The Issues

Steven Dutch, Professor Emeritus, Natural and Applied Sciences, Universityof Wisconsin - Green Bay

Oil

Either energy is serious, or it isn't. If it isn't, then stop blathering aboutconservation and changes in lifestyle. If it is serious, than controlling energy amountsto controlling people, and you may have to fight to prevent someone controlling yourenergy resources.

The Emir's Faucets

The Emir of Kuwait, we're told, had solid gold bathroom fixtures, or maybe they wereplatinum, or plutonium. While I was in Kuwait, I met people who had been tortured, hadspent months in hiding, and had had friends and loved ones disappear or be killed. Justexactly what is the relevance of the Emir's plumbing?

Why Didn't We Finish the Job?

We did. The UN mandate for Desert Storm was to expel Iraq from Kuwait. What part ofthat didn't we do?

So why didn't we go on and topple Saddam Hussein?

We didn't have a mandate to change the government of Iraq, only to free Kuwait.
The alliance included not only the US and its traditional allies, but also Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Syria. These are not countries used to cooperating closely with us or with each other. This was not an extremely stable alliance - it held together to deal with an immediate threat. The faster we did the job and got out before somebody remembered an old grudge, the better.
Nobody, not us, not the Russians, and especially nobody in the Middle East, wanted to set a precedent of the U.S. moving in, toppling a government, and replacing it with something more palatable. Just look at all the friends we made in Latin America by doing that.
Look at a map of the Persian Gulf and see who has all the waterfront real estate. That's why they call it the Persian Gulf (Arabs call it the Arabian Gulf). Iran is the major strategic factor in the Persian Gulf. Always was, always will be. That worked tremendously in our favor when Iran was a staunch U.S. ally, but became a threat in the days of Ayatollah Khomeini. So we want to keep Iraq from being a threat to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, but not totally powerless against Iran.
Immediately after the war, it did look like Saddam would go down. Between the revolts in the north and south, plus disaffected officers, there seemed to be a very good chance he would not last. Oh well.

Why don't we just let the generals fight the wars? Clausewitzonce noted that "war is politics conducted by other means." The only reasonsrational nations fight is for political ends. Irrational nations fight for adventure orplunder perhaps, but then rational nations have to fight to defend themselves againstthem. So war is inherently political. If you want a war free of political constraints youwant what never was, never will be, and never can be. While we're at it, I'd like anabsolutely unrestricted research budget.

The last general who got to fight a war absolutely on his own terms was probablyNapoleon. He'd probably have been much better off if he'd had a politician reining him inand giving him reality checks.

Kuwait and Saudi Arabia are Still Repressive

Nobody elected us to remake these countries in our image. That was never our mission.

The Media

Ever since the Gulf War, the media has been cringing in embarrassment over the way theywere "handled" by the military. There are two main reasons why:

Despite all their political prejudices and innate tendency to reject U.S. policy out of hand, the crassness of the Iraqi invasion and the brutality of the occupation got to many of them morally. The technical competence of the Allied forces and the inherent excitement of the conflict caused many media reporters to be swept up by the events. They lost some of their professional "detachment", or maybe it's more accurate to say that for the first time in their careers they found objective reality more interesting than their own fantasies.
The military "read" the media perfectly and gave them exactly what they wanted: comfortable quarters, convenient briefings, good sound bites and nifty footage. The media showed they could be bought, and cheaply at that. And they're angry at the military for revealing it.

So while many media critics lament the "uncritical" reporting during the GulfWar, my perception is that between the inherent excitement and fast pace of the events,plus adroit work by the military, for the first time in many years the media covered anevent solely by reporting the facts largely devoid of ideological spin. The Gulf War wasreporting done the way it ought to be done if the media were doing their jobs properly.

A good indication of how the media would like to have handled the conflict was the wayone network tried to get permission to film inside the facility in Dover, Delaware wherebodies would be returned. The military refused access and were upheld in court. Exactlywhat information would filming there have provided the American public? Howbodies are processed for burial? Any funeral director can tell you that. The number ofcasualties? Maybe, if there were any suspicion the casualty figures were being faked. Butthere are too many ways to spot fakery to make that an even plausible scenario. We're justtoo open a society. There is no information whatsoever to be gained by filminginside the facility; the only purpose of doing so would be to create emotional impact.Creating emotional impact takes us outside the realm of journalism and into the realm ofentertainment or political advocacy. Both are protected by the First Amendment but theydon't carry the same aura of sacredness as informing the public. The government is obligedto help keep the public informed; it's not obliged to keep them entertained or to providematerial for political activism.

The Embargo

We're causing immense suffering to the people of Iraq by continuing the embargo.

Excuse me. Who's causing the suffering? It wouldn't be Saddam Hussein by anychance? And it wouldn't be the Iraqi people, who allowed him to come to power and aredoing nothing to get him out?

We also caused immense suffering in Germany during World War II. The suffering wascaused by the actions of Adolf Hitler, who was allowed to come to power by the Germanpeople, and who failed to take effective action to remove him once his policies had provendisastrous.

Does this seem harsh? Ask yourself two questions:

Who's more morally responsible for creating the problem, a citizen of a country ruled by a rogue regime, or a foreign soldier who probably has never visited the country and may never have even heard of it?
Who's more likely to die fixing the problem?

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Created30 December 1999

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