150,000 more troops to Iraq - 16 November 1990

In what we call an off year, when there's no presidential election but when the elections are for a new House of Representatives, one-third of the Senate seats, but also a time when many states elect new governors –and there are, across the country, local elections for every sort of office from mayor to dog – we can always assume once the November election is over that Americans will be absorbed, more than at any other time, with their local troubles, with the things they've just voted for or against.

Because the Congress is dead and gone, the senators and congressmen have gone back to the grass roots or the asphalt jungle, and the new Congress won't come to life until January.

So this is the time when you expect to hear what the new governor of California's going to do about the crackling fight between the state's mighty legion of farmers and the smaller, but equally belligerent, legion of environmentalists over the use of pesticides.

A time when we expect to learn what the new governor of Massachusetts is going to do, to salvage the state from the pit of debt and depression, into which it as plunged by the departing governor, one Michael – remember? – Dukakis.

And here, in New York City, we do hear that the man who replaced the incomparable, the incorrigible Ed Koch, New York's first black mayor, Mr David Dinkins, he has spread before New Yorkers a very scrawny dish of goodies.

In fact what he had to announce last week was that many promised goodies weren't going to be served. The several thousand new policemen for duty on the streets? Can't afford them. A pay rise for the schoolteachers, which had been joyfully applauded? It will have to be revoked. Cuts everywhere and the quiet, unannounced, sneaky threat of new taxes.

It's much the same all across the country. Lay-offs throughout most industries, threatened cuts in social services and everywhere the growing problem of rot in the physical structure of the cities, the roads, water and electrical systems, bridges, the nervous system, if you like, of any city's vitality.

A system built, of course, built to last we thought, a century ago. In short, the question is no longer, is the country moving into a recession, but how deep is it now?

Well of course the inner pages of our newspapers, the second and third items of our nightly television news programmes, are about such things. But while the big story remains Saddam Hussein and the Gulf, suddenly within one week, another figure has been unwillingly shoved into the limelight, as if into the dock in a court of law, and challenged to defend himself, and he is President Bush. Within two weeks, the approval for his Gulf policy has dropped from 69% to 49% and it is slumping more every day.

Why now? What set off this popularity landslide was the president's announcement last week that he not only had cancelled the plan for rotating the forces that go on duty in the Gulf, but he was ordering another 150,000 troops to Saudi Arabia.

This will build the American fighting force, by Christmas or thereabouts, into 380,000 and that's, that's only 40,000 less than the entire American forces that, in the end, served in Korea. Served, of course, meant fought and so far, in the Gulf, not a bullet has been fired.

The president said he was sending that extra 150,000 to provide an adequate offensive military option. You may have noticed that in all the political announcements, the United Nations resolutions, the ambassadorial pronouncements, we stagger through thickets of jargon and always come out with something like "offensive option".

And what does that mean? Of course it means war. On the day that President Bush announced the huge increase in the number of "offensive option" personnel, that means soldiers, he also let drop the casual, irritated, aside that he's had it with Saddam Hussein.

Well I'm sure he and the other allied leaders have said such a thing, as also fed to the teeth and had it up to here, in private, but when the President of the United States says it in public, and then orders up another 150,000 troops, what is that meant to do? Frighten Saddam Hussein?

Well, to paraphrase the Duke of Wellington, it frightened us. It frightened the disbanded Congress, so much so that many Democrats said out loud in public what they'd been muttering in private and two leading Republicans, normally dependable Bush lieutenants, Senator Dole and Senator Lugar, came out and asked the president to revive the dead Congress, call it back into special session now and, frankly, say what he has in mind.

In fact, the urge has taken hold of Congress, about a month after it was felt in the country, to force the President to answer the original elementary question. Why are we in the Gulf and what are we going to do there?

This seems an extraordinary question to ask, at this late date, almost four months after the president's so swift response to the invasion of 2 August. He said then, "We are opposing naked aggression. Saddam Hussein must get out of Kuwait. We can't have dictators walking into little countries. This aggression will not stand."

Well the first, what 50,000 and rising every week, were sent off to defend, the president said, Saudi Arabia, for if Hussein conquered coastal Saudi Arabia, he would control over 40% of the world's oil supply. I should think that for any western nation, that was in itself an intolerable prospect.

It was unfortunate however, that the administration, president in particular, didn't stress this dire prospect and emphasise that it represented a threat to the economies, the actual prosperity of, among others, western Europe.

Fight for oil? Yes indeed, the president might have said, and gone on to quote vivid and memorable instances from history, of great wars, fought down the centuries, from the Egyptians to the Indo-Chinese, for some raw material whose denial would impoverish your country.

But neither the president nor his secretary of state came out firmly at the start and said there was nothing dishonourable in fighting for oil. The awkward fact which may have inhibited this line, was that the United States is far less dependent on oil from the Gulf than most other western countries and, most glaringly, Japan.

As the American forces gathered through August and September I must say many thoughtful Americans began to feel nervous about the president's apparent assumption that everybody knew why America was in the Gulf and there was no further need to define the cause more clearly and put it up to the people.

Of course there was no pressing popular objection to make him do this, for a month or so more than 80% of the American people backed him, on what they took to be American policy in the Gulf. Nevertheless, I felt at the time that the country was in a sort of a trance. It was proud of all those thousands of troops being deployed in Saudi Arabia.

A nightly high was available in the television shots of men thundering through clouds of sand, in tanks or toasting their families and saying things were fine. The country got a lift from seeing the first big, dramatic exhibition of its strength, surely to be used, if at all, in a good cause.

But once the United Nations security council passed that unanimous resolution and voted sanctions, it was noticeable with what relief a lot of political leaders, and surely millions or ordinary citizens, decided that the UN decision was an actual insurance policy against war. All those precious American boys weren't going to fight after all.

The administration expected, I think, that the troops would then settle down for the long haul. Living in the desert till March, April, maybe through the blazing summer, to see if sanctions worked. But the TV microphones soon amplified the dreadful fact that most, many, of the troops weren't at all prepared for a long haul. They wanted action or they wanted out.

Realising this, and getting disturbing reports about the morale of all those thousands, President Bush said he'd had it with Hussein and ordered up another 150,000 and suddenly it occurred to the complacent home bodies – you, me, the Congress – that perhaps, after all, the president meant all those soldiers actually to fight, sooner than later.

So again, suddenly, the New York Times and many other fine institutions begged for patience, let the sanctions work. Demonstrators took to the streets, no blood for oil. The Congress, roused from its deathbed, says, under the Constitution, the president cannot go to war. Only the Congress can declare war.

And that is absolutely correct, but they do not remark that the Constitution has been blandly ignored for 49 years. The last Congressional declaration of war was against Italy in December 1941. In the meantime, at least six presidents have committed American forces abroad, without even a nod to Congress.

So the question now emerges, does the president have emergency powers that transcend the Constitution? For nearly 50 years, presidents have assumed those powers. So a noisy confrontation seems to lie just ahead.

All this, the preliminary noise, the war drums, the street protests, the sulking troops, the weeping wives, the angry liberals and others in Congress, the rebellious Senators Dole and Lugar, all this must be music to the ears of Saddam Hussein. He must be leaning back, sitting it out and loving it.

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