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The Gulf War: Was It Worth It?
| Article
# : |
19625 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1991 |
5,307 Words |
| Author
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Adam Garfinkle
Adam Garfinkle is associate director for programs at the
Middle East Council, Foreign Policy Research Institute, in
Philadelphia. His latest book, Israel and Jordan in the Shadow
of War will be published thi fall by Macmillan/St. Martin's
Press. |
Judging by public opinion polls and punditry samplings from the country's major newspapers and magazines, it did not take very long for the shimmering luster of military victory in the Gulf War to acquire a patina of doubt, second guessing, and contrition. At the height of the Kurdish and Shiite insurrections in April, more than half of those polled believed that the United States either had done too much by having gone to war, or wasn't doing enough now that matters had taken an unexpected turn. By early June, fully 30 percent of those polled believed that going to war was a mistake, more than double the number just three months earlier.
Since the end of February, too, second thinkers have tried with mixed success to put the Bush administration on the political and intellectual defensive on a number of fronts: a new security arrangement for the Gulf that never seems to materialize, the lack of political reform in Kuwait, the seeming inconsistencies of administration views on arms control and U.S. military sales in the region, and the nail-biting meanderings of the Arab-Israeli peace process.
On reflection, this turn of events might seem rather a surprise, if one recalls how things stood when the fighting stopped at the end of February. At that time, a surprisingly wide consensus held that America had a new model of a "splendid little war." A rapacious tyrant had been given his comeuppance, American casualties were miraculously low, victory had been speedy and technologically spellbinding, and an evil had been undone in the dramatic liberation of Kuwait. The rest of the world, especially including a diplomatically docile Soviet Union, was at America's feet, and to many the Arab-Israeli conflict seemed (somehow) more pliable to U.S. diplomacy than ever. Generals Powell and Schwarzkopf were touted as war heroes and political powerhouses of the future, and President Bush rode the highest approval rating since the rating system was devised. Indeed, even those who had urged more time to give economic sanctions a chance to work were at least temporarily quieted by the sheer rout of the fourth or fifth largest military in the world, and Democrats had begun to engulf themselves in wry, self-pitying prognostication over the 1992 election.
So what happened? The answer is a complicated one. Disenchantment with the war has different sources for different critics. Those who opposed the war to begin with, after a stunned delay, have exerted a mighty post hoc effort to show that their judgments from before the beginning of the air war on January 16 were correct after all, as even if for reasons other than those claimed at the time.
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