Kissinger’s Shadow (25 page)

*   *   *

As a public official, Kissinger repeatedly mocked the principle of sovereignty. “I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people,” he once said of Salvador Allende's 1970 election.
23
But this disregard was always justified by the right of America to defend itself (with “defense” interpreted broadly to cover preemptive actions against anticipated threats). With Panama too, Kissinger, despite what Bush was saying to the press, carefully avoided making mention of democracy (he had just defended China over Tiananmen). Rather, he vaguely invoked the old rationales, a president's prerogative and the like.

But history was getting ahead of him.
24

 

11

Darkness into Light

The cosmic has rhythm, tact, the grand harmony that binds together lovers or crowds in moments of absolute wordless understanding, the pulse that unites a sequence of generations into a meaningful whole. This is Destiny, the symbol of the blood, of sex, of duration. This answers the question of when and whither, and represents the only method of approaching the problem of time. It is felt by the great artist in his moment of contemplation, it is embodied by the statesman in action and is lived by the man of the Spring-time culture. It constitutes the essence of tragedy, the problem of “too late,” when a moment of the present is irrevocably consigned to the past. The microcosm contains tension and polarity, the loneliness of the individual in a world of strange significances, in which the total inner meaning of others remains an eternal riddle. Rhythm and tension, longing and fear, characterize the relationship of the microcosm to the macrocosm.

—Henry Kissinger, 1950

Having either condoned, authorized, or planned so many invasions—Indonesia's of East Timor, Pakistan's of Bangladesh, the United States' of Cambodia, South Vietnam's of Laos, South Africa's of Angola, along with Turkey's assault on Cyprus and Morocco's annexation of Western Sahara—Henry Kissinger took the lead in condeming Iraq's 1990 assault on Kuwait. In office, he tried to pull Iraq away from the Soviets by pumping up Baghdad's regional ambitions. As a private consultant and pundit, Kissinger promoted the idea that Iraqis could serve as disposable counterweights to revolutionary Iranians, with the resulting civil war dragging on for years and costing millions of lives. “It's a pity they can't both lose,” he is reported to have said.
*
But now, in the days following Saddam Hussein's August 2 surprise attack, Kissinger insisted that Hussein's annexation had to be reversed.
1

THE FIRST GULF WAR

George H. W. Bush had launched Operation Desert Shield immediately after Hussein's invasion, sending hundreds of thousands of troops to Saudi Arabia. Taking place less than a year after the quick victory in Panama, Bush's actions helped draw attention away from a worsening domestic economy and the growing savings and loan scandal, in which his son Neil was implicated. But once in Saudi Arabia, what was the US military to do? Contain Iraq? Attack and liberate Kuwait? Or drive on to Baghdad and depose Hussein? There was no clear consensus among foreign policy advisers or analysts.

Prominent conservatives who made their names fighting the Cold War gave conflicting opinions.
2
Jeane Kirkpatrick, for instance, opposed any action against Iraq. As Reagan's ambassador to the UN, Kirkpatrick did much to provide an intellectual foundation for his drive into the Third World. But she didn't think that Washington had a “distinctive interest in the Gulf” now that the Soviet Union was gone. “We have no special relationship with Kuwait. It does not share our values or interests,” she said, “Saddam is not directly dangerous to the US or to our treaty allies. He is a danger to the independence of other States in the Gulf.”
*
Other conservatives pointed out that, with the Cold War over, it mattered little whether Iraqi Baathists or Saudi sheiks pumped the oil.
3

Kissinger took the point position in countering what he called America's “new isolationists,” that is, those conservatives who were against taking a strong stand in the Gulf. What Bush did next in Kuwait, he announced in the very first sentence of his August 19 syndicated column, published in a number of major papers across the country, would make or break his administration. Anything short of the liberation of Kuwait would turn Bush's “show of force”—his quick dispatch of troops to Saudi Arabia—into a “debacle.” The president faced three choices: passively endorse whatever tepid consensus emerged at the UN, act in league with other oil-dependent industrial democracies, or “take the lead in opposing Hussein” in an “effort in which the United States would bear the principal burden.”
4

