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an interview two weeks ago, Tom Brokaw asked former President Bush
to respond to those who say "we should've taken Saddam Hussein
out back during Desert Storm." Bush responded: "At the
time we stopped the war, won the war because our mission was complete,
I didn't hear any of these voices. Now, because Saddam Hussein has
been there for a while, they're saying, 'Hey, you should've done
something different.' I don't think so."
Over the years,
we have talked to any number of foreign-policy experts who have
said that nobody called for Saddam Hussein's removal in 1991. This
is simply not true. A few voices did call for exactly that. It is
possible to see in hindsight that a policy that shrank from regime
change would fail. But it was possible to see it then, too.
National
Review, for example, editorialized within a month of the Iraqi
invasion of Kuwait that "our eventual objectives must be. .
. the overthrow of Saddam and the permanent reduction of Iraqi military
power. . . . Better a crushing blow now than any peaceful
solution that leaves Saddam free in five years' time to renew his
bid for supreme power in the Arab world, armed with nuclear weapons
and a prestige born of outwitting the United States." (Lest
we seem to be indulging in the pleasure of saying 'I told you so'
— a rather wan pleasure in this case, under the circumstances
— we should note that neither of us worked for the magazine
then.) The following spring, NR criticized Bush for not aiding the
Iraqi opposition in the aftermath of Desert Storm.
The editors
of the Wall Street Journal took the same line. On August
29, 1990, they wrote that America's goals should not stop with an
Iraqi retreat to their borders. Their "optimum" policy
was "to take Baghdad and install a MacArthur regency."
On the eve
of the ground war, they explained the reasons a regime change "is
the sine qua non of international peace and security in the Gulf."
About the administration's hope that an Iraqi retreat from Kuwait
would be followed by an uprising or coup, they said, "We understand
the logic of this plan, and we hope it works." But what if
it didn't? "Would the coalition have the political stamina
to maintain the sanctions and continue the bombing? . . . With a
Saddam regime lingering on even in a crippled state to make propaganda
and mount terrorism, there would be little prospect of the more
stable Gulf envisioned in the United Nations resolutions or Mr.
Bush's new world order."
None of this
falsifies the former president's statement. We have no doubt that
he "didn't hear any of these voices" at the time. But
the Journal's editorials were sufficiently widely noted to
be criticized. George Will said they represented "conservative
overreaching." Tom Foley, the Speaker of the House in that
benighted age, pronounced his own position: "White House right,
President right, Wall Street Journal wrong. He should not
have gone to Baghdad." And this was the prevailing view in
the political class.
The former
president does, of course, have a point about most of those who
criticize him now but would have objected at the time if he had
continued the war. An editorial in NR was prescient about this development,
too: "If in the end [Bush] retreats, leaving Saddam Hussein
to continue his nuclear and chemical buildup for the next aggression,
we will criticize him as unambiguously as we support him now —
and we will have earned the right to do so. Those. . . who by their
carping defeatism have made the task of defeating Saddam Hussein
appreciably more difficult will have no such right."
What
the Public Thought
We were curious about public opinion in the run-up to the war, so
we asked Karlyn Bowman of the American Enterprise Institute about
it, and she looked up the Gallup numbers from the period. From the
first time polls were asked after the invasion and at all times
subsequently, huge majorities supported the sending of troops to
the Gulf. Support for withdrawing the troops never rose above ten
percent. Going to war was, of course, less popular than having troops
in the area. In mid-November 1990, a small plurality of respondents
opposed war even if the Iraqis remained in Kuwait. By late November
and in every subsequent question, they supported it. Support for
sticking with sanctions "no matter how long it takes,"
the Democratic position, dropped to 34 percent by mid-January.
Bowman notes
that in follow-up questions probing the subject more deeply, respondents
gave more aggressive answers. Today, she notes, "more people
are saying we're not acting fast enough than we're doing too much."
Profile
in Courage
The Cincinnati Post reports (and we learn from the Hotline)
that Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton plans to introduce a bill "aimed
at getting the government to study and prepare for the effects of
bioterrorism on children." We're guessing the effects are not
good.
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