The Great Temptation to War

DESPITE DIRECT TALKS BETWEEN WASHINGTON AND BAGHDAD AND the release of all the hostages, the countdown to war is nearing zero hour. President Bush's "last mile" effort to avert war through direct talks with Iraq may be no more than a gesture to placate critics, and Saddam Hussein may not take a way out even if it is offered.

To make his intention to use force believable, President Bush has ordered more than 400,000 troops to Saudi Arabia and the surrounding waters. As leaves are cancelled and enlistments extended, the nation is on a war footing for the first time since the massive intervention in Vietnam.

Both the president and the Joint Chiefs of Staff hope that threatening war, followed by face-to-face talks, will avoid war, but the massive troop deployments and escalating rhetoric are creating their own momentum. The arguments for "getting it over with" before the holy month of Ramadan, before the morale of the troops in the desert sinks further, before the April heat sets in, or before Saddam completes the "crude atomic weapon" the United States says he is building are becoming more insistent and more shrill.

War is the great tempter of nations, and first Saddam, and now the president of the United States, have fallen victim. "Throw yourself off the parapet," the tempter challenged Jesus, and the angels will be your parachute. Do something foolish and count on your God to save you. When that didn't work, the tempter promised the world. "All these I will give you, if you will only fall down and do me homage," he says to Jesus after he has taken him to the mountaintop and "showed him all the kingdoms of the world in their glory."

War -- the tempter of nations -- says, "I will make you secure in your riches. I will provide gainful employment. And I will provide excitement and purpose for your life. My bombs, missiles, and bullets will bring justice to the world. A new world order. My tanks and planes offer your only chance to escape death. My supply of weapons is as inexhaustible as the supply of enemies. I will not leave you without enemies and just causes. I will give you the satisfaction of grinding your enemies into the dust. I will prove that you are right because those who oppose you are dead or humbled. I will hand you the pen with which to write the winner's history -- the only history that counts. I will make the world your footstool.

"You don't have to pay homage to me. You can curse me and say you hate me. I know I have a bad name. [Honest people like Teddy Roosevelt who said he loved war are out of fashion.] All you have to do is this: Have the old men send the young to die. Have the rich send the poor. Have the whites send the blacks. Tell them nothing or tell them lies.

"Harden your hearts. Stiffen your will. Stand firm in your pride. I release you from the rules of civilization. I call on you to burn, gas, and eviscerate men, women, and babies, and I make it easy to do it by the thousands from far off -- from way up in the sky or from behind a missile. It's not like doing it one by one and face to face. If you threaten to kill, you probably won't have to. And if you have to, remember, you kill for peace."

And then the biggest lie of all: "You don't have any alternative."

GEORGE BUSH IS TOO POLITICAL a creature not to appreciate the serious risk of his presidency crashing in flames once the body bags come back. Neither the new Arab allies of the United States, the reluctant Soviet partner, nor the old European allies are enthusiastic about fighting Saddam. Democratic leaders such as Sens. Sam Nunn and Daniel P. Moynihan have been openly critical of Bush's handling of the Gulf strategy, and if history is any guide, the criticism will escalate as the casualties mount and the American people begin voicing the frustration they always feel when wars last too long. All the more reason, then, to get it over with before the 1992 campaign begins in earnest.

The top generals at the Pentagon may be grateful to Saddam for providing a dramatic illustration of the new post-Cold War threats and terrors just as talk of peace dividends, "lean" forces, and slashed military budgets was reverberating in the halls of Congress. But like most generals most of the time, they do not feel ready for war. If the press accounts of stalled tanks, malfunctioning helicopters, and logistical and morale problems facing untested troops in a brutal environment are even partially true, the overwhelmingly American force in the desert is unlikely to shoot its way to a quick victory.

But the Washington generals are themselves trapped in the desert. How can they ask for budgets of nearly $300 billion year after year and not be ready to take on this evil and dangerous force, who, the president has declared, threatens the world's oil reserves, peace in the Middle East, and the "new world order"?

As risky as war may be for Bush, it may well appear politically easier to send the troops to the Gulf and commit them to battle than to bring them home without achieving the purposes for which they were sent. The president has steadily escalated the rhetorical commitment. He has said that Saddam is "worse than Hitler" and that he is hell-bent to add nuclear weapons to his arsenal of biological and chemical warheads. The message is clear. Negotiation is impossible, and war soon is preferable to war later.

