James Baker and Russians in Iraq - 7 September 1990

“Well,” said a man sitting in the oasis of Flushing Meadows, where they United States Open Tennis Championships were being played, “things seem to be cooling off, or at least settling down in the desert wouldn’t you say?”

He was a decent, genial man and this was not the place or time to say, "No, I wouldn’t say". He was, after all, making a courteous attempt to show that while he lived his life inside the very small world, the peaceful cocoon, of professional tennis he was capable of coming out of it to take an intelligent interest in the larger world of the Middle East whose complex of threats and potential chaos we’re all suddenly made to confront.

But he was also expressing, in the form of a statement, a wishful thought that millions of people hope would come true.

After only – what is it? – five, six weeks of crisis, we find we can no longer go on living at the constant musical pitch of high C. In the days when we could choose or not choose to read the papers, we could leave political crises to go on growing and rumbling in the foreign offices of three or four nations and only pay attention when, after several years of provocation, the thing broke into our own lives in the form of recruiting posters.

But television now saturates us with fears and alarms in a week and the mobilising of hundreds of thousands of troops on the desert borders of several nations is made for television. The immediate American military response to the invasion of Kuwait seemed brave, even exhilarating at the time, the country was solidly behind the president, even before the idea dawned, that for general approval it had better be a United Nations effort.

In case the Congress, off on its summer holiday, had other ideas, the president dashed to Washington, called in the leaders and sub-leaders of both parties and was mightily cheered to hear from them that there was no dissent.

Saddam Hussein with his million-man army, his poison gas, his missiles, his biochemical weapons, was a menace to the world, and, to the vast relief of the president who had been prepared to go it alone, 22 nations evidently felt the same way.

It seems an age – though it was only two weeks ago – since an American General said to camera, “We’ll kick their butts in”. It was a rousing reminder of the spirit of General George Patton, and of that American commander who asked to surrender at, I think it was, the battle of Bastogne, sent back his written answer in a word, the word was “Nuts”. Great stuff.

But then once the United Nations security council had voted, once the embargo was mounted, once we began to hear that scores of ships were sailing through the Gulf with harmless cargoes, we began to be told that perhaps the embargo, contrary to first reports, would not throttle Saddam and his people in a month or two, or three.

Mr Baker, the secretary of state, back from his anonymous vacation in Wyoming, did not promise or threaten to kick in anybody’s butts. He put a smooth gloss on the findings of government analysts that the embargo against Iraq could take more than a year to work.

He said, “What we ask most of the American people is to stand firm, be patient and remain united so that together we can show aggression does not pay”. He said this in a long session before the Senate foreign relations committee, during which several senators wondered why goods were being shipped to and from Iraq evading the embargo and going on to answer why the embargo didn’t extend to the air.

You’ll have gathered that Congress is back at work and now is beginning to ask the questions that, for a month or more, had been left to the news commentators, the columnists, and the innumerable experts interviewed on television.

Congress works slowly, carefully, its wonders to perform and its main weapon in tackling the president, what he’s doing and why on any issue, is the congressional committee. There are scores of them and they can call to testify anybody in the country short of the president himself.

It struck me on Wednesday watching Secretary Baker, sitting there fielding all sorts of questions from senators, sometimes friendly, sometimes not, it struck me that the open committee hearing is a far tougher, more probing ordeal for any administration than questions in the House of Commons.

I had the uncomfortable feeling that while for the moment Congress is willing to wait and see, it is disturbed by the call for patience and a long run over which we may find that Saddam Hussein is not strangled, his people survive and the boys are still there hunkered down in the rancid heat of the desert.

Put it another way and say that, as against the usual experience of a slow developing crisis – Vietnam for example – the dispatch of technicians, the advisors, the advisors turning into soldiers, then scores of thousands of soldiers and then the high drama of war itself and after that slow exhaustion and disillusion and the new and shocking experience – to Americans – defeat.

This time – thanks to daily, nightly, television of the embarkations, the sad partings, the scenes in the desert, the rainstorm of file pictures of fighter planes, missiles, the mobs of hungry refugees, companies in gas masks and so forth – this time, we’ve already had the drama, and it has not ended in glory and medals.

It was a big impressive show that is not going to pay off, we now hear, for a year, two perhaps and the big thrilling first act is to be followed by how many more acts of Cabinet officers and generals being quizzed and, in time, attacked before military affairs committees, foreign relations committees, intelligence committees.

The tough questions which during the summer holiday the commentators and columnists were almost too polite to ask were being rudely asked this week of Secretary Baker.

How many billions will be added to the debt to maintain those 145,000 men in the desert and how much are the 22 allied nations going to contribute? All right, we are grateful for a fighter squadron here, a cruiser or two there, but when will Egypt put thousands, say 50,000 soldiers in Saudi Arabia where are the Syrian tanks, where are the Germans, what about Russian troops?

One old conservative is already talking about French tokenism. The questions are not put quite so concretely as that, but if the reassuring answers are not forthcoming they will be.

The one awkward question that came up out of that Senate chamber and was highlighted on the national television news and, therefore, is likely to be the one question more than another that will seize popular feeling was, why do the Russians have over a thousand military advisors in Iraq, instructing in the use of the advanced weapons they sold to Saddam Hussein, and when are they going to get them out?

To Americans, obviously, their presence constitutes the most flagrant contradiction – you might almost say defiance – of the United Nations resolution and of the international alliance against Saddam Hussein. It’s a question to which Americans were eager to have an answer from Mr Gorbachev in Helsinki this weekend.

This is the week when the schools and the colleges are going back to work and play. So somebody asks, how about the students in the Gulf? In fact the question was put to me, how about the students and the war?

Two weeks ago, as some of you will recall, I was in San Francisco and the question came up most naturally on the campus that was the seedbed of the student revolt of the '60s and, later, the battlefront of student protest against the Vietnam war, Berkeley.

The University of California at Berkeley, which lies across the bay from San Francisco and which in quieter times is assumed by the media to be a true reflection, a barometer, of student feeling across the nation. The most noticeable thing was that for the past four years anyway and for the arriving students, politics is not, as one young man inevitably put it, our priority.

A history professor said, “I don’t remember a time when there was so little feeling, let alone indignation, about politics”. He conceded that during the past year the temperature of concern about war and peace had dropped dramatically after the rebellions in Eastern Europe.

The breaking up of the Berlin Wall, for college students as for many more people, positively marked the end of the Cold War and a blessed release from the prospect of a war in their time. After all, if there was going to be an enemy it had been throughout their lives the Soviet Union and now the Soviets were our pals and allies, their menacing war machine immobilised or being demobilised.

Peace, as we went on saying throughout last winter, was breaking out all over.

What, then, were the students priorities – getting good grades to get well-paying jobs, watching out for Aids and safe sex, feeling concerned in a guilty way about the homeless. Then came Saddam, the swift immense military build-up at once touched them where they lived and hoped to have their being for another four years, would they have to go to war? Would they be drafted?

The President calmed them at once by saying, there would be no draft, though the registration for a draft remains in place. But I noticed a general creeping bewilderment more than anything else. They may have read about the Second World War, but Korea has to be dug out of the history books or seen on M.A.S.H.

They were babies when Vietnam was over. American life for them has been prosperity, sport, some study, lots of fun and games. Who suggested a war? They’re not frightened by it, just now they resent it, they’d want a thumping good reason to have to go into it.

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

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC. Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.