Operation Desert Storm - 17 January 1992

It seems this week has been devoted in print and on the tube to worrying about the footloose republics that once comprised the Soviet Union, but mostly to remembering Desert Storm.

The 16th of January, being the day the war began a year ago, was of course not to be overlooked by the Republicans, to remind people of a swift and famous victory, but by the Democrats who can go about contrasting with many manufactured sighs, the George Bush who mobilised half a million troops and thrashed Saddam Hussein in a hundred hours than the George Bush just returned from a trip to Tokyo, whose main purpose, according to the Democrats, was to beg the Japanese for mercy.

So long as the recession drags on, the Democrats who are running for the presidency can hammer away at this theme of the martial George Bush abroad and the faltering George Bush at home. Look here, upon this picture and on this, one candidate quoted, and it didn't matter that the small crowd stamping in the snows of New Hampshire didn't know or care much who was being quoted.

Apart from this mechanical theme, the Democrats have problem with remembering or celebrating the desert war. President Bush caught them out when, a year ago, they started complaining of the fact – and it is a fact – that since the Congress declared war on Italy in 1941, the United States has participated in many little wars on the say-so only of the president of the United States. Even though the constitution says that the power to declare war rests exclusively with the Congress. The Democrats at the turn of last year were getting ready to start bawling "no more undeclared wars", when President Bush said, quite right, I'm going to put it up to you. So he did and the Congress voted by handsome majority to back him. Moreover, and this was something that even the Democrats who urged economic sanctions but no war could not ignore, the Security Council of the United Nations had voted unanimously for the first time to take military action.

The other memory the Democrats don't want to revive is the number of them who, right up to the moment when the guns went off, argued that economic sanctions alone would be enough to cripple Saddam Hussein. Anybody who believed that then has surely had to have a grim second thought. In the light of the findings of that United Nations inspection team, which has unearthed all sorts of nuclear materials* and facilities, in spite of the cataclysmic bombing and the sanctions. Mr Bush well knows the discomfiture of the Democrats about the war and the availability of their old speeches and protests and he isn't going to let go of the one prominent Democrat who spoke and voted against the war all along and he, Mr Bush, must be very grateful to him – he is no less than Mr Mitchell, the Democrats' leader in the Senate. Up in New Hampshire this week, Mr Bush said, with well-feigned disgust, if I'd listened to him a year ago, Saddam Hussein would now be in Saudi Arabia and you'd be paying $20 a gallon for gas.

An aspect of the war that the President's critics have fastened on with more confidence is the order to cease fire as soon as the Saddam legions were seen to be retreating north, hence the failure to block the city of Basra and so surround and capture not only two divisions of the Iraqi Republican Guard, but 600 tanks and that fleet of helicopters which were soon be used to suppress the Shi'ite rebellion. The answer to that is one the president will stand by, that the United Nations mandate had been fulfilled, which was to liberate Kuwait and that the damage being inflicted on the tanks and trucks and guns and men of the retreating Iraqis, was already horrendous. General Powell, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, had the decisive word here. What was streaming headlong north, he told the President, was a broken army, thousands of soldiers no longer able to fight, running for their lives. To subject them to massive aerial bombardment would be, he said, un-American and un-chivalrous. President Bush listened and agreed and ordered the ceasefire. That decision also is enough to parry criticism that the Allied forces should have gone on to Baghdad. That was no part of the United Nations sanction and would undoubtedly have led to long occupation and spreading outrage throughout the Arab world.

About the CIS, I suppose we have to call it, or the loose collection of republics on the loose that for 70 years formed the Soviet Union. Rarely an evening goes by that we don't see something, hear something, that requires us to cross our thumbs and hope for the best through the winter. The bread queues, the Lenin-Stalinist demonstrations in Moscow, the boast of the rather impressive Mr Zhirinovsky, that he will have 99% of his administration in place to change the guard and succeed Mr Yeltsin by mid-April at the latest. And in one long and unforgettable scene, the reminder that among the hungry, in the breadlines, are hundreds of nuclear physicists whose salaries have gone or are in doubt, who are either getting offers or soon will, to be restored to a comfortable, if not a lavish life by any one of 10 or 12 countries that have nuclear ambitions or a capability already well underway.

Talking of changing of the guard, do you remember the name Angela Davis? Seems strange to be bringing her name in just that way when you consider that 20 years ago there were committees of young people formed, all over the world, to set her free. Certainly I know there was one in Golders Green and surely there were chapters in Bombay and Berlin and Stockholm and on and on. Well, Angela Davis was a young university teacher in the University of California at Berkeley, across the bay from San Francisco. She was beautiful and black and bright and she was a down the line Marxist, which in those days meant unquestioning devotion to the big man in the Kremlin, whoever he was. At the time, in the spring of 1972, it was, he was Leonid Brezhnev.

Anyway, what should she have been set free for? She was charged with murder, kidnapping, criminal conspiracy and with buying the guns that were used to kill a judge in his own courtroom. Almost as soon as she was arrested, these committees of sympathy sprang up all over the place. If you ran into any one of their placard carriers, they'd tell you that Miss Davis didn't have a chance of a fair trial any more than the two black brothers who were on trial in California for killing a white prison guard. Miss Davis swore they didn't have a chance of a fair trial either. But the two brothers were acquitted by an all-white jury. Miss Davis called the verdict beautiful. She herself had a, presumably, fair trial and was acquitted of all charges, after which she promptly made a triumphal lecture tour of the Soviet Union denouncing the United States and, among other things, its system of so-called justice.

Well, I think it's fair to say that until this past week, she had vanished from the news as completely as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. By the way, they came roaring back into print after a team of forensic experts dug up a pair of skeletons in Bolivia and believed them to be the remains of none other than those infamous, free-wheeling outlaws. The astonishing news on the Angela Davis front, now that she's middle-aged, black and beautiful, is that she's been tossed out of the Communist Party of the United States by Gus Hall, the 81-year-old boy from Minnesota who is the perennial general secretary of the party in America. In 1983, Mr Hall wrote his last book which was called, Karl Marx: Beacon for Our Times. Two years later, Mikhail Gorbachev came to power and began to put into effect the liberal reforms of glasnost and perestroika, which greatly pained Mr Hall and keepers of the true faith everywhere. The succession of Mr Yeltsin didn't help the party here at all and its numbers dwindled and shrank. But old Gus Hall was not to be shaken, not even by the succession of Boris Yeltsin. His response to the idea of abolishing the Communist Party was to trim the wick of the flame in this country and cry a plague on all reform, including the, as it turned out, impossible idea of Mr Gorbachev to introduce democratic freedoms and a measure of free marketeering into the Soviet Union, but still keep it firmly within the stockade of the Communist Party.

Well, Mr Hall decided that as far as the party in America was concerned, not only did it deplore Mr Yeltsin, it deplored almost as much, Mr Gorbachev's democratising reforms. Mr Hall, at the recent general meeting, came out for the grand old party, back, he proclaimed, to Lenin and Stalin. But Miss Davis had already indicated the way she wanted the party to go. It was the way of Gorbachev. She made a speech or a statement which was uncannily almost word for word taken from the declaration of faith that proved to herald Mr Gorbachev's downfall. The same with Miss Davis. She was deemed to be a heretic and has been excommunicated. She is no longer, by the American party standard, a true Communist. The news item that carried this story had a sombre closing sentence. Following on Miss Davis's expulsion, it said, massive defections from the party are to be expected. You have to wonder how massive those defections can be in a party whose full strength in a country of 255 millions is just under 20,000.

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