The Iraqi leader has shown no sign of withdrawing from Kuwait; instead he has more than matched the U.S. reinforcements by shoring up his own forces. The president is spending his principal energy building an international coalition to use force. But the force that will do the fighting and dying will be 80 percent American.

There is little to suggest that the policy of righteous indignation, saber rattling, blockade, and the threat of the war to come will work. Even in the unlikely event that Saddam withdraws at the last moment, the United States will not, cannot, simply pack up and come home. A new security arrangement for the region would have to be negotiated with Saddam still in power.

Once he is out of Kuwait, the "decapitating" strike at his government, the preferred negotiating tactic of the former chief of staff of the Air Force and other middle-aged men who write newspaper columns, would have almost no world support. Why would an ego-bruised and vengeful Saddam sitting on the Kuwaiti border with his forces intact be an easier or more trustworthy negotiating partner than he is today?

One could have more confidence in the president's strategy if the road to war he has already traveled were not littered with miscalculations and mixed signals. On July 24, 1990, a week before the invasion of Kuwait, Margaret Tutweiler, the State Department spokesperson, declared that the United States had no commitment to come to Kuwait's defense, contradicting Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney's statement earlier that day. She added, however, that the United States remained "strongly committed to supporting the individual and collective self-defense of our friends in the Gulf with whom we have deep and long-standing ties."

The next day United States Ambassador April Glaspie told Saddam, "I have direct instructions from the president to seek better relations with Iraq ... We have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait." For his part, Saddam Hussein falsely assured King Fahd of Saudi Arabia that he would not invade Kuwait, and his spokesperson falsely promised to withdraw. Those who sent the mixed signals that got us into the crisis are unlikely to signal their way out.

WAR IS LIKELY FOR THREE REASONS. First, unlike the cynical adventures in Grenada and Panama, genuine, emotionally-charged principles are at stake in the Gulf crisis. Second, the protagonists are not wholly in control of events; a provocation that would instantly ignite the war could come from many directions. Third, no alternative to war has been placed on the political agenda by any credible political figure or movement, and so there has been no negotiating position around which a broad coalition of anti-war forces could coalesce.

We have arrived at a moment in world history when for the first time in 150 years the great powers recognize the futility of war against one another -- and the chance for a genuine collective security system is greater than it ever has been. Why is the president of the United States pressing for war?

Two former chairs of the Joint Chiefs of Staff publicly oppose the rush to war because they understand the catastrophic consequences -- for the people of the United States and for the people in the region. Consider the "best case" scenario offered by a senior retired U.S. general: The war would begin with massive bombardment of Iraqi defensive positions and "decapitating" strikes on command-and-control centers as well as nuclear and poison gas installations. This would be followed by an unavoidable ground war that would take at least three weeks. The price of victory would be at least 40,000 casualties, including 10,000 deaths, and 90 percent of these casualties would be American.

The U.S. troops slog their way to Baghdad. What then? The country is a ruin. There are hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties and refugees. (Only the professional hawks of the op-ed pages talk about "surgical strikes.") As scenes of the U.S.-directed carnage dominate the nightly news, the entire region seethes with hatred for the "imperialist butchers," the "infidels," the "baby killers" of Baghdad.

The allies run for cover. Like some of the unhappy troops in the desert who joined the Army to learn computers or auto mechanics, Germany, Japan, and the other funders and token participants in Operation Desert Shield will protest that they hadn't bargained for a shooting war.

That's the "best case." Add flaming oil fields, Israeli involvement, $75-a-barrel oil, global economic shock, ugly recriminations among the victorious brothers in arms, and a politically divided, economically paralyzed United States. Something less pleasant than the "best case" is likely in store for the American people once the dogs of war are loosed.

It is not that the president is unaware of these possibilities, although he has scrupulously avoided consulting experts on the Middle East who could tell him that the anger in the street against the United States has already reached the boiling point in much of the Arab world. He feels trapped by what he has said and done. Most wars start this way.

Bush started down the road believing that this little Hitler of the Middle East would come to his senses once the world was arrayed against him, and that if he didn't a war more on the order of Panama than Vietnam would take care of the problem. Deeply embedded ideas from the World War II and Cold War eras became the prism through which he looked at this first post-Cold War war.

