Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power (17 page)

And who won this argument? The answer is kind of surprising, but sadly obvious today, when we find ourselves in a succession of indefinite hot wars the country does not really want.

Remember the words of James Madison: “The Constitution supposes, what the History of all Governments demonstrates, that the Executive is the branch of power most interested in war, and most prone to it. It has accordingly with studied care vested the question of war in the Legislature.” The “studied care” Madison
describes behind that “vesting” has not been matched by any equal and opposite studied care in recent decades, as we’ve divested that same power. It’s not a conspiracy. Rational political actors, acting rationally to achieve rational (if sometimes dumb) political goals, have attacked and undermined our constitutional inheritance from men like Madison. For the most part, though, they’ve not done it to fundamentally alter the country’s course but just to get around understandably frustrating impediments to their political goals. The ropes we had used to lash down presidential war-making capacity, bindings that by design made it hard for an American president to use military force without the nation’s full and considered buy-in, have been hacked at with very little appreciation about why they were put there in the first place.

When Ronald Reagan extricated himself from the Iran-Contra scandal by cutting one of those crucial mooring lines—without considered forethought or specific course headings in mind—it set the country adrift and heading into a dangerous tide.

Congress has never since effectively asserted itself to stop a president with a bead on war. It was true of George Herbert Walker Bush. It was true of Bill Clinton. And by September 11, 2001, even if there had been real resistance to Vice President Cheney and President George W. Bush starting the next war (or two), there were no institutional barriers strong enough to have realistically stopped them. By 9/11, the war-making authority in the United States had become, for all intents and purposes, uncontested and unilateral: one man’s decision to make.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

TWO HUNDRED THOUSAND ADDITIONAL TROOPS MINIMUM
, nearly double what the president of the United States had already ordered into the hot desert of Saudi Arabia, was what it would take. According to the presentation his top military adviser made at the White House Situation Room meeting of October 30, 1990, that was the minimum manpower price George Herbert Walker Bush would have to pay to forcibly remove Saddam Hussein and his Iraqi Army from Kuwait. This was decision day. If Bush couldn’t bear the size of that call-up and he stoppered the military spigot pouring our soldiers into the Persian Gulf, he could do no more than sit his army in the desert and wait for the UN sanctions to pressure Saddam out of Kuwait. If he kept the flow open, he’d leave himself the option of launching a punishing offensive attack on Saddam’s army. He’d have the wherewithal to make the biggest war Americans had seen in a generation.

It had been three months since the Iraqi dictator had invaded Kuwait, jettisoned its ruling royal family, and claimed its oil fields, which gave Saddam, the Bush administration claimed, something near to 20 percent of the world’s oil reserves. And
worse than that, Saddam was now within arm’s reach of Saudi oil, which might give him close to half of the planet’s most consumed necessity.

In the first days after the invasion, President Bush had made it clear: “This will not stand, this aggression against Kuwait.” He said later, “That’s not a threat, not a boast. That’s just the way it’s going to be.” Within a week of the Iraqi Army’s invasion of Kuwait, the president had deployed a large contingent of American soldiers, sailors, and Marines to the Persian Gulf to make sure Saddam knew the United States was serious about defending Saudi Arabia—and to stand by for further orders. And he had convinced the reluctant Saudi king to play host to this huge American army. (The Saudi king, incidentally, had chosen Bush’s offer of military assistance over the offer made by a certain Saudi national who boasted he could defend the kingdom’s oil fields with his army of mujahedeen fighters, who had distinguished themselves in battle against the Soviets in Afghanistan. King Fahd’s decision to go with the American military instead turned Osama bin Laden against the Saudi royal family forever, and it didn’t exactly enhance his feelings toward America, either.)

Bush had been masterful at building international support and a broad coalition of allies. The UN Security Council and almost every nation in the civilized world had agreed to impose strangling economic sanctions meant to bring the Iraqi dictator and his army to heel. And the United States was leading the way. “Recent events have surely proven that there is no substitute for American leadership,” Bush reassured Congress and the country. “In the face of tyranny, let no one doubt American credibility and reliability. Let no one doubt our staying power. We will stand by our friends. One way or another, the leader of Iraq must learn this fundamental truth.” At Bush’s insistent urging,
every one of Saddam’s Arab neighbors had signed up on our side. Even the Soviet Union was with us.

But still, three months in, George Herbert Walker Bush was not a happy man.

The day before that fish-or-cut-bait National Security Council meeting, Saddam had appeared on television—
US television
—having sport with the president. “If an embargo would force the American people to withdraw from the last state that was linked to the United States—say, Hawaii,” Saddam offered, “then the same standards, if they were applied, would probably lead the Iraqis to consider withdrawal from Kuwait.” And then, sticking a thumb in Bush’s eye: “Whoever commits aggression against Iraq will be the party that shall turn out to be the loser.…”

When President Bush met with his national security team the next day, his patience was wearing thin, and he was not, as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Colin Powell, knew, a patient man to begin with. The president had been agitating the chairman for weeks about launching air strikes on Baghdad; he’d also been confiding in British prime minister Margaret Thatcher as well as his own advisers that he’d really appreciate it if Saddam did something sufficiently provocative—like, say, abusing some of his Western hostages (whom the Iraqi dictator insisted on calling his “guests”)—to justify a US-led attack. The longer this stalemate went on, the more nervous Bush seemed to grow. “Dealing with the president,” Powell said years later, “was like playing Scheherazade, trying to keep the king calm for a thousand and one nights.”

