|
Jewish World ReviewMarch 6, 2001 / 11 Adar, 5761
Michael Ledeen
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
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
02/26/00: The Clinton Sopranos
|