The Path To Kuwait - 31 August 1990

It must be nearly 30 years ago the then secretary general of the United Nations, Dag Hammarskjöld, the most independent of all secretaries general allowed me a television interview.

He hated interviews but he yielded on the understanding that this TV film should never be shown, it was meant for the United Nations archives. And there, for all I know, it lies buried growing brown and brittle.

What remains sharp in my memory is Hammarskjold’s reason for hating all but the most formal contact with the press. He believed that if the press, and by extension the people, were allowed to know all the stages of negotiation between nations, the tentative proposals, the cabals, the setbacks, the little feuds, the various devices to save face, he believed that agreements would be very difficult to come by.

It was essential, he thought, that diplomats should be permitted not to talk about the stages of negotiation, so that in private they would not have to cover up their true feelings and could speak freely and frankly. He put it in other and shorter words. “President Woodrow Wilson was dead wrong when he championed open agreements openly arrived at. They should be” said Hammarskjöld “open agreements secretly arrived at.”

It was the general professional view throughout two centuries or more of the practice of diplomacy, but since the Second War, since the popular discovery of secret clauses to published treaties and agreements, and since during that war the access of the press and the radio became essential to keeping up the morale of the fighting nations.

Finally since the arrival of Freedom of Information acts and the universal peeping Tom of television, there’s no hope that any diplomat ever again can cook up agreements, good, bad or indifferent, without our being allowed to pretend that we know all along what’s going on.

I say pretending because obviously it’s still true that the most delicate and vital negotiations can be ruined by leaks, by distorted accounts, by rumours. However they are what we live by. Why? Mainly because, I think, there are now thousands of media correspondents, where once there were scores and they all have to write or speak a daily piece however little they truly know.

So in the past month in this country and I’m sure it’s true in yours, we’ve been engulfed with floods of information, misinformation, guesses, rumours, all masquerading as fact. I believe we know less of Saddam Hussein’s intentions than we knew in the late 1930s about Hitler’s intentions.

In the past week in the evenings in the interval, like President Bush of what he calls recreating himself on the golf course, I have sketched out in my head a talk as if it were to be given next morning. When morning came the talk, so far as it reported the known turn of events, was either wrong or dated.

So, since I don’t have a private pipeline to you on the day that you’ll hear this talk I think all speculation about what might happen is useless. What we can do is look at what positively happened during the past month or part of it and say what was overlooked in the reporting of it.

And the main thing that strikes me is the effect – which I’m afraid the White House never guessed at – the effect of President Bush’s decision to stay up in Maine for his long summer holiday and not to retreat, as President Carter did during his hostage crisis, and lock himself in.

In the beginning I thought Mr Bush was quite right and showed a sensible maturity in taking a regular break from the most pressing responsibilities. Winston Churchill, during the blackest moments of the war, used to retire to watch Marx brothers movies. We knew about the Marx brother’s showings but we also knew about the appalling industry he gave during the other 18 hours of the day to all the theatres of a world war.

Well Mr Bush, I learned, was advised by most of his closest aides to pack up in Maine and get to the White House. He refused, he said he was there for recreation and hoped the rest of America was also recreating itself through this drenching summer. Very good. But what I believe he didn’t anticipate was how, as the horizon grew darker, it would look on the place to which the vast majority of people turn for their news – on television.

Every night we saw soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines taking off from their American home bases, we saw their teary wives and bawling children. Cut to President Bush, out on his petrol-guzzling boat, or on the first tee, demonstrating his creaky swing.

And so later on to the hostages, the guests, and Saddam Hussein’s sickening impersonation of Santa Claus, and the unforgettable face of that sad bewildered little English boy, back to the President in his golf cart.

Evidently Mr Bush had meant to reassure us by looking confident. He succeeded in seeming callous. What else could the networks have shown, of a president who was only visible when he was off to fish or play golf? That’s where it seems to me the White House aides fell down.

We didn’t know, we weren’t shown what he was doing out of the boat, off the golf course, and while surprisingly to me 75% of this country strongly approves of the way he has taken hold, we’ve not seen him doing. By which I mean we have not seen or heard much of the tenacity, the imagination, the industry he too has invested during the days and nights since the second of August. And that is the story, the proof of how well he’s done.

Only an hour or two after Saddam Hussein plunged into Kuwait the president was up at six in the morning and at eight had the full national security council meeting. To the press immediately afterwards he was brusque and blunt, intervention wasn’t being discussed.

That same day the president was off on a previously-arranged speaking appointment to meet Mrs Thatcher in Aspen, Colorado. He appeared with her up against the Rockies, not saying very much except about the need to stop big bullies walking unprovoked into little countries.

But from that moment his next four days and nights were given over to a whirlwind of diplomatic business, ceaseless hours at the telephone which one reporter present compared to the decisive days of President Truman, when he put the Marshall Plan before Europe and proclaimed the Truman doctrine and later on, moved overnight to call the United Nations security council into session to get a unanimous vote on going into Korea, before the boycotting Russians could fly to New York.

Mr Bush started by calling Chancellor Kohl and didn’t get very far with him, he then called the prime minister of Japan in the brilliant gamble that if he would come in on an economic boycott, the Nato allies would be more or less shamed into it. It took time to work.

He then turned to Mrs Thatcher and spent an hour or more with her and it appears to be the fact that it was Mrs Thatcher who moved the president away from his pondering of the short-range American interest in oil and the open market of the Gulf to the long-range peril of allowing Saddam Hussein to negotiate out of Kuwait and go on arming, eventually with nuclear weapons.

By the end of what may come to be seen as an historic get-together the president had a policy he believed in. Now was the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party of the first part. He decided that to cement a real international stand he would have to have the word, the commitment, of the Soviet Union, of China, of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Japan.

Secretary of state Baker was told to get the Soviet foreign minister to cut off arms to Iraq. It was done, the president was again on the phone working on the Japanese prime minister who was hesitant but in the end Japan came in on a full embargo.

How about China, whose support the president, anticipating a United Nations security council veto, thought essential. The Chinese it seems will not do any do any diplomatic business on the phone, quite apart from the suspiciousness with which they look on Washington after the infamous massacre in Tiananmen Square.

Perhaps the decisive deed – we never heard of it – was the dispatch of an assistant secretary of state to China to stress the president’s urgency in having the Chinese cut off arms to Iraq. It took time and further pressure from the president on the Chinese ambassador to the United Nations to achieve, in the end, the first unanimous vote in the history of the United Nations security council to approve the use of force.

During this time Mr Bush had been on to the president of Egypt, who had to be noncommittal in public but privately promised military aide. The king of Saudi Arabia you’d have thought would have welcomed the prospect of a massive American armed force – he was in fact reluctant.

After several calls, the president sent Mr Cheney the secretary of defence, to King Fahd and spread before him satellite pictures of Iraqi missiles aimed at his cities. That was enough, it was the signal for the American intervention. Once again Mrs Thatcher called on the president and, from all accounts, in 90 minutes fortified the president in his stand.

The western allies rallied after that and Mr Bush took off for Maine to show us for the first time how he was spending his days – an hour or two of them at least. It was left to one reporter, Fred Barnes of a small-circulation liberal weekly to fill us in on how he spends the other 15, 16 hours.

We should have seen it, the visual signs of it, it would have done much to offset the frivolous impression left by those sea-going, golfing, hours, not to mention the devastating effect of those carefree television pictures on the Arab world.

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