Don't Know Much About History, Anniversary Edition: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned (Don't Know Much About®) (85 page)

August 7
The United States announces that it is sending troops to the Persian Gulf to defend Saudi Arabia from possible attack by Iraq.

August 25
The UN Security Council authorizes the use of force to carry out the embargo against Iraq.

November 29
The council gives coalition members permission “to use all necessary means” to expel Iraq from Kuwait if Iraq does not withdraw by January 15, 1991. Iraq does not withdraw.

1991

January 17
The air war begins at 3
A.M.
The coalition’s goal is to destroy Iraq’s ability to launch attacks; eliminate Iraq’s biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons facilities; and reduce Iraq’s ability to defend itself. By late February, the air war reduces the number of Iraqi troops in Kuwait and southern Iraq to about 183,000, mostly through casualties and desertions.

Iraq responds to the allied air assault by launching Scud missiles at populated areas in Israel and Saudi Arabia. Crude and inaccurate by modern Western military standards, the Soviet-built Scuds have enormous psychological value, striking fear in the targeted cities. Among the chief fears is the possibility that Saddam will arm these missiles with either chemical or biological weapons as he has done in suppressing a rebellion by the ethnic minority Kurds in Iraq. The attacks on Israel are designed to draw the Israelis into the war. However, Israel does not enter the war, thus making it much easier to keep the coalition together.

February 24
At about 4
A.M.
, coalition forces launch a major three-pronged ground attack. U.S. and French troops invade Iraq from Saudi Arabia, west of Iraqi fortifications in Kuwait. They move rapidly north into Iraq and toward the Euphrates River to cut off Iraqi supply lines and to prevent an Iraqi retreat. U.S. and British troops cross into Iraq from Saudi Arabia. They move north into Iraq and then sweep east to attack the Iraqi troops. Coalition troops, consisting of U.S. Marines and troops from Egypt, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Syria, assault Iraqi forces at several points across southern Kuwait. The troops quickly break through Iraqi fortifications, and about 63,000 Iraqi soldiers surrender.

February 26
Saddam Hussein orders his troops to leave Kuwait. But by that time, the Iraqi forces have been surrounded.

February 28
The coalition ends all military operations at 8
A.M.
, about 100 hours after the ground attack began. American losses for the operation were 148 killed in action and 7 missing in action.

The Gulf War lasted forty-two days: thirty-eight days of intense air strikes and four days of ground fighting. The U.S.-led coalition routed Saddam’s army, overran Kuwait and southern Iraq, and liberated Kuwait. By stopping the offensive against Iraq without assaulting Baghdad and possibly overthrowing Saddam Hussein, President Bush and his advisers had fulfilled the UN’s terms of the action against Iraq. (Ten years later, the consequences of that decision would impact many of the same men. In the wake of the September 11 attacks on the United States and the ensuing war in Afghanistan, still in positions of power were Colin Powell, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Gulf War, now secretary of state under George W. Bush, forty-third president and son of the forty-first. Dick Cheney, the secretary of defense during the Gulf War, was now Bush’s vice president.)

The Persian Gulf War devastated Iraq. As many as 100,000 Iraqi soldiers were killed and a great number of civilians also died. Iraqi roads, bridges, factories, and oil industry facilities were demolished. Water purification and sewage treatment facilities could not operate without electric power. A continuing trade embargo caused serious economic problems. In March 1991, Kurdish and Shiite Muslim uprisings, with encouragement from President Bush, who had promised American support that never came, broke out. But by April, Iraqi troops put down most of the rebellions with brutal efficiency.

In April, Iraq accepted the terms of a formal cease-fire agreement and the UN Security Council officially declared an end to the war. In the cease-fire agreement, Iraq agreed to the destruction of all its biological and chemical weapons, its facilities for producing such weapons, and any facilities or materials it might have for producing nuclear weapons. After the formal cease-fire, the UN continued the embargo to pressure Iraq to carry out these terms.

A
MERICAN
V
OICES

G
EORGE
B
USH,
accepting the 1988 Republican presidential nomination:

The Congress will push me to raise taxes, and I’ll say no, and they’ll push, and I’ll say no, and they’ll push again. And all I can say to them is, “Read My Lips: No New Taxes.”

How do you “downsize” a president?

With this swift and relatively low-casualty victory over Iraq, Bush’s ratings soared like a Patriot missile, a defensive weapon that had been hailed during the war for stopping Iraq’s Scud missiles. Before the Gulf War, Bush had already notched one win after U.S. troops swept into Panama and captured dictator Manuel Noriega, who had been indicted in a U.S. court on drug charges. Coupled with the victory in Kuwait, American prestige seemed unmatched in Bush’s New World Order.

But every missile that goes up must come down. Just as the Patriot missile’s reliability, accuracy, and performance were questioned after the war, the glow of the Reagan–Bush foreign policy coups vanished, dulled by a dizzying slide from postwar euphoria. Unemployment surged as the Federal Reserve’s high interest rates, designed to wring inflation out of the American economy, mired the economy in a recession. The new corporate policy of “downsizing”—in old words, “layoffs”—was pushing unemployment higher. And it was a different kind of unemployment. The downsized now included the white-collar workers who thought they had bought into corporate security, as well as the blue-collar factory workers more accustomed to the traditional cycle of layoffs and rehirings. Bush was viewed as out of touch with average Americans, and publicity stunts such as shopping for socks at a local mall only made him seem more disconnected.

Americans were cranky, and George Bush wasn’t the only target. Congress faced intense scrutiny as a series of scandals rocked the House. Speaker Jim Wright and Democratic Whip Tony Coelho resigned following ethics investigations, and a congressional post office scandal involving cushy check-writing privileges sounded like fraud to most Americans. The House clearly enraged the public. To the average American, Congress fiddled while America burned.