Kissinger felt history's urgency. If Bush didn't act, the widespread support he enjoyed would quickly evaporate. Above all, he needed to avoid a protracted siege, which would sap American will and strain credibility. Kissinger, who during his tenure at the White House and State did more than any other single person to tie the United States to high oil prices and the Saudi regime (as long as the Saudis kept buying US weapons, contracting US construction firms, and depositing what was left in US banks), was arguing against conservatives like Kirkpatrick, who were making the “fashionable” argument that it didn't matter who produced the oil. Baiting them in terms they would recognize, he said such advice was nothing short of “abdication.” There are, Kissinger said, “consequences” to one's “failure to resist.”

Kissinger was among the first, possibly the first, to make the analogy between Hussein and Hitler.
5
He argued that if Iraq's annexation of Kuwait was allowed to stand, the “absolutely inevitable” result would be a series of wars that would threaten the existence of Israel (Hussein, after grabbing Kuwait, suggested that all of the region's occupations should be adjudicated simultaneously, including Israel's control of the occupied territories).
6
In opinion pieces, appearances on network and public TV, and testimony before Congress, Kissinger forcefully argued for intervention, including the “surgical and progressive destruction of Iraq's military assets” and removal of Hussein from power.
7
Sweeping aside the concerns of cautious hawks like Kirkpatrick, Kissinger insisted that there was no turning back: “America has crossed its Rubicon,” he said.

*   *   *

Another way to assess how far our expectations have shifted from 1970—how what seemed to be the collapse of the national security state was really the beginning of its reorganization on different, more spectacular, more covert, and, over time, more interventionist footings—is to compare the secrecy with which the bombing of Cambodia was carried out with the visual immediacy of the first Gulf War, conducted to capture and keep the public's attention.

Actually, before making that comparison, it's worth taking a moment to consider the way Panama offered a preview of what was to come. According to one US brigadier general, Operation Just Cause was “extraordinarily complex, involving the deployment of thousands of personnel and equipment from distant military installations and striking almost two-dozen objectives within a 24-hour period of time.… Just Cause represented a bold new era in American military force projection: speed, mass, and precision, coupled with immediate public visibility.”
8

One year and one month after that display of “immediate public visibility,” on January 17, 1991, Operation Desert Storm was launched. In a way, this war represented the full flowering of the logic behind Kissinger and Nixon's covert air campaign on Cambodia: that the United States should be free to use whatever military force it needs in order to compel the political outcome it seeks. Where Kissinger worked to keep that operation hidden for as long as he could (because he feared the public's reaction), Desert Storm was preceded by a four-month on-air discussion among politicians and pundits (including Kissinger). Where those executing the bombing of Cambodia burned records and fabricated false documents to cover their tracks, Bush led an assault for all the world to see. “Smart bombs” lit up the sky over Baghdad and Kuwait City as the TV cameras rolled. Featured were new night-vision equipment, real-time satellite communications, and cable TV—as well as former US commanders ready to narrate the war in the style of football announcers, right down to instant replays. “In sports page language,” said CBS News anchor Dan Rather on the first night of the attack, “this … it's not a sport. It's war. But so far, it's a blowout.”
9

And Kissinger himself was everywhere—ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, and on the radio and in the papers—giving his opinion. “I think it's gone well,” he said to Dan Rather on the first night of the bombing.
10
So well, Walter Cronkite felt he had to warn Americans not to be “overly optimistic” or “euphoric.”

