The Gulf War begins - 18 January 1991

I was in Los Angeles the weekend before D-day and in the evening there, as everywhere else in most of the world, the news reporters were speculators, guessing in long bouts of wordiness what would or might happen now that time and the last whimpers of diplomacy were giving out.

On the Friday evening after the national network anchor men and women had had their say, came the local news. Local meaning the news about or thought most appealing to the 13 millions of greater Los Angeles.

The first item was something that I certainly would not have guessed in a hundred tries, Los Angeles had run out of gas masks. It seems that several years ago Israel had placed a massive order for gas masks with a Midwestern manufacturer, the order was lavishly filled so that eventually Israel said, hold, enough. The manufacturer was stuck with many thousands of gas masks which eventually found their way to, I suppose, among other cities, Los Angeles. I don't know the numbers that had lain in the army and navy stores there, but, after Mr Perez de CuŽllar had failed in Baghdad there was a swoop of Angelinos, the stock ran out, and the last picture I saw was of a young mother, in Hollywood diligently tying gas masks on her two toddling daughters and that at what 8,000 miles away from the Persian Gulf, what did they think they were doing?

Well, I gather there'd been a television programme, dreamed up and put together very quickly entitled something like Target New York, Terrorism Alert. The programme had not even been shown then, it had used trailers by way of promotion. And apparently it picked out possible targets that Iraqi in the United States or associated Arab terrorists might move in on. This was a scary programme even in anticipation. However lurid its imagined incidents, however faked its pictures of terrorist attacks, their producers were absolutely safe from any threat of slander or even of inciting to riot. Inciting to caution is probably what they would have claimed. Yet, wherever this programme was shown the viewers must have transferred the imagined horrors to their own city, their own homes. Hence at the mere dark suggestion that the big cities of America and Western Europe are vulnerable to renewed terrorism, several thousand Angelinos hop into the old car and whip off to the army and navy stores to protect themselves against the worst and you might say the most extreme improbability of Iraqi vengeance.

I felt about this programme as I've felt about other programmes and discussions Ð especially of chemical and biological warfare Ð that though they are done with, no doubt the most serious and compassionate intentions, the effect of them cannot help but deliver yet another wounding blow to the morale of the ordinary citizen. Two or three months ago I aired a similar misgiving about the nightly interviews on two of the three national networks of mothers and children left behind by embarking troops. Brave motherly faces, whining or crying children, true, distressing, but they couldn't have served a demoralising purpose any better if they'd been made under the personal supervision of Saddam Hussein himself.

Well, after Los Angeles a couple of days and nights in Washington where the anxiety of Americans in and out of Washington centred on the Congress and what it would do now, now that it had got what it wanted. A debate to sanction or reject the president's power to wage war. You'll recall that in the months since Saddam's August invasion and once the president has sent the first hundred thousand to defend Saudi Arabia, Congress started to protest his unilateral power and to remind them that the constitution gives to the Congress a lien, the right to declare war.

Almost up to the January United Nations deadline the president had flouted Congress, reminding them in his term that they've been about two hundred occasions on which the United States has gone to war without permission of Congress. It's true that the last time Congress voted to declare war was in the spring of 1942, against Hungary and Romania. The reason Congress has become in the past decade and more so touchy about the war power is of course, Vietnam, the great trauma which wounded Americans in many ways.

When it was over, Congress passed a war powers act, which requires the president once he has gone to war to seek permission from the Congress to continue and to continue the money for it after 60 days. In this crisis what everybody had in mind was the infamous Gulf of Tonkin resolution which Congress passed in 1964 after some North Vietnamese boats had attacked two American destroyers. Today we are not certain that that ever happened, but the word of it inflamed Congress at the time and with only one dissenting vote it gave President Lyndon Johnson a free hand to use any measures he chose in Vietnam. A vote that succeeding congresses have been regretting ever since.

So this time, both houses met in a divided move that caused much anxiety too, in the White House, for, only a week, 10 days ago. There's no question the country was deeply divided, split just about down the middle about going to war.

Well, it's all over now but for those two days before the fateful weekend we saw the House vote, 250 to 183 to authorise the president to go to war against Iraq, a bigger vote of approval than appears because of the resounding voice of Southern Democrats against their northern colleagues who voted heavily against the president. In the Senate the vote was closer still, 52 to 47, which sounds like a promise of bad news for President Bush, but, the Senate was at its very best serious, not flowery, barely sentimental and, once the vote was taken, most of the opposition said the Democratic requirement had been fulfilled and now the whole Congress must back the president and the forces. They were as good as their word, on Wednesday in the wake of the good news about the first allied air raids the Senate voted 98 to nothing on a resolution to give full support to the president and the troops.

Well, in this reconstruction of America leading up to the dread 15th, I found myself that night and without prior intention, prepared to sit up and wait and watch beyond the deadline, almost like sitting up on new year's eve. My wife who would never make a reporter Ð she's too, too emotionally mature Ð said, it'll never get better if you pick it. So we get bombed in our beds, I'm saying good night.

Well Washington, that majestic city was very quiet in the hour before midnight, the long wide avenues running into the circles that 200 years ago were designed to have cannons at all their intersections, the capital city was very quiet. All the government buildings had double security forces but, already installed, inconspicuous. Up and down the sidewalk outside the White House a candlelit troop of protestors, really hardly protestors, shuffling back and forth, keeping a vigil against the fading hope of a truce, a peace plan. Then, 12 struck and all the animation was indoors Ð coming from the grave gabbling voices on the tube, talking heads from Baghdad, Amman, Jerusalem, London, Riyadh, Tel Aviv. Back Ð always and through all the day and even through the first huge bombing raids of the allies Ð always back to Baghdad which was a surprise to me. I don't recall Hitler making arrangements for British and American correspondents to report from Berlin, the bombings of Berlin.

From Wednesday on it's safe to say that, all the world did what it found itself doing a year ago, after the invasion of Panama. They tuned into Atlanta Georgia and its 24-hour news station CNN. President Bush in the White House, Clint Eastwood on Carmel Bay, Mrs Thatcher Ð where ever, Saddam Hussein in one or other of his 50-odd bunkers. An extraordinary development in the history of television that two or three years ago nobody anticipated except, of course, the inventor himself the brash and bouncing Mr Ted Turner who announced 10 years ago that that was his idea all along.

In this high-tech war, in which unmanned missiles will reach a target 300 miles away in a few minutes, the fortunes of war as never before can swing in the moment that you're commenting on them. And so in the beginning of this war it's noticeable that the papers the commentators, the White House, the Pentagon, even perhaps the central field command, can only react to the news of the past few hours. On Thursday morning here, the tone was elation and astonishment, the thousand-plane air raids the almost negligible response, the stock market upped 114 points. Friday morning was the morning after the missile attacks on Israel, Saddam Hussein had kept a dire promise and from the desert headquarters. In the Pentagon and on Friday noon from the president himself, the word was beware of euphoria. Mr Bush brought a reminder I don't think would have occurred on Wednesday night, Saddam Hussein has spent many years and all his resources building this mighty military machine and he's not, as the president put it, to be overthrown over night.

By the time of the evening television programmes on Thursday night, what was surprising to me, was that the commercial networks at vast expense by way of reimbursing sponsors were cancelling their regular entertainment programmes as they went along. Public television did the same, the coverage was as continuous as if we were watching the world series of the football super bowl. Then it occurred to me, for most of the correspondents this is their first war. Surely as the war goes on there will be other news, other preoccupations, other things in life to do. But it's the first war for everybody in the age of the instant satellite communication. Why do the television people cover the whole war all the time? Because the satellites are there.

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