Consequences: White Flags In the Desert

By Strobe Talbott

Suddenly, there he was, the only major participant in this most televised war in history who had remained off-camera. For weeks, the world had watched the nightly pyrotechnics over Baghdad, the battered allied pilots on Iraqi TV, Patriots rising to meet Scuds, the nose-camera view of smart bombs at work, the artificial twilight above the burning oil fields, top guns catapulting into the mist, even Saddam Hussein presiding over his Revolutionary Command Council. Only the frontline Iraqi soldier had stayed out of sight.

But he was never out of mind. The briefers in Riyadh referred to him constantly in the anonymous yet curiously familiar third-person singular: "He's dug in along the border . . . He's taking quite a beating . . . If he heads north, we'll cut him off." As long as he was invisible, he was easy to imagine as one of half a million clones of Saddam himself, smug, defiant and murderous.

So it came as something of a shock when he scrambled out of his hole in the ground. He was thin, pitiable, and quivering with the fear that his captors were going to shoot him on the spot. He knew what execution squads attached to his unit were doing to others who tried to give up. Why should he expect better from the enemy? When he realized he was going to be fed and cared for, he fell to his knees and kissed the hands of a U.S. Marine.

They surrendered all along what was supposed to be the mighty "Saddam line," in squads, then platoons. Many waved tattered pieces of white cloth. Some held aloft the Koran.

These were the most telling images of the entire war. For one thing, they put faces to the staggering estimates of many tens of thousands of Iraqi casualties, making them less of a box-score abstraction.

At the same time, the gratitude with which many Iraqis turned themselves in hammered home the justification for this war, terrible as it was. They were not just relieved to be alive or trying to please their new masters. Several groups of prisoners even began chanting the name of George Bush. It was as though they sensed that their defeat was a necessary step toward the liberation not only of Kuwait but of Iraq as well.

Certainly that is how Bush has come to see this war. Time and again, he made clear that for him, the rationale was not merely geopolitical; there was more at stake than Persian Gulf oil or, as James Baker once put it, American jobs. The President's critics, from Mikhail Gorbachev to protesters on the home front, were right when they accused him of having an objective that went beyond the United Nations mandate of expelling Iraqi forces from Kuwait. For its Commander in Chief, Desert Storm became a moral crusade, targeted against a leader whose very regime was an abomination. "Saddam tried to cast this conflict as a religious war," said Bush in a speech in January, "but it has nothing to do with religion per se. It has, on the other hand, everything to do with what religion embodies: good vs. evil, right vs. wrong."

Even after he had inflicted on Iraq the mother of all defeats, Bush left no doubt, as he said Friday, that in his own mind, there would be no "definitive end" to the war so long as Saddam was "still there." For the next phase of the campaign, Bush needed only to revert to the advice that the doves were offering him before he ordered the bombers into action on Jan. 16: Give sanctions a chance.

The U.S. public welcomed last week's triumph in the gulf as much more than a mission accomplished. It has been 46 years since Americans were able to celebrate a real victory in a real war. Only about 30% of the country's 250 million citizens were even alive on Aug. 14, 1945, when Japan capitulated at the end of World War II. Bush can remember listening to that news on the radio as a junior naval officer, and Brent Scowcroft was a cadet at West Point. But for the others who ran Desert Storm, the memory of the U.S.'s last "good war" -- best defined as an unambiguous win against an unambiguous villain -- is probably dim at best: Dick Cheney was four years old on V-J day, Colin Powell was eight, and Norman Schwarzkopf, 10.

Since then, the U.S. has settled for a draw in Korea and swallowed a defeat in Vietnam. The invasions of Grenada in 1983 and Panama in 1989 did not qualify as wars; they were neighborhood busts. For decades, many Americans were worried that the U.S. suffered from a national character flaw, a syndrome of flabbiness and faintheartedness. Perhaps, mused some, it was a side effect of too much democracy, too much safety behind the oceans and too little gumption.

Such self-doubts never made much sense. For more than four decades, the exertion of U.S. power was, quite properly, inhibited by the cold war and its twin, the ever present danger of a global conflagration. Over the horizon of every battlefield was the Soviet nuclear arsenal. If tangling with Kim Il Sung or Ho Chi Minh could lead to World War III, it was only prudent to pull back to the DMZ in Korea and, eventually, all the way home from Vietnam.

| Prudence is George Bush's favorite word. Yet he has led his nation into battle and won decisively. That's a credit to his personal determination, the prowess of the armed forces he commands, the steadfastness of the alliance he has assembled and the wizardry of military technology he has at his disposal. But last week's stunning conclusion would not have been possible if the U.S. and the Soviet Union were still competing on every issue, at every level, at every point in the world. Had the Kremlin been playing its old, deadly zero- sum game, threatening to intervene on Saddam's behalf with its still formidable military might rather than just kibitzing diplomatically, Kuwait might be a DMZ today.

Now that both the cold war and the gulf war are over, the United Nations, with the U.S. more than ever its senior partner, will be more credible when it vows to punish -- and thus deters -- would-be aggressors. However, in almost every other respect, the happy ending of the gulf crisis does little, in and of itself, to advance the much vaunted new world order. Whatever challenges to international security and stability lurk in the future, chances are they won't be so morally stark and politically compelling as this one was. Therefore, it won't be so easy to mobilize a multinational coalition. In that sense, while Bush was masterly as a war President, he was also lucky.

Successful as it was in its own terms, Desert Storm was the consequence -- indeed, a tacit admission -- of a massive failure. The international community has had to pay a vast price for waiting too long to put in place arrangements that will control the spread of weaponry, ameliorate the social pressures that feed extremism and, above all, keep the peace. Creating those structures now will be every bit as important as rebuilding Kuwait and Iraq.