Ambassador Glaspie's interventions - 22 March 1991

"With the end of the war, he dreaded the return to party politics with its bitterness and strife." That's a quotation. And since it's from a book entitled Churchill in Power, obviously the quotation comes from the last chapter when he finds himself, painfully, thrown out of power.

I think the same sentence could be written about President Bush, though he's doing his best to hide the dread by acting like a St George who has just slain one dragon and is going to call on the same courage to slay a few other dragons on the home ground. I find, from a little reading I've been doing about the end of several wars, including the First and the Second World Wars, I find that this is standard rhetoric from the victors, or rather from the victorious politicians.

But while, just now, there's automatic eager applause for any presidential speech urging the audience to emulate the drive and valour of the men in the Gulf, in attacking domestic problems, of course, nobody is going to be fooled for long. Softening up the command posts and the entrenchments of a huge army with massive aerial bombardment has nothing much to do with stopping the unstoppable flow of cocaine, say, across the southern borders of this country. Or with lifting the educational standing of American high school pupils up to the level of say Scandinavia.

If Mr Bush is inclined to go on with these rousing, but I'm afraid now pointless, pep talks, he's going to be made disinclined by a whole pile of statistics now being unloaded on Washington. Because this is the time of the year when new bills are coming out of the hopper and Congressional committees, in both Houses, are busy doing what is their main reason for being. Which is to call witnesses, the great and the humble, who may have some knowledge of the topic of the bill in question and on the facts they have to offer the committees then send a bill to the floor of their House or decide to bottle it up for later dispensation. If ever.

Before an education hearing the other day in which they were going in to, among other things, the appalling high rate of absenteeism – skipping school – among blacks and Hispanics. A black mayor testified, what used to sound like a lurid rumour but is now thoroughly attested by the Department of Justice as a fact of American life, that one black youth in four, between 15 and 21, one in four, throughout the country, is wounded or killed by gunshot. And just to bring the horror home to the assembled legislators, if not to say the busy men in the White House itself, figures are now made available showing that during the, what was it, 43-day war, more young American men were killed in Washington DC than in the desert.

However, before we get down to what the politicians blandly call the domestic agenda, which means poverty, crime, drugs, day care, bailing out the shameful thrifts, trying to do something about the rising, now the $325 billion deficit – before we revel in all that strife and bitterness, I ought to say that one powerful congressional committee, the most powerful body in Congress to serve as a watchdog over foreign policy, had a little tidying up to do. About the Gulf war and why it happened. And why it might have been stopped. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee, on Wednesday, called on a lady that not one American in 10,000 has ever met or heard or seen of, but that since January, since perhaps 2 August, millions of Americans have wanted very much to hear from.

She is April Glaspie, the American Ambassador to Iraq. All we've heard about her till now is the rather shocking report that only a week before Saddam Hussein lunged into Kuwait, she had told him that Iraq's border disputes were none of America's business. Now what has been, everywhere, inferred from this line is that the State Department thought Mr Hussein was blustering and would never invade. Of course, we also inferred that Miss Glaspie was not speaking for herself. It's not an ambassador's job to speak for himself or herself, except in private, perhaps to the spouse. She was under orders from the State Department and this throws the blame, if any, on nobody's shoulders but those of Secretary Baker.

However, in the din and blaze of the desert victory, no congressman of either party was ready just yet to deplore anything about the conduct of the war or to point a piercing finger at anyone in authority who might have prevented it.

Since Wednesday, only, since Miss Glaspie came before the Senate committee, we've learned a lot about her. She is a lean, greying woman of 49, with an austere profile and an earnest, but quite unruffled, manner. She was born in Canada and her mother's family had several members who'd served with the British army in Palestine when it was a British mandate. And it seems that this family connection spurred in the young girl a fascination with the Arab world, which has evidently held throughout her life.

There must be very few diplomats who knew in their early teens exactly what they wanted to do in life, and did it. She graduated from an academically distinguished, small college in California in history and government. And went on at once to Baltimore to the School for Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. With a Masters degree, she sat and easily qualified for the United States Foreign Service, and then came up against an ancient wall of prejudice when she wanted to study Arabic. A prejudice I'm pretty sure was, then at any rate, shared by all Western countries for obvious reasons. Having to do with the peculiar, and to us, demeaning status of women in Arab countries. So, women were urged to practise a diplomatic career in almost any other part of the world.

But Miss Glaspie climbed the wall. By concentrating at the start on Arabic and French, she made inevitable her posting much of the time to Oman, Beirut, Cairo, Damascus, Kuwait. She has also served in London and Stockholm. In Damascus, by the way, in the summer of 1985, you may remember the scene, a nightmare on the tarmac, when an American commercial airplane had 104 passengers and crew held hostage. April Glaspie was the moving force in getting Syria to set them free. And the American Secretary of State at the time, George Schulz called her "a genuine heroine".

She's been in the Foreign Service for 25 years and has every hope of staying in the Middle Eastern Department. Whether she can make it will depend a good deal on whether or not she can confound and repudiate the criticism of influential officials in the State Department who privately maintain that she alone is responsible for either misreading Hussein's intentions or being too tentative and unsure in conveying the resolve of the United States not to tolerate any violent action, including invasion. We didn't know that was the policy. This sounds very like wisdom being ostentatiously aired after the event.

We never heard Miss Glaspie's account of her meeting with Saddam Hussein or indeed of any of her diplomatic moves or duties, for seven months the State Department had forbidden her to speak in public. But there, on Wednesday, Miss Glaspie appeared before the Senate Committee, under the dazzling television lights, for a standing-room only audience. However weakly she may have behaved with Saddam Hussein, she never faltered in her quite contrary version of what happened on 25 July.

Now the only official account so far had come from Baghdad. It purports to be a transcript of the conversation between Saddam Hussein and Ambassador Glaspie. She was reported as saying, "We have no opinion on Arab-Arab conflicts like your border disagreement with Kuwait". That's all we ever read in quotation marks. And, of course, it lead to the general view of Miss Glaspie as either a blunderer or at best a scapegoat. She said on Wednesday, with no querulousness, no defensive emphasis, quite quietly and firmly, that the first half of her sentence had been edited. In it, she repeated this often, I mean to Hussein, she had said, "We will insist on settlements being made in a non-violent manner. Not by threats, not by intimidation and certainly not by aggression". President Hussein, she said, was flummoxed. It had only just occurred to him that we might really fight.

On the American side, Miss Glaspie said, "Our mistake was not to realise that he was stupid. He did not believe our clear and repeated warnings that we would support our vital interests".

That's a very different story. Why hasn't the State Department said so. The State Department says there were omissions in the Baghdad version but that it was essentially accurate. "Essentially", I imagine, is the word Miss Glaspie would dispute. Well, she's not going back to Baghdad. A new ambassador has already been assigned. Is she to blame? Is she a scapegoat? Is she a liar? It's surely up to the White House to go into all available evidence of what happened on 25 July. And if it comes out that Miss Glaspie is none of these things, and that her version is "essentially" accurate, the, I should think, it's up to the White House, to the president, to echo ex-President Reagan's phrase, "We goofed". And make it quite clear that "we" means Mr Bush and Mr Baker.

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