FROM THE OUTSIDE IN: GEORGE H.W. BUSH AND THE PERSIAN GULF WAR, AUGUST 1990 JANUARY 1991

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1 CHAPTER 3 FROM THE OUTSIDE IN: GEORGE H.W. BUSH AND THE PERSIAN GULF WAR, AUGUST 1990 JANUARY 1991 Introduction In early August 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait and offered up a challenge to President George H.W. Bush s hopes for a new world order in the wake of the unraveling Soviet bloc. Instead of handling this crisis with its former ally in the Gulf alone, the Bush administration chose to enlist a broad segment of the international community to expel Saddam Hussein s army from Kuwait and prevent an attack on Saudi Arabia. In fact, domestic opposition was one of the largest obstacles as Bush sought to move ahead with military force; dealing with that resistance posed a puzzle for the president and his advisors. One observer noted after the 1991 Persian Gulf War that military schools will long be studying Schwarzkopf s march through the Gulf. Government schools will be studying Bush s march through Washington. 1 In this case study, we explore not only how President George Herbert Walker Bush marshaled improbable support from within the United States for military mobilization in the Persian Gulf region, but also from the international community. By using the four strategies, he managed both through intermestic policy making. A brief history of events is provided in the next section, which highlights the obstacles George Bush faced in The chronology at the end of the chapter summarizes many of these events. An Impossible Situation For numerous reasons it was a far-fetched goal to get Americans and an international coalition to threaten, and then employ, force against Saddam Hussein in response to Iraq s August 1990 invasion of Kuwait. This section presents the obstacles that constitute the puzzle in this case, and the bulk of the chapter illustrates Bush s use of the strategies for taking advantage of, changing, or reinterpreting the domestic and global contexts to fit with the goals of forcing Saddam Hussein from Kuwait and protecting Saudi Arabia from invasion. A. K. Grove, Political Leadership in Foreign Policy Andrea K. Grove 2007

2 42 POLITICAL LEADERSHIP IN FOREIGN POLICY Let us begin with a contradiction to the aforementioned assertion that Bush s plan faced impossible obstacles. Several changes in global politics indicate that Bush could have been far less constrained in his foreign policy choices: a monumental shift away from the rigid bipolarity of the Cold War in 1989 and 1990 provided an opening for the Bush administration. Up to this point, cooperation between the superpowers on the UN Security Council was hard to imagine; calls for action on one side were often met with vetoes on the other. However, in 1989, the USSR had scaled back its involvement in Third World conflicts and in developing countries more generally. Cooperation on long-standing regional conflicts in Latin America and southern Africa was increasing. The change within the superpower relationship in turn opened up the possibility that many Third World states would be willing to get on board with American policy. Indeed, the Non-Aligned Movement, established among large numbers of developing countries in the 1960s, had been good at manipulating the superpowers, playing them off against each other in ways to benefit the developing states. Once the Soviet Union was out of the game, many of these countries shifted allegiance to the United States. Former Soviet bloc states, such as Poland, did this as well. 2 In addition to improving relations with the USSR, Bush also felt that the United States had good relations with China. 3 President Bush saw an opportunity for an international community to work together in establishing a new world order. Still, someone else may have interpreted things differently, and getting the rest of the world and the audience at home to shift their view of the world was a great challenge. Given these structural shifts, what was it about the context of August 1990 that made the execution of Bush s emerging plans so improbable? The following obstacles had to be dealt with: the shadow of the past U.S. relationship with Iraq; the past policies of other states whose help was needed; the special case of the Soviet Union; the positions of states in the region including the Arab countries, Turkey, and Israel; the American public and Congress; and once the use of force was on the table, the antiwar (and sometimes pro-iraq) publics at home and around the world. The shadow of the past was perhaps one of the most important barriers that had to be overcome. The United States, France, United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union all had maintained significant relationships with Saddam Hussein s regime. The Reagan and Bush administrations pursued a policy of cultivating Saddam, despite