The next day, January 18, in the CBS studio, Cronkite and Rather engaged in an extended conversation that made them seem less like sports announcers describing live action than veteran color commentators comparing today's game to how it used to be played.
11
The two men concluded that the old big-bellied B-52s that had been used extensively in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia and now were being deployed to bomb Baghdad were more effective at sowing terror and generating panic than the lean “hi-tech” missiles the media were fascinated with:

WALTER CRONKITE:
You have seen the B-52s in operation in Vietnam, I have, and they are almost a terror weapon, they are so powerful. They are dropping all of those bombs. My heavens, 14 tons of bomb out of a single airplane—they could very well panic the Iraq army.… One thing that's interesting about this, Dan, these bombs come in at a very low rate of speed, comparatively—compared to rocketry and other such things and, as a result, the bomb blast is widespread. It can do an awful lot of surface damage without serious damage to a single target, except right where it lands—blow out a lot of windows, blow out a lot of walls, things of that kind as opposed to the high-speed missiles that are inclined to bury themselves and blow up.…

DAN RATHER:
I want to pick up on what you were talking about with the B-52s. It's certainly true, anybody who's seen or been through a B-52 raid, it's an absolutely unforgettable, mind-searing experience.

CRONKITE:
When you're not underneath it directly.

RATHER:
Exactly. And that's when you're able to just sort of observe it. It is a devastatingly effective physical bombing weapon, but also psychologically. That's one of the reasons of going right at the heart of Saddam Hussein's best troops is [to cause] panic and to—to break the back of morale.

Such color commentary, along with the real-time reporting, the night-vision equipment, and camera-carrying smart bombs, allowed for public consumption of a techno-display of apparent omnipotence that, at least for a short time, helped consolidate mass approval. The assault was meant as both a lesson and a warning for the rest of the world. And with instant replay came instant gratification, confirmation that the president had the public's backing. At midnight January 18, a day into the attack, CBS TV announced a new poll “indicates extremely strong support for Mr. Bush's Gulf offensive.” “By God,” Bush said in triumph, “we've kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.”
12

Darkness rendered into light, the inherent made manifest, helped along by the counsels of Kissinger, “an ancestral voice prophesying war,” as one reporter wrote.
13
And thus, in a short eight years since the Beirut barracks bombing, when Reagan chose not to answer Henry Kissinger's call to fully commit to the Middle East, the United States delivered a stunning display of “shock and awe” (before the phrase was invented). For a moment, then, between the invasion of Panama and the liberation of Kuwait, it seemed as if the reality Kissinger believed he
ought
to live in (where massive bombing would, in Dan Rather's words, “break the back” of its targets) rather than the reality he
had
been living in (where bombing made more problems than the problem that justified the bombing in the first place, including mass radicalization) had come into being. Hussein was easily driven out of Kuwait.

CLINTON AND IRAQ

But he continued in power in Baghdad, creating a problem of enormous proportions for Bush's successor, Bill Clinton. It was the UN that first imposed sanctions on Iraq, which remained in force even after its army was driven out of Kuwait. But it was up to the United States to enforce those sanctions, which included demands that Baghdad allow inspectors in to search for weapons of mass destruction. We now know that Saddam Hussein didn't have such weapons, yet he still refused to cooperate fully with inspectors. A twelve-year siege ensued, with the sanctions greatly damaging Iraq's economy and inflicting unimaginable hardship. That hardship was captured in a now infamous answer Clinton's Secretary of State Madeleine Albright gave to a question put to her in 1996 by the journalist Lesley Stahl, on
60 Minutes.
Stahl asked Albright about the estimated half a million Iraqi children who had died as a result of the sanctions. “I mean,” Stahl said, “that's more children than died in Hiroshima.” “We think the price is worth it,” Albright responded.
14

By this time, Clinton was sending cruise missiles into Iraq at regular intervals, for various reasons: to punish a Baghdad-backed assassination attempt on George H. W. Bush (twenty-three missiles launched, including three that struck a residential area and killed civilians), to protect the Kurds (forty-six missiles), to force Iraq to cooperate with UN weapons inspectors. This last assault took place in 1998, on the eve of the House impeachment vote related to the Monica Lewinsky affair, and was described by the
New York Times
as “a strong sustained series of air strikes.” “More than 200 missiles rained down upon Iraq,” the
Times
reported, “without any diplomacy or warning.”
15