Besides being a man of preternatural impatience—sitting still without a fishing rod in his hand drove him batty—the president
had whipped up for himself a furious and frothy head of contempt for Saddam and his invasion of Kuwait. What had started as a strategic national imperative to keep energy prices in check, maintain a balance of power among the oil-producing nations of the Middle East, and show that as the world’s lone remaining superpower after the slow-motion dissolution of the Soviet Union, America would remain an active force in the world, had blossomed for Bush into a bigger idea, a vision thing. “As I look at the countries that are chipping in here now, I think we do have a chance at a new world order,” he’d said at one formal news conference. “And I’d like to think that out of this dreary performance by Saddam Hussein there could be now an opportunity for peace all through the Middle East.” And he got downright poetic in an address to the nation: “A hundred generations have searched for this elusive path to peace while a thousand wars raged across the span of human endeavor. And today, that new world is struggling to be born. A world quite different from the one we’ve known. A world where the rule of law supplants the rule of the jungle. A world in which nations recognize the shared responsibility for freedom and justice. A world where the strong respect the rights of the weak.”

So there was the whole new world order thing. The otherwise grounded and pragmatic George Herbert Walker Bush was nominating himself for a place among the pantheon of politicians and kings who claimed that one, just
one
more war would bring world peace. There was also the matter of standing up to a bully, a matter of honor in Bush’s personal code of ethics. Human Rights Watch had reported that Saddam’s soldiers were murdering, raping, and generally brutalizing Kuwaiti citizens. “I mean, people on a dialysis machine cut off, the machine sent to Baghdad,” Bush had exclaimed. “Babies in incubators heaved out of the incubators and the incubators themselves
sent to Baghdad.” He was even hearing stories about Kuwaiti children being mowed down and killed on their way to hospitals, or Iraqi soldiers releasing the animals from the Kuwait zoo for target practice. “Their efforts, however, were not completely successful,” a Bush administration official told reporters. “A lion escaped and mauled a young Kuwaiti girl.”

It wasn’t long before Bush, the old World War II fighter pilot, started turning his description of Saddam up to eleven. “Worse than Hitler!” he said. “I began to move from viewing Saddam’s aggression exclusively as a dangerous strategic threat and an injustice to its reversal as a moral crusade,” Bush later wrote. “I became very emotional about the atrocities. They really gave urgency to my desire to do something active in response. At some point it came through to me that this was not a matter of shades of gray, or of trying to see the other side’s point of view. It was good versus evil, right versus wrong. I am sure the change strengthened my determination not to let the invasion stand and encouraged me to contemplate the use of force to reverse it.”

Saddam had rolled into Kuwait on August 2, 1990. Bush had sent troops to wait in Saudi Arabia on August 6. By October 30, 1990, the day he summoned what was effectively his war council to the Situation Room, the president was worried that the air was leaking out of his new world order moral crusade. He was getting edgy; he wasn’t sure how long the international coalition he had personally gathered would hold together. And he wasn’t sure how long the American people would support him in the crisis. He’d had huge backing for his response to Saddam up till then, something near 70 percent of Americans. But he could feel it slipping away.

He’d had a tough month—he’d taken “the damndest pounding I’ve ever seen” from the Democratic-controlled Congress in the budget battle occasioned by the prodigious deficits Reagan
had left in his wake, and then another one from his own party when he’d had to back down from his Eastwoodesque “Read My Lips—No New Taxes” pledge. The tax hike was the right thing to do, Bush knew, but that didn’t make it popular with the hard-liners in his party. He was starting to fear the return of that ugly (and he thought unfair)
Newsweek
headline he’d endured during his presidential campaign, “Fighting the Wimp Factor.” His recent twenty-one-point drop in the polls was “one of the worst slides in public approval of any modern President,” the
New York Times
noted. “That fall is at least as great, although perhaps not quite as sudden, as the decline in President Gerald R. Ford’s approval rating after he pardoned former President Richard Nixon for his conduct in the Watergate scandal and the tumble that President Ronald Reagan took after disclosure of the Iran-contra affair.”

And now, after pummeling Bush into submission over the budget, Congress was starting to “get in his knickers,” as he sometimes said, about his handling of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Just a few hours before the big October 30 war council meeting, he’d had to endure an hour-and-a-half-long sit-down with congressional leaders—they’d demanded it—so they could lecture him about war powers and public sentiment. The Democratic Speaker of the House had opened the proceedings by formally presenting Bush with a letter signed by eighty-one of his colleagues:

Bush sat and listened. Senate majority leader George Mitchell insisted that the case had not been made that the sanctions had failed. “I want to plead with you personally before you take the country into war,” Speaker Tom Foley implored. “Unless there is gross provocation, you won’t have public support.” Bush listened some more, and then showed them the door. Oh, he’d “consult.” He’d tell them what he was doing—
what he’d already done
, was more like it. He wouldn’t trust Congress with a decision about China patterns at a state dinner, let alone war and peace. “As long as the people are with us, I’ve got a good chance,” he’d written in his diary. “But once there starts to be erosion, [Congress] is going to do what Lyndon Johnson said: they painted their asses white and ran with the antelopes.”