansion
of the strength of radical Shi'ites (and thus of Iran, which threatens
Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States). Therefore, we acquiesced and
stopped short. At the time I called our sudden ceasefire "Desert
Shame," and a more elegant pen pal of mind branded it "Victory Interruptus."
The story is false. Indeed, according to people who were present
when the message was delivered in the final days of Desert Storm,
both the Saudis and the Turks badly wanted us to remove the evil
Iraqi regime. They knew that if Saddam survived, he would do everything
in his power to punish those who had fought alongside the United
States, above all Saudi Arabia and Turkey, who had not only worked
with us, but had provided us with the bases from which we staged
our devastating assault.
Both will deny it today, because there is a sort of Heisenburgian
uncertainty in international affairs. Just as our perception of
sub-atomic particles is affected by our efforts
| “According
to people who were present when the message was delivered
in the final days of Desert Storm, both the Saudis and
the Turks badly wanted us to remove the evil Iraqi regime.” |
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to
see them, so nations' responses to our questions depends on our
own will and actions. Foreign leaders — above all our generally
timorous allies in the Middle East — will very rarely be brave
enough to tell us things they know we don't want to hear, and on
which we are unlikely to act. During Desert Storm they saw we were
serious and quite capable of taking out Saddam, so they asked us
to do it. Today, after eight years of dithering, and an administration
that was more inclined to pressure our friends than our enemies,
they will try to cut their losses, and encourage us to ease up on
Iraq, lest Saddam do mean things to them. The last thing they want
is for Saddam to see that they had called for his elimination.
Back when he was at the top of our armed forces, General Powell
formulated a "doctrine" that laid out preconditions for the use
of American power: We had to be sure we could win, we had to be
sure we had the power to do it quickly, and we needed a strong domestic
consensus in favor of the action. This is a thoughtful bit of advice
from an extraordinarily decent and worthy man, but it is wrongheaded.
We will not always know the outcome of conflict in advance, and
many of our greatest victories — from Bunker Hill and Valley
Forge to the three world wars of the last century — were accomplished
despite poor odds. And, above all, the only consensus that matters
is the one at the end of the action, not the beginning. If Reagan
had taken a poll before sending our armed forces to Grenada, he
probably wouldn't have done it. Yet it turned out to have been
a major turning point in the Cold War. As Machiavelli told us five
hundred years ago, if a leader wins, the people will always find
his methods to have been appropriate. If he loses, he will be scorned.
Our secretary of state should remind himself of this eternal principle,
and if he wants to hear it from one of his own, rather than from
a Renaissance sage, he has only to consult General George Patton:
" the American people hate a loser."
The real touchstone of America's destiny in the Middle East is Iraq,
not Israel/Palestine. Like it or not, Colin Powell is going to
have to deal with Saddam Hussein once again. It's terribly unfair,
to be sure. Bill Clinton squandered our great victory in Desert
Storm, and Iraq once again threatens our national interests. We
will not be able to reassemble the war party, and we will not have
the support of our previous Middle East allies until and unless
they see that we are again serious in our resolve. That means taking
the fight to Saddam. It means arming and training his democratic
enemies, even though we can have no certainty about the outcome,
and cannot be sure the struggle will be brief.
It will not be easy for Secretary Powell to embrace this difficult
and uncertain strategy; it goes against his announced principles
and requires him to rethink his understanding of the Gulf War.
Worse still, it will certainly not be blessed by the dozens of Clinton
holdovers who are still in the key positions in Foggy Bottom, and
to whom Powell has promised the first word in foreign policy.
But it is a brave strategy, altogether worthy of an outstanding
leader. Let him pronounce the final words: We're going to fight,
and we're going to win.
We'll hear his words very soon: He's testifying Wednesday to Henry
Hyde's International Relations Committee.
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