Prescience in Hindsight
The Gulf War ended too soon.

By John J. Miller & Ramesh Ponnuru
October 10, 2001 5:30 p.m.

n 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.