What's your exit strategy? - 23 April 1999

In the New Yorker magazine this week there's a cartoon of two jailbirds sitting on opposite benches below a window with iron bars.

They're simple-looking chaps. Their prison headgear could be mistaken for baseball caps. And one's saying to the other: "What's your exit strategy?"

I hope this cartoon is being circulated in the White House and the Pentagon.

"Exit strategy" is one of those simple-sounding, actually menacing catch phrases we've started using about war whenever it's uncomfortable to think a little deeper and acknowledge something unpleasant.

"In harm's way" is another. "Putting our men at risk" a second, and the third, most dumb and heartless of all, is "collateral damage" - which means killing women and children.

The same kind of mind which sometimes appears to be in charge among the media spokesmen for the high command avoids the word "war" itself, from the same instinct to jib at the facts of life. What Nato has been doing in Yugoslavia is "a military confrontation". I heard a Nato spokesman the other day say about some intended target that it too might be "an object we could address militarily".

I think "exit strategy" came in with the Gulf War. Do you remember the war? The, er, missile confrontation with one Saddam Hussein? By the way we're still bombing him several times a week.

Way back then the politicians here - mostly Democrats, who opposed President Bush's decision to throw Saddam out of Kuwait - they demanded to know, once that United Nation's object was achieved: "What is your exit strategy?" Some of them, I'm afraid, put the question before the United States went in.

And that's the mischief which has been repeated this time - chiefly by Republicans now - who after much wobbling have decided the aerial bombing isn't working and now they can safely decide to be against what they're already calling Clinton's War.

None of the men who used this preposterous question then or now appeared to stop and think what a wonderful advantage the question offered the enemy. To start a war brandishing your sword or your missile and saying on the first day: "We're going to whip you but we promise to be out in 60 days."

Imagine in August 1914 if, the day Britain declared war on Germany, Prime Minister Asquith had promised: "But we shall leave France and get our boys home by Christmas."

Now by a bizarre irony that's what the military actually promised the Cabinet and the Cabinet ministers told their party members.

It was their sober calculation that Britain, with its commanding weapon - the one that controlled the seven seas, its mighty navy - would blockade and starve the Germans, sink their inferior ships and have them begging for mercy within three months. Probably only a minimum need for Britain's tiny army if it need be used at all.

There was, however, one man - a field marshal on leave from his post in Egypt, a dour character who'd complained for years that Britain's army was ludicrously small and the Territorial Army untrained. He was persuaded to stay home as secretary of war.

A man of few words - some said because he was deeply stupid. Not so, said the First Lord of the Admiralty, one Mr Churchill.

"He spoke little," Mr Churchill said, "because he was a man of deep if dim perceptions of world movements."

And when it came the Field Marshal's turn to predict how long the war would last he astounded his colleagues and later, alas, the nation, by saying: "Three years or the duration. And the war will be won only by the last million men whom Great Britain can raise, train, equip and hurl into battle." Unfortunately he was right.

Of course this "home by Christmas" chant was a boast, not a promise made to the parliament - least of all to the enemy.

But that, I'm afraid, is exactly what is contained in a piece of legislation I mentioned a few weeks ago which the now-rallying Republican opponents of the war are threatening to bring up as the starter for a debate in Congress.

Do you remember my telling you when I was in San Francisco a month ago about a law professor at the University of California writing an indignant piece accusing Presidents Reagan, Bush and Clinton of constantly breaking a law which was well debated and solemnly passed at the time - the time being 26 years ago, 1973?

What brought it up then was a growing feeling in Congress that President Nixon - he was still undisgraced - and his Secretary of State, Dr Henry Kissinger, had too often conducted foreign policy, to put it crudely, as if the United States were the policemen of the world. The Act was called the War Powers Resolution.

It really wasn't a new idea. It wanted to recall the president - whoever he was - to one of the sections of the Constitution that the three of them together had flouted for - well, then, 30 years - namely Article One Section Eight, the Powers of Congress.

"The Congress shall have power to declare war, to raise and support armies but no appropriation of money to that use shall be for a longer term than two years."

Incidentally the last Congressional declaration of war was on 8 December 1941 - the day after Pearl Harbour - when Congress declared war against Germany and then Italy.

A month ago I listed all the countries into which one or other of those three presidents had sent armed forces without anybody's permission. Sometimes under United Nations auspices, sometimes under their own powers as commander in chief of the armed forces.

The professor reminded them that, not only had the three of them ignored the Constitution, but flouted the new War Powers Resolution Act which further restricted the president's powers.

He cannot use the armed forces, it says, until Congress has declared war or the country has been suddenly attacked. Then the president must, within 48 hours, say when and where the troops are to be deployed - another gift to the enemy - and then he must withdraw them within 60 days.

More than anything else, I think, that last provision, which writes in the equivalent of an exit strategy, was what made every president simply ignore the Act.

But now, as I say, some opponents of the war want to use the neglect of that Act as the agenda for a Congressional debate about Kosovo. Now, before anybody gets too excited let me say that if the present tactics succeed - the aerial bombing - there'll be no debate, but if not we could be in for a ferocious verbal battle over substantially not the war powers resolution but the use, ever, of ground troops.

Perhaps this constant harping on an exit strategy will have the good effect of never again letting a president start any military action and say ahead of time that he'll limit the forces and the weapons he will use.

Now, of course, the trouble there - with the weapons, of saying at the start you'll use what's needed - could get you into the hot water that drenched President Truman at the start of the Korean War. Usually a canny hand or mouth at repartee, and knowing when not to be downright, Mr Truman was asked the artless question at a press conference: "Is there any thought of using an atomic weapon?" That was in Korea.

Quite casually I well recall, and without a pause, Mr Truman said something to the effect: "Well every commander has to bear in mind what's in his arsenal." That was the effect of it I don't believe the actual transcript was ever published.

He thought no more about it nor did we, the gathered reporters, all except one - a reporter for a British news agency. He cabled a despatch to London and by London's evening those posters on the streets displayed flaring headlines: "Truman considers atomic bomb".

Scary questions in a night session of parliament: "Does the prime minister have any more information on the possibility of the President of the United States using the bomb in Korea?" General panic. The debate suspended on the petition of, I don't know how many members of parliament. Mr Attlee was urged to fly to Washington overnight and stop the terrifying Harry Truman.

Mr Attlee did so. Found a serene if not amused president. They talked about Britain's wish to have communist China replace Chinese Formosa in the United Nations against America's strong determination, as Secretary of State Acheson put it, not to let any nation "shoot its way" into the United Nations.

Only on the second day of their talks the conversation, according to Attlee's biography and Truman's memoirs, went something like this.

Attlee: "By the way you're not thinking of using the atomic bomb in Korea?"

Truman: "Of course not, that bomb is in our joint keeping. We consult with each other before we use any nuclear power."

End of discussion.

To this day all the British accounts of the incident I've read mark this episode as a heroic moment in Attlee's career.

The moral of this pathetic story is: don't expect a president to say aloud the first thing that comes into his mind. Somebody's going to exam every word and report it as a carefully worked-out, fateful decision.

Mr Clinton knows as well as we do now that his saying three weeks ago: "Positively no ground troops" was a first class blunder and a delight to the ears of Mr Milosevic, who could then proceed to do what we went to war to stop him doing - namely ridding Kosovo of its million and a half Albanians.

In a word, he's winning and he knows it.

As I talk, 1500 delegates from the 19 member nations of Nato are arriving in Washington to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the founding of, wait for it, Nato - the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation.

So how, what to celebrate? - that is the question.

The bodies of two founders - President Truman and Secretary Acheson - must be cringing in their graves.

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.