congressional attempts in the late 1980s to push the executive branch to condemn the human rights abuses of the Iraqi leader. The courting of Saddam went beyond a limited relationship to balance the Islamic revolutionary leadership in Iran after Two analysts note that the Reagan and Bush administrations did not just tilt, they lunged.... Iraq was taken off the list of terrorist nations, even though it still supported terrorism. Further, any protests to Iraq s objectionable behavior were subtle, not tough and assertive. Not in August 1988 (after the war with Iran was over; emphasis in original) when Iraq used chemical weapons against the Kurds. Not in February 1990 when, at an Arab summit, Saddam warned against new U.S. efforts to dominate the region and called on all good Arabs to undermine U.S. influence. Not in April

3 GEORGE H.W. BUSH AND THE PERSIAN GULF WAR when Saddam threatened to burn half of Israel. Not when Saddam massed his troops on the Kuwaiti border. 4 Meanwhile, by 1987, Iraq was one of the largest buyers of American agricultural and food products. Saddam was promised a credit of $1 billion, which was the largest loan of its kind to any single state in the world. By 1990 the agricultural credit scheme had gone over the $1 billion mark, and yearly trade between the two countries had grown to over $3.5 billion (from near $500 million in the early 1980s). When investigations by the Treasury and Agriculture Departments in November 1989 uncovered that loans had been diverted to buy military hardware, Bush s Secretary of State James Baker made sure that the loan programs continued. 5 Further, export controls were relaxed to the extent that hundreds of millions of dollars of dual-use technology were imported by Saddam. The executive branch opposed congressional attempts to sanction Iraq after the chemical weapons incident in August 1988 and again in July Bush s first policy responses to the invasion of Kuwait were the pursuit of UN Security Council resolutions for an arms embargo and for economic sanctions. European and other states presented obstacles to Bush s efforts. Consider the situation in the years leading up to the invasion. France, for example, had long been one of the regime s largest suppliers of military equipment. Also, by 1990 Britain had become Iraq s third-largest trading partner, having been more cautious about relations with Saddam prior to the end of the Iran-Iraq war. 7 From 1984 to 1989, Saddam used $14.2 billion in hard currency to buy high-technology imports from Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and the United States, demonstrating that he was an important customer of these states industries. 8 Especially once the UN Security Council moved to adopt full economic sanctions (including on oil supplies), Japan was concerned. The Asian economic powerhouse had been sending $490 million a year to Iraq, for which it was owed about $2.56 billion in loan repayments. Japan was receiving part of these in oil, since 12 percent of Japan s oil came from Iraq. 9 Others with significant trade relationships with Iraq, such as Brazil, were also an initial obstacle. Turning to the Soviet Union, as President Bush put it, What we would be trying to accomplish ran counter to Moscow s traditional interests and policy in the region. 10 The USSR had played a delicate balancing act, attempting to maintain influence with both Iran and Iraq. Though during the Iran-Iraq War, for example, the USSR tried to court Iran. Yet, the longer-term Soviet-Iraqi relationship meant that there were people in the foreign ministry who would try to obstruct a hard line against Iraq after the 1990 invasion of Kuwait. These Arabists had to be fended off, since the Americans wanted to get tough with and eventually go to war against a country with which the Soviet Union still had significant ties. The text of UN Security Council Resolution 660 condemned the invasion and called for an arms embargo; the fact that the Soviet Union was Iraq s leading arms supplier posed another challenge. Many decision makers, some close to Gorbachev, still looked through Cold War lenses. In their view, giving the United States a blank cheque [sic] to lead the international coalition against Saddam would not only amount to an open admission of the USSR s decline from superpower status, but