Early in his presidency, Bush had to deal with the worst crisis in the banking industry since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Between 1980 and 1990, more than 1,000 savings and loan institutions failed and hundreds more neared bankruptcy, a crisis resulting from defaults on loans, poor regulation, and fraud and mismanagement in the industry. Soon after entering office, Bush proposed legislation to rescue and restructure the industry. The savings and loan bailout eventually cost taxpayers more than $400 billion to maintain failing banks, one of which involved Bush’s third son, Neil, a board member of Silverado Savings, a Colorado bank.

Mounting budget deficits and deep anxiety over health care magnified these problems. The grim national mood darkened with the bitter debate over legal abortion, which President Bush opposed in a reversal of his own earlier position. “Gender gap” tensions rose higher when law professor Anita Hill charged that Clarence Thomas, Bush’s choice to succeed civil rights legend Thurgood Marshall (1908–93) on the Supreme Court, had sexually harassed her when she was his assistant. For two days in October 1991, the nation was once again transfixed by Senate hearings in which the two testified about the charges. Thomas denied Hill’s account and charged that a “lynch mob” was out to get him. Thomas was approved by the Senate 52–48, but the ugly episode, in which both Thomas and Hill became the targets of vicious character attacks, had further darkened the mood of the country along party, gender, and racial lines.

The depth of that racial animosity boiled over in April 1992 rioting that swept Los Angeles after four policemen were acquitted in the vicious 1991 beating of Rodney King. In two days of the worst American riots in a generation, President Bush had to order Marines and Army troops to keep peace in the city. When the violence subsided, fifty-two people had been killed and more than 600 buildings set afire, many of them burned to the ground.

But for American voters, George Bush’s gravest sin seemed to be his broken tax promise. When Bush agreed to new taxes to reduce the deficit in 1990, Desert Storm was worth so much desert sand. Since colonial days, Americans have hated taxes and often reserved a special hell for politicians who raise them, especially after pledging not to. With the recession millstone around his neck, George Bush plunged in the polls—his 90 percent approval ratings sharply downsized—as the 1992 election approached.

A
MERICAN
V
OICES

Sign in
BILL CLINTON’S
campaign headquarters, attributed to campaign director James Carville:

IT’S THE ECONOMY, STUPID
.

Can a man called Bubba become president?

Although it won’t go down as one of the great presidential pronouncements like, “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country,” when candidate Bill Clinton told America, “I tried it once, but I didn’t inhale,” it certainly was memorable.

During the primary battles of 1992, Bill Clinton was asked by reporters about smoking marijuana in his college days, and his reply left many Americans choking with laughter. A Rhodes scholar who attended Oxford, where he avoided the Vietnam-era draft, Arkansas governor Bill Clinton (b. 1946) dodged many uncomfortable questions during the 1992 campaign. But Americans were less interested in pot smoking, draft dodging, and womanizing than in solving America’s problems. Running as an “agent of change” who promised reforms, Bubba Clinton and his vice presidential running mate, Senator Al Gore of Tennessee, became the first “baby boomers” to win the White House, following a raucous election most notable for the third-party candidacy of H. Ross Perot.

A man whose political fame would be built on assailing big government and excessive government spending, Ross Perot (b. 1930) had built his Electronic Data Systems into a billion-dollar firm with large and very profitable government contracts. With his deep pockets, the amply financed Perot ran as an independent with a campaign aimed at overhauling government. His folksy style and can-do approach appealed to millions of American voters who were completely disenchanted with the two major political parties, whose differences seemed marginal and who seemed most concerned with fund-raising and retaining control. But when he abruptly canceled his unorthodox campaign, Perot was dismissed as a wealthy kook. Then, only weeks before Election Day, Perot stunned the political world by rejoining the fray.

In a series of three-way televised debates, the most indelible image was that of President George Bush checking his wristwatch at the Richmond, Virginia, debate as if his limo was double-parked with the engine and the meter running. When advised to fire up his campaign, Bush turned to name calling, deriding Clinton and Gore as “bozos.” Gore, an environmentalist and author of a book about the risks of global warming, was dismissed as “ozone man.” Then a week before the election, the Iran-Contra special prosecutor announced a grand jury indictment of Caspar Weinberger, and questions about Bush’s role in the Iran-Contra case were pushed back into the headlines.

Garnering nearly 20 million votes (19 percent), Perot drew disaffected voters from Bush and probably skewed the race, allowing the Clinton-Gore ticket to win with 43 percent to Bush’s 37 percent. In later years, Bush would claim that the indictment of Weinberger and the failure of Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan (p. 557) to cut interest rates quickly enough doomed his presidency. But Ross Perot and the Reform Party, like several other successful third-party candidates in American history, had probably been the big difference, tipping the balance in a very closely divided and unhappy America.

Must Read:
Shadow: Five Presidents and the Legacy of Watergate
by Bob Woodward;
First in His Class: The Biography of Bill Clinton
by David Maraniss.

A
MERICAN
V
OICES

Retired Arizona
SENATOR BARRY GOLDWATER
(1909–98), a longtime leader of the conservative movement in the Republican Party, on the question of homosexuals in the military:

You don’t need to be “straight” to fight and die for your country. You just need to shoot straight.

Who took out a Contract with America?

It may be called a “honeymoon,” but Bill Clinton must have been wondering when the fun would start. Before he unzipped his suitcases in the White House, Clinton’s brief “honeymoon” period was over. Having pledged to overturn the ban on homosexuals in the military, Clinton found himself walking into a Pentagon Chainsaw Massacre. Accepting a compromise “don’t ask don’t tell” policy, Clinton retreated from his promise, hinting at the policy and personnel reversals that would plague his first two years.