President Bush defends Gulf War - 12 April 1991

I had to look back at my diary to be sure, it was only six weeks since the war ended, the day or the night, according to where you were in the time zones. I didn't need to look on any calendar to know that only a week ago I said something cheerful and factual about the effect of the desert victory on the American recession. Something that is no longer either cheerful or true.

Until 10 days or so ago, nobody, of whatever political stripe, would have disputed the reality, whether they liked it or not. The reality of the great wave of pride and relief that broke over the nation in the first week of March and rippled on well into the month. Indeed I said, a week ago, there's no getting away from the hard fact that the lift in the nation's morale seems to have weakened the recession. Well, the euphoria, it now appears, was as exhilarating but as short lived as a firework display.

Last time I was going on my own observation of course but also on one or two economic surveys by reputable research firms. One in particular, its March index reported that consumer confidence had jumped 21 points, the biggest jump in one month since 1967. But a week later, last weekend, there appeared simultaneously a New York Times' poll surveying the people about the recession and the monthly report of the government, the Department of Labor. The Times' report so strikingly contradicts the earlier surveys that it felt obliged to comment: "The new survey stands in sharp contrast to record-breaking surges in consumer confidence measured by polls in March".

Today, almost 60 per cent of Americans say they know someone who is out of work. Three out of ten mention a family member who has not worked for a year. With blacks, it's five out of ten. The conclusion of this survey is the vast majority of Americans, far more than the 6.8 per cent unemployed, have been deeply stung by the recession.

And on the heels of this limping courier comes the report of the Labor Department. It presents figures worse it admits, than had been predicted. Unemployment is higher than it's been in, 5 years. There are more discouraged, part-time workers than for several years. More unemployed have gone longer without work than before. And there's a great number of workers in manufacturing and factory work who don't come into the unemployment figures who, unwillingly, are working a shorter week.

There is, according to the government, one glimmer of hope. Which is really a sort of trick of refracted light. It's thought that employment may improve soon because there's a remarkably slow growth in the labour force. For example, in the past decade, the average annual growth rate has been 1.8 million newcomers. Over the last year, the labour force has expanded by only 650,000. So, if it had followed the normal rate which is three times that, of course, the unemployment figure would be much higher. It's a consolation of sorts. So for many more Americans than we'd guessed, in the glowing weeks after the war, life is not, as the lady I quoted last time said, "dull" after the war, it's nasty.

Apart from the pain, for so many people, of the daily realities they've had to return to, there is one big black cloud on the desert horizon that has done more than anything, I think, to puncture the ballooning euphoria of the 100-hour war. It's the aftermath of the war in the country that was ravaged by it. Iraq.

Mr. Bush's political opponents, in Congress and in the media, people who were strongly opposed to using force against Saddam Hussein were very quick and glib, at the time, to say, well, the president hasn't given a consistent good reason for sending that army over into Saudi Arabia and he also doesn't seem to have a plan for the peace. Of course not. Whoever has a plan for the peace in any war? Of course, there are always scores of paper plans while the war's on but most of them are a recitation of pieties like self-determination, more democracy, fair borders to ensure living in peace with your neighbours, arrangements for international discussion, well-meaning leagues to see that in future all disputes between nations will be solved by negotiation.

I get reams of letters, manifestoes, protocols from very earnest, very sincere and very wordy people who are against war, poverty, famine, greed and who expect to produce a peaceful world by recruiting several million members into their organisations. This has been going on since the 14th century.

President Bush was no better than his predecessors. The moment he decided to send the first 100, 200,000 men into Saudi Arabia, he said: we were going to fight aggression, we were against nations that violated international law by invading smaller nations. Little was said at the time about the American violations in Grenada and Panama, so judged at the time by, respectively, the International Court of Justice and the Organization of American States.

"This aggression," said Mr. Bush "will not stand." And once Saddam Hussein was conquered or put down or done away with, which was never made quite clear, there would be a new world order in which the United States under President Bush would be proud to play its part. How big or small or peripheral a part, was not said. Now that the war the coalition's fighting war is over, and we see in Iraq hateful divisions, revived ethnic conflicts, uprisings we never anticipated, the cry rises again: what did we go to war for?

The Security Council of the United Nations was quite clear. The war was fought to get Saddam Hussein and his forces out of Kuwait since he refused to leave of his own will. That was always the primary purpose though once the aerial bombardment started, the White House and the Pentagon, and the desert command, constantly declared that they aimed to destroy Hussein's means for fighting nuclear and chemical and biological warfare. We boasted before the land war began that all his resources of that sort had been bombed to ashes. But the aim is firmly stated again, in the very tough United Nations' terms, for a permanent ceasefire. Which Saddam Hussein has accepted. How we know he'll keep his word, I don't think we know.

But what has greatly affected and I'd say depressed millions of Americans, like millions every other nation with television sets and eyes to see, are the nightly scenes of the refugees, padding, overburdened with rags or children, or both, along barren plains or through grim mountains. Their only companions hunger, disease and well-remembered tales of atrocious acts against thousands of families by Saddam Hussein's forces. There are dreadful refugee migrations in the wake of most wars. What appals many people and riles some is the unwillingness of the allies to protect, with force, the Kurdish and Shiite rebels from what one reporter called Saddam Hussein's "vengeful butchery".

So now a fierce division of popular opinion has appeared here and deepens every day, between the administration and its policy not to intervene in the civil war in Iraq and the agonising migrations that are following it, and a body of opinion which obliterates party lines, that believes the United States, if not the Coalition, has a duty to bomb Saddam Hussein and his forces into impotence or a second surrender.

I just said that the people who want to renew the war cannot be tagged with any obvious party affiliation. Liberal Democrats and right-wing conservatives, who were dead against the use of force in the beginning, are among those who are hot for further punishment of Saddam Hussein. Conservatives in both parties who stood with the president from the beginning, now say the inhuman crimes in Iraq are atrocious, the plight of the refugees ghastly, the crushing of the two rebel factions brutal. But if the United States went deeper into Iraq into Baghdad or even began destroying Saddam's remaining and evidently competent troops, it would find itself in a political and ethnic jungle and required to take one side or another, or three, and have little hope of withdrawing. In fact might have to become the protector of one sort of Iraq, or one part of Iraq, over another for years and years.

The feeling for hot pursuit is intense. One spokesman for these presidential opponents started his column the other day lamenting the: "Enormity of the dishonour brought on the United States by President Bush's decision to betray the Kurdish people". It's a bad-tempered debate that's going on and it's taking a turn that doesn't please the White House because it might touch, at one point, on an uncomfortable truth.

When President Bush urged the people of Iraq to rise up and turn out Saddam Hussein, did the Kurds and the Shiite rebels expect help in doing that? The answer from them is "yes". Some expatriate Kurds said last weekend they were convinced that massive help would be on the way because they were recruited to urge a rebellion in talks given in an underground radio station set up, they say, by the CIA.

In other words, is the United States intervening secretly but openly declaring it must not? If it's true, Mr. Cheney, the Secretary of Defense, said last Sunday: "I wouldn't talk about it. Period".

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