Out of the Quagmire : Healthy Restraint on American Military Interventionism Lost

What a wonderful war. Nearly everyone seems to agree. The TV was great, the body count on our side low and the enemy bad. The news was brilliantly managed by the Pentagon to depict war as “Top Gun” rather than as “Born on the Fourth of July.” Iraqis bled but that went unnoticed here as the post-Vietnam doldrums gave way to a patriotic orgy.

Well, it’s time to untie the yellow ribbons. Sorry to play party pooper, but the Vietnam syndrome was a healthy restraint.

The post-Vietnam mood of caution represented a necessary check on military intervention. For once, a great power was given to soul-searching over the ethics and objectives of war-making. What was wrong with recognizing that war has real costs and ought to be waged sparingly, if at all?

This mood was reflected in the January congressional debate over the authorization of force in the Persian Gulf, a high point in the U.S. democratic experience. But in the aftermath of the stunning technological victory by the anti-Iraq coalition, it is doubtful that any such restraint, constitutionally mandated, will operate on a President in the near future.

Nor is the media likely to play its role, also constitutionally indicated, of challenging the claims made for the presidential exercise of power. The Gulf lesson is clear: The news can be effectively managed and the press reduced to providing high-tech graphic score cards and other attributes of a cheer-leading role.

Understandably, it was easier to cheer a war against a dictator who invaded an independent country than, as was the case in Vietnam, to root for the U.S. surrogate in a civil war. But the justice of the end ought not to obliterate all concern about means.

During the Vietnam War, the media reported and Congress debated the issues arising from the destructive power unleashed on the enemy. We learned a great deal about napalm and fragmentation bombs.

It is not true, as is often suggested, that this knowledge led inexorably to what some take to be an immobilizing pacifist position. Difficult to remember now, but there were few restraints on the U.S. military in the ‘60s and early ‘70s; yes, we didn’t obliterate Hanoi, but it was hit as hard as Baghdad.

The big difference is that at least back then we knew what weapons were being used, considered their impact on the human beings on the receiving end and were forced to debate the ethics implicit in such notions of total war. This time around, the news was so carefully managed that we ceased to regard those under the bombs as human.

It is shameful that the deaths of what now appears to be more than 100,000 Iraqis have barely been noticed. The allies have been burying thousands of them, many young conscripts, in mass graves. The Defense Department will not even supply a reliable estimate of the body count.

Perhaps it is possible to morally justify this huge loss of life as being necessary to what are judged noble goals. But it is wretchedly immoral accounting that assumes all this human suffering to be without serious cost.

Tell me again why more than a month of bombing a civilian population, surgical or not, doesn’t qualify as terrorism. Too harsh? Last week’s U.N. survey of civilian damage in Iraq terms it “near-apocalyptic,” with the country reduced “to a pre-industrial age.” Terrorizing the Iraqi population was one of the prime goals of tens of thousands of sorties; to turn his population against Saddam Hussein was one of President Bush’s oft-stated desires. The goal might be noble, but the means were the same as in hijacking a commercial aircraft--treating civilians as combatants

Two stark legacies of the Persian Gulf War are a further blurring of the line between military and civilian targets and a weakening of the moral underpinnings of the war against terrorism. That cause was not well served by our sudden embrace of the government of Syria as an “ally,” when only months before we had branded it the chief backer of terrorism in the world.

If the central goal of the war was, as President Bush often stated, a new world order beginning with peace and stability in the Middle East--forget it.

For openers, you cannot have stability when a small group of people are sitting on a huge pot of gold and their neighbors are mostly broke. The liberation of Kuwait and the protection of Saudi Arabia and the Emirates heightens rather than settles the main contradictions in the region.

Does the liberation of Kuwait require nothing more than the return of the emir and the rest of the royal family to power? And if the emir permits the Parliament, which he suspended in 1986, to resume its work, will it still represent only the 60,000 eligible male voters out of a prewar population of 1.9 million?

Is it off the wall to suggest that a U.N.-supervised election for all Kuwait’s prewar residents, including non-Kuwaitis, be part of the liberation package? We have demanded that governments from Nicaragua to Lithuania recognize and honor human rights--why is Kuwait an exception? Or is it enough that the Western companies that have been hustling for reconstruction deals since the first day of the Iraqi invasion get their contracts signed?

Sorry to have to bring it up, but what about the price of oil? The West, led by the United States, has pressured the Saudis and Kuwaitis to produce enough to hold prices down. As a result, the price of oil has not kept up with the cost of finished high-tech industrial goods.

Should the price of oil be low as Washington insists? That has been acceptable to the Arab countries with a lot of oil and a small population but not to those with many mouths to feed. The price of oil and, in particular, Kuwait’s undermining of the OPEC price by cheating on its production quota was the original source of Iraq-Kuwait tension.

The Vietnam syndrome forced us to confront the complex and often intractable nature of regional problems. That reality will once again parse the language of celebration. No matter the fate of Hussein, other leaders will emerge espousing the cause of Pan-Arabism or Islamic fundamentalism and some will even cite the memory of Hussein, along with that of Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, another great military loser.

What is the lasting principle of Operation Desert Storm?

Sounds like a Vietnam-syndrome downer question, I know, but are we bound only by those U.N. resolutions that affect oil-rich countries? Will we intervene if it’s only a matter of genocide in a resource-poor country, as in Cambodia or Uganda in the past? What about the U.N. resolutions dealing with Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories?

The good news is that we have blundered onto a new stage of international involvement. It will be much more difficult to ignore genocide or other forms of cruelty. But if this comes to mean Pax Americana, in which the United States attempts to adjudicate every dispute, it will prove a disaster.

The lesson of previous efforts to police the world’s hot spots should be clear: No matter how one-sided the battlefield victory, the political results will be messy in the extreme.

In bars and at church socials later, they will ask who really won and what did they win? The hand waving the flag will slow, the jaw will slacken and the bright moment of Hussein’s defeat will be tarnished by a complex reality that we can barely comprehend, let alone control.