4 44 POLITICAL LEADERSHIP IN FOREIGN POLICY would also risk years of carefully nurtured relations with the Arab world. What s more, this view was shared by the military, which did not like the idea of Western military deployment in the region. Because the Soviets had 8,000 personnel in Iraq, they worried about them becoming hostages. 11 Another challenge came from Arab states in the region, whose governments at the beginning of the crisis repeatedly asked the United States to stay out of the conflict between Iraq and Kuwait. This attitude surfaced before the Iraqi invasion. When Saddam moved thousands of troops to the border of Kuwait in July, the United States stepped up diplomatic meetings and communications with the Iraqi leader. The United States, at the request of the United Arab Emirates whose offshore oil rigs had been attacked by Baghdad in the Iran-Iraq war, sent two tankers and a transport in late July (arriving July 24). 12 At this time, Egypt s leader Mubarak and Saudi Arabia s Crown Prince Abdullah asked the United States to keep a low profile while the Arabs solved the problem among themselves at a summit meeting. 13 Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan made similar pleas after the invasion, imploring Bush to refrain from action. Undoubtedly, these leaders were concerned about how their cooperation with the Americans would look to publics who were more anti-american. During the entire crisis, Saddam would attempt to play off regional suspicions of Western colonialism in the Middle East and to exploit the divisions between governments and the Arab street. 14 National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft expressed understanding of this dynamic: It was important that we listen closely to, and take seriously, their advice and not act unilaterally in the face of it. We needed Arab backing for whatever moves we might have to make. We almost certainly would forfeit improved U.S.-Arab relations, and U.S. credibility in the Middle East, if we acted against an Arab state without regional support. 15 A lingering danger was that the Arab states would give in to a compromise solution, a constant temptation because their populations were so anti-american. 16 Others might have given in to Saddam s offers of riches from Kuwait s oil in return for support; Egypt s Mubarak reported that he received such an offer and believed that Jordan s King Hussein and Yemen s Saleh accepted. 17 Saudi Arabia s leaders had an especially strong incentive to compromise with Saddam in order to stop him from invading their country. 18 The United States also had to get Saudi Arabia to agree to American troops on its soil, something the kingdom was very reluctant to do. 19 In one of the August meetings between Prince Bandar, Saudi Arabia s ambassador to the United States, and Brent Scowcroft, Bandar explained why the Saudi kingdom was unsure it wanted to be defended by the United States. The Americans had a reputation in the region for being unreliable because of the retreat from Lebanon in 1984 and an incident in 1979 when U.S. support for the kingdom turned out lukewarm. 20 Another regional issue emerged with the U.S.-led effort to impose economic sanctions through a UN Security Council resolution. Sanctions, especially on oil, would make a difference only if they could be enforced. Pipelines through Turkey and Saudi Arabia had to be closed. Both states were concerned about the financial

5 GEORGE H.W. BUSH AND THE PERSIAN GULF WAR 45 and security issues involved. A major obstacle was getting Turkey on board, because the sanctions meant a substantial loss of about $7 billion and because the military and a few others in the government favored neutrality in regional disputes. 21 Iraq supplied about one-third of its oil and owed Turkey about $1 billion as well. In addition, just before the Gulf crisis the American-Turkish relationship was at a low point because Congress and the White House had condemned Turkey for the Armenian massacres perpetrated as the Ottoman Empire collapsed. 22 In terms of security issues, Iraq could also incite the Kurds who live in the border region of the two states. Saudi Arabia was more concerned with the security issues than with the economic impact of the sanctions. 23 A final regional dimension raising questions was Israel s interest in the conflict. Could Saddam be opposed by the coalition without Israel becoming a target? And, relatedly, how could Israel be kept from engaging in a preemptive strike issued out of fear that Saddam would act first? 24 These fears were fueled by Saddam s fanning of Arab-Israeli tensions such as an August 10 speech in which he declared a holy war on Israel and the United States. 25 Separate from the challenge of turning on a dime American foreign policy toward Iraq and the pressures of the weapons and agricultural lobbies noted earlier, Bush faced an American public and Congress that would be difficult to mobilize. With regard to the former, Secretary of State James Baker noted that... practically overnight, we went from trying to work with Saddam to likening him to Hitler. The apparent contradiction made it more difficult to raise the consciousness of the American people to Saddam s threat. 26 Bush was facing political challenges because the country was in a recession, and he was in an allout partisan battle with Congress over the budget. There was also concern, verbalized frequently in Congress, that the United States was footing the bill for all of its allies and risking lives out of all proportion to the benefits from opposing Iraq s invasion. 