It isn't working out the way it was hoped. The sanctions are causing some hardship and some deterioration in Saddam's military forces, but how long Saddam can wait out the world is not clear. The Iraqis have had a good harvest, Saddam has eliminated his political enemies, and his country is so honeycombed with informers that a plot to overthrow him is unlikely. Like it or not, he is a popular figure, a symbol of Arab nationalism and Islam -- in his own country and in the entire region. As the Vietnam experience suggests, poor dictatorships can play the waiting game better than rich democracies.

The war preparations cost the United States a billion dollars a month. The morale of the troops under the broiling sun and the impatience of the American people with the crisis in the Gulf set limits to the wait-and-hope strategy. Perhaps the most serious cost of a prolonged crisis is that we are at one of the critical turning points in world history. The post-Cold War world is being shaped and with it the face of North America, but the White House is too busy with Saddam Hussein to notice.

Even the senators who are cautious about going to war appear to share the consensus that negotiation with the "Beast of Baghdad" is impossible. Congressional concern has focused more on the president's neglect of the lawmakers' constitutional prerogatives that have been supinely given away over the years than on the wisdom of his policy. They do not want war, but they do not yet support an active policy of making peace.

THE CHOICES ARE CLEAR, ALTHOUGH what lies at the end of the road once the choices are made is not clear. The choices are: 1) wait and hope the sanctions work, 2) war, and 3) negotiations now.

The first two make no sense except as strategies to accomplish a negotiated settlement. The sanctions alone cannot restore peace or order to the region. Iraq, intact or destroyed, with Saddam or without, will at some point have to be a participant in the negotiating process.

The reason President Bush has been unable to articulate a good reason to go to war is that there aren't any. Yet important questions of principle are indeed at stake. How can these be addressed without threatening or making war?

For all the hype emanating from the White House, Saddam is indeed a menacing figure. He has made threats to use weapons of mass destruction, and the fact that he gassed thousands of Iranians and Kurds means that the threat has to be taken seriously. But he is no Hitler; he controls an impoverished, underdeveloped country which is dependent on foreign technology, not the industrial powerhouse that Hitler had created by 1938. He faces an overwhelming force that has already been committed against him, not the weak and divided democracies that tried to avoid war through appeasement.

Nor is he a unique figure. One reason why the alliance against him is so shaky is that he cannot be destroyed without at the same time making Iran the dominant power in the region. Our new ally, Hafez Assad of Syria, now an honorary "former terrorist," is as vicious as Saddam, and smarter. Important principles have been invoked in defense of U.S. policy in the Gulf crisis, but defense of democracy is not one of them.

Yet the threat of nuclear proliferation and aggression against small states are issues that must be addressed. To be sure, Kuwait is an artificial state created by colonial officials, and it was run by the Sabahs as a family corporation. Nonetheless, it is as legitimate as many other members of the United Nations. If small states are allowed to disappear at the hands of covetous neighbors, the world is in for an endless cycle of arms races and pre-emptive wars.

The United States, France, the Soviet Union, and other nations all helped to make Saddam the No. 1 military power in the region. It was an incredibly foolish policy driven by the trade deficit and crackpot realpolitik. "We'll show Khomeini he can't push the United States around!" You can just hear Ronald Reagan as he signs the fateful document calling for the "tilt" toward Iraq.

But Bush's alarm about Saddam's nuclear bomb is a transparent use of scare tactics to build support for a war that is turning out to be hard to sell. In fact, Iraq cannot develop a nuclear capability for at least five years, probably 10. It would be suicidal to threaten, much less use, a "crude" weapon against the nuclear-armed alliance or nuclear-armed Israel. (The International Atomic Energy Agency inspected the Iraqi reactor recently and reported no suspicious diversions to weapons purposes. The United States said it had contrary evidence but produced none.)

Negotiation is the rational road out of the crisis, the morally defensible road, and the only one likely to work -- that is, the only one that could produce the desired outcome without suicidal consequences. How can we negotiate with an undefeated enemy? That, of course, is the only kind of adversary you do negotiate with. Once the enemy is defeated, the "negotiation" becomes a surrender ceremony.

The American tradition is "unconditional surrender" -- from the Civil War to World War II. The end of the Cold War, with the collapse of communism and the embrace of capitalist values in the Soviet Union, is another apparent vindication of the "unconditional surrender" policy.

