The Presidency 'Twas a Famous Victory

By Hugh Sidey

George Bush is giving 1991 a bittersweet goodbye kiss. He's lost 40 points in his ratings and gained 10 times that many gray hairs. But he's got his feet up on the desk in an Oval Office flooded with December sunshine, and for 30 minutes he is remembering when he played the ultimate chess game -- Desert Storm -- and won brilliantly. The afterglow of that triumph has faded now, but not his granite conviction that what he did was right. Back a year, the tension was real and he talked more at night with Barbara and hugged his grandchildren with more feeling as he pondered two of his huge problems: Saddam Hussein and the U.S. Congress.

The problem with Saddam was not his military might -- the President never doubted that the U.S. had the power to prevail in combat -- but the possibility that the Iraqi leader might withdraw from Kuwait at the last minute, keeping his menacing army and maniacal intentions intact. "I mean, this was worrying me," says Bush. "What happens if he does just haul all this armor back along the border, unpunished, unrepentant, faced down by what he knows is a superior army?"

As complex a problem in many ways was the one on Capitol Hill, where critics argued for a say in how and when force was to be committed. But Bush took the bold step of moving U.S. combat troops to the region without seeking congressional approval. His reasoning: "If I had ever conveyed to this Congress that I wasn't going to do anything unless I had their endorsement . . . I really believe Saddam Hussein would still be there." The President now concedes that his action carried enormous political risks -- including a possible impeachment attempt if Desert Storm had failed. "They would have had impeachment papers out there in a hurry -- no question about that -- for violating my constitutional authority, for leading our country into a quagmire."

Bush wanted to make every effort at a peaceful solution but was determined to line up enough force to win a war if it came to that. He focused his argument on the Iraqi strongman: "I tried to make very clear from the beginning that it was not a battle with the people, but with this dictator." As the Jan. 15 deadline approached, Bush concluded that Saddam had badly misjudged the situation. "Somewhere along the line," the President recalls, "I realized that he felt we were bluffing, and that he also felt another thing where he was just as wrong: the Nasser parallel -- he doesn't have to win to win. He can be seen as standing up against this onslaught, the West, the Yankees, and be seen as a victor ((even)) if he sues for peace." Saddam, thinks Bush, misread American newspaper editorials and arguments on television. "He was still living back in the Vietnam days. He didn't know we had a different ball game on here, different levels of technology, a different military force, a different President."

For all his confidence in an ultimate allied victory, Bush now admits that he had some doubts about the U.S. forces' ability to carry out his intentions with the devastating efficiency his commanders claimed. "I've got to confess that I wondered, when ((Air Force Chief of Staff)) Tony McPeak came up to Camp David and briefed me on what we could do with air power. I turned to ((National Security Adviser)) Brent Scowcroft or somebody; I said, 'Does this general know what he's talking about? I mean, this is awesome.' " Later, after McPeak had visited the U.S. staging ground in Saudi Arabia, Bush summoned him to a private lunch at the White House. "I said, 'Tony, I just want to be sure how you feel now that you're back. And I remember what you told me up there and these things that air power can do.' He said, 'I'm more confident now than I was.' " Thus reassured, Bush never considered drawing up any "doomsday kind of scenario" to allow for a U.S. stalemate or retreat.

But other specters haunted Bush's thoughts. Chemical weapons worried him: "All the plans were predicated on ((Saddam's)) using chemical weapons because he'd done it before." Bush was also haunted by the ubiquitous images of body bags that appeared in the press early in the crisis. It seemed almost as if the dead were being counted before any battle had been fought. "Body bags," Bush mutters. "The charge by the opponents . . . was that 'you're going to have on your hands, Mr. President, the lives of the 30,000.' We'd ordered 50,000 body bags. I think that was the figure they used. That'll show you. They had a picture in one of the magazines of endless numbers of graves that had been dug somewhere."

Once he unleashed his forces against Saddam, Bush was astonished by how smoothly things went and how few allied casualties there were. "I was surprised that it literally worked out -- in spite of the predictions -- as quick as it did," says Bush. "The system worked, so I wouldn't change one thing in the way the decision making worked."

Saddam is still in power, of course, and there has been much debate about Bush's decision not to send his tanks to Baghdad and topple the Baathist leader. But the President insists that the chastened and defanged Iraqi dictator is no worldly threat today. "The Republican Guard units, some of them, have been dismantled," he says. "Most of them are 50% strength. And it's a different army. They aren't capable ((of projecting)) aggression the way they did before."

A common criticism of Bush is that the decisive leadership he showed in Desert Storm has not been duplicated in his budgetary and domestic policy efforts. When confronted with this charge, the President suddenly begins pointing around the empty room at imaginary members of his war staff and giving orders as he did in the thick of the gulf crisis: " 'Colin, you do this. Dick, you're responsible for this. Have Colin, the Chairman, and General Schwarzkopf do this. Brent, here is what I want to do' -- something happens. And in dealing with the domestic economy, you're dealing with every subcommittee chairman and somebody that has got a different outlook . . . It is very, very different than when you're dealing with a Congress ((dominated by)) another party in a different setting."

In his chair in the Oval Office, brow furrowed, glasses in his restless hands, Bush is in some ways a far different man from what he was three years ago when he began his presidential odyssey. His wariness, his caution, are evident. But much of his regular routine is unaltered. He gets through these tough days -- just as he did the tense weeks and months of the gulf crisis -- by trying to remain human. "Exercise and try to, you know, lead a normal life," he says. "Going to Camp David, the whole concept of having your kids around. I mean, it's funny with something that big -- some things as mundane as family love and a grandchild running in or the dog here or all the common little things . . . I'd hate to be in this job and not have family."