America Abroad: High Noon Minus the Shoot-Out

By Strobe Talbott

In his feud with Saddam Hussein, George Bush is trying to be Gary Cooper in the climactic scene from High Noon. As the lanky sheriff faces down the archvillain, frightened townspeople peek out of the windows to see who will be left standing in the dusty street. "This planet's not big enough for the two of us," says the leader of the free world.

We know what's supposed to happen in the movie: a quick draw, a clean kill and a happy ending. But we've also seen repeatedly how reality has a way of departing from the script, frustrating hero and audience alike. The guy in the black hat won't go for his pistol or otherwise provide a pretext for the big shoot-out. The sheriff is left muttering that he'll get the varmint next time. And when the next time comes, there's often a new sheriff.

The pattern goes back at least 30 years. For John Kennedy, bandito Numero Uno was Fidel Castro. The Bearded One occasioned both the greatest debacle of J.F.K.'s term, the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, and the most dangerous incident of the cold war, the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. Lyndon Johnson's presidency became a battle of wills between Johnson and Ho Chi Minh. Johnson lost. Jimmy Carter found himself squared off against the Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini. Desert One, site of the failed attempt to rescue the U.S. hostages in 1980, was Carter's Bay of Pigs -- and, as it turned out, his Waterloo.

Ronald Reagan, naturally, had the best instincts for how Hollywood would handle these things. He staged a dogfight with Muammar Gaddafi's air force over the Gulf of Sidra in 1981. Five years later, Reagan wowed the world with Thirty Seconds over Tripoli. That raid was nothing less than an assassination attempt, in the same spirit as the cloak-and-dagger boys' dreams of using exploding cigars and Mafia hit men to finish off Castro in the 1960s. Much was made of how U.S. bombers taught Libya a lesson for its sponsorship of terrorism. Maybe so, but they missed their main target: Gaddafi himself.

There were obviously differences among those cases. Castro had the backing of another, now deceased superpower. Ho was a nationalist waging a civil war, as well as a Kremlin ally waging an ideological one. Khomeini was the avatar of Islamic rage against the West. But they also had something in common: by dodging American bullets, sometimes literally, each enhanced his standing in various quarters of the Third World.

And each lived to see his American nemesis leave office, one way or another. Castro has already outlived Kennedy by 29 years. By the time Ho died in 1969, U.S. opposition to the Vietnam War had driven Johnson back to Texas. Khomeini went on taunting the Great Satan for nine years after Carter's defeat. Reagan may have given Gaddafi the scare of his life, but only one of them is in retirement.

Now it is Bush vs. Saddam. From the beginning of the Persian Gulf showdown, Bush personalized the conflict. He implied that Saddam's removal from power, if not from this world, was as much an American objective as his eviction from Kuwait. He denounced Saddam as "worse than Hitler." When hurled from the bully pulpit, such epithets have, as they say in Washington, policy implications. They create expectations and raise questions: Would Hitler have been allowed to remain the Fuhrer of Germany after World War II?

In the messy epilogue to Desert Storm, Bush called for an uprising against "the dictator Saddam" and hoped out loud for "a sort of Ceausescu scenario," a popular uprising that would induce ruling circles to turn on the leader. But when it looked as though the insurgent Kurds in the north and the Shi'ites in the south might tear Iraq apart, Bush let Saddam unleash his helicopter gunships against the rebels and thus consolidate his power. The issue in the gulf was suddenly not so personal after all. Bush calculated that assuring the survival of the Iraqi state was worth permitting Saddam to continue as its President for a while.

But a while has gone on too long. Now Bush is infuriated and embarrassed that Saddam's smug, often smiling image still blights the TV screen. Moreover, to Washington's dismay, some U.S. partners in the gulf war, particularly Turkey, are inclined to make peace with Saddam on the theory that in his weakened condition, he will keep Iraq together but not be able to throw his weight around.

In the past several weeks, Bush has made a show of reaching for his six-gun and polishing his badge. In a five-day period last month, he renewed his call on "the Iraqi people and the Iraqi military" to install "a new regime"; CIA director Robert Gates told Congress that Iraq will be a threat to the region "at least as long as Saddam Hussein remains in power"; and Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney publicly predicted that Saddam "will, in fact, be toppled." Since then, the press has been awash in leaks about a covert campaign and hints of a possible military operation.

The Administration believes it is frightening Saddam, emboldening his enemies and giving pause to those, like the Turks, who might otherwise let bygones be bygones. In short, the U.S. thinks it is putting pressure on Saddam. It may, however, end up putting pressure on itself. If, come May or June or November, Saddam is still thumbing his nose at Uncle Sam, Cheney's prediction will be remembered as wishful thinking, and Bush will look like a bluffer. Not a happy position for the sheriff, especially one up for re- election.