However, the problem with settling complex political, economic, and cultural disputes by force, quite apart from the mass murder and property destruction it requires, is that the victor is stuck with the unresolved problems. The winner can either walk away from the carnage the war has caused, occupy the defeated country, or pay for its reconstruction. All three involve enormous costs.

A negotiated settlement that would have a chance of avoiding future war and bringing stability in the region would need the following elements:

1. A timetable for the complete withdrawal of Iraqi troops from Kuwait. The withdrawal could be in tandem with the staged withdrawal of the US. forces from the region, something that is in our interest in any event.

To provide a face-saving context for Saddam to extricate himself -- and us -- is hardly reward for aggression. It is the result that counts. Humiliating Saddam is neither a necessary, worthy, nor prudent objective. The important objective is to contain Iraq's ambition and military power. That can only be done in the context of a wider Middle East settlement.

2. A structure for the settlement of the border dispute between Iraq and Kuwait. The dispute over the islands, access to the sea, and the exploitation of the oil fields on the border could be submitted to the World Court or to a special commission set up by the Arab League.

3. A regional security conference under the auspices of the Security Council of the United Nations. Its mission would be the elimination of weapons of mass destruction in the region, reduction of arms levels, the control of arms exports to the region, and the establishment of an inspection system along the lines of the one developed for Europe. The arms-producing countries would declare a moratorium on all arms sales to the region while the conference is negotiating this security arrangement.

Israel, Egypt, and Iraq have all proposed the creation of a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East. The survival of Israel ultimately depends on it.

4. A regional peace conference should meet simultaneously to work out a treaty to end the 45-year war in the Middle East. The security of Israel's 1967 borders should be underwritten by the Security Council and all regional powers. The West Bank and Gaza should be returned to a newly created Palestinian state that unequivocally recognizes the 1967 borders of Israel, renounces all attempts to change the status quo by force, and accepts low levels of armaments and international inspection. Other military occupations including Syria's occupation of portions of Lebanon should be ended.

5. The causes of instability in the region must be urgently addressed. 17 out of 20 Arab states show a declining GNP. 60 percent of their populations are under 20. Investment funds from the industrial world are needed to deal with water and other environmental problems of concern to the whole world. But the major funding should come from the thinly populated oil-producing countries that have most of the money in the region.

The political evolution of the region toward greater justice and equality for the people of the Arab world is essential for stability and peace. A United Nations effort can provide a framework by supporting forces for democratic and progressive change in the region, but once border questions are settled, the establishment of a stable order depends upon the Arab nations themselves.

Diplomats are resourceful enough to avoid the sort of crude "linkage" that would in any way legitimize Saddam's aggression toward Kuwait. But the fact is that the issues of aggression, high-technology weapons and arms levels, increasing polarization of wealth and poverty, secure borders, and the rights of Palestinians, other Arabs, and Jews to live together in peace in the Middle East are linked.

This crisis has created what is perhaps the last chance to deal with questions that should have been dealt with long ago. If it is allowed to pass and positions harden further, the Arab-Israeli confrontation will almost certainly lead some day to nuclear war.

It is just possible that the world may be witnessing a miracle. Elite concerns and public unease have become so strong that the Bush administration has been forced to change its tactics if not its strategy. It has agreed to talk about matters it said it would not discuss in advance of Saddam's retreat from Kuwait. It is unprecedented for a former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to criticize presidential war policy on the eve of war, and two have done this. The chairs of the House and Senate Armed Services Committees counsel patience. Public opposition to the human sacrifice in the desert is rising all across the country, and the war has not yet started. There has been some response from Saddam.

But if war is to be avoided, the voice of conscience as well as prudence must be heard across the land. The last 18 months has been a time of democratic miracles, people rising up in Czechoslovakia and all through Eastern Europe, throwing off the yoke of oppression and fear. We who already have the gift of free expression, of the right to assemble in the streets and protest, of the right to instruct our representatives about our deepest convictions, must exercise those rights now.

We need to send a signal that we do not believe the tempter's lie. War and appeasement are not the only alternatives.

Richard J. Barnet was a Sojourners contributing editor, a fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC, and the author of The Rockets Red Glare: When America Goes to War (Simon & Schuster, 1990) when this article appeared.