27 Perhaps the greatest obstacle of all within the United States was the Vietnam syndrome, the label given to the lingering fear of a drawn-out foreign military involvement, as described by Scowcroft. 28 Indeed, in Baker s words, The President s private resolve to order American forces into combat if necessary to expel Saddam Hussein from Kuwait was conspicuously lacking in support both in Congress and with the public at large. 29 Bush especially faced a strong challenge when he doubled the troop deployment soon after the November elections, and the consensus that had supported his previous moves seemed to be dwindling. 30 Polls showed that Americans began to think U.S. involvement was about oil and not allies and reflected a fall in confidence. 31 Finally, within the United States the move away from sanctions and toward the use of force in October and November was met with resistance by those who felt that war should only be a last resort; the sanctions should be allowed more time to work. The public opinion polls showed a strong sense of wanting to wait out sanctions. Hearings in Congress, timed to coincide with debate on a use of force resolution in the UN Security Council at the end of November, showed the prevalence of this theme. In October, significant figures such as Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee Sam Nunn, Head General of the U.S. forces in the Gulf Norman Schwarzkopf, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Colin Powell,

6 46 POLITICAL LEADERSHIP IN FOREIGN POLICY and Secretary of State Baker all questioned the move toward war. 32 In the November congressional testimony, the most recent Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral William Crowe and Air Force General David C. Jones stressed the costs of war and argued that Bush was moving too fast toward this option. 33 On December 2 at the hearings, five former secretaries of defense (Harold Brown, Frank Carlucci, Robert McNamara, Casper Weinberger, and James Schlesinger) argued against the use of force and that sanctions and diplomacy be given more time. 34 Former President Jimmy Carter also wrote a letter to members of the Security Council asking them to withhold support of the resolution. 35 Once the military option became the focus, governments around the world faced antiwar and in some cases pro-iraqi publics. Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Brazil, Tunisia, and Morocco were especially volatile. 36 In fact, there were only a small number of states where there was wholehearted support for the war effort, and in industrialized countries the governments were lukewarm anxious to do enough to show they supported UN resolutions but unable to go further because of a deeply reluctant public opinion. 37 The strongest support was from Britain and the other Anglo-Saxon countries such as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Indeed, in their accounts of the crisis, President Bush and National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft refer to Margaret Thatcher s firm stance after the invasion and her appeals to them to not go wobbly (she was replaced as Conservative Party leader and Prime Minister by John Major part way through the crisis). 38 France, with the economic interests noted earlier, was preoccupied with asserting leadership to find a solution to the crisis and in this way was an additional obstacle to the Bush administration s effort to act as a single international community, and to not reward Iraq in any way for its illegal behavior. 39 The French government also had to worry about its large Arab, pro-saddam and anti-american population. 40 Germany was distracted by its reunification process until actual war became a possibility, at which time the largest antiwar demonstrations in Europe took place. In late December, Turkey tied its willingness to allow the coalition to use its bases to NATO support, and Germany was resistant to vote for NATO approval. 41 Americans and countries around the world also had economic concerns, specifically that the price of oil would skyrocket as supplies were interrupted. Many of the publics in the Third World states listed earlier had concerns about neo-imperialism and the bullying image of the United States. In the end, one of the most remarkable characteristics of the campaign against the Iraqi invasion was the sheer size and diversity of the thirty-one-member coalition that closed ranks behind U.S. leadership during the fall of At this point, surveying the obstacles, we can see that Bush had his work cut out for him. He had to deal with the shadow of the past in terms of relationships the U.S. government and the weapons and agricultural lobbies had with Iraq; the past policies of other states such as France, Britain, Germany, and Japan; the special case of the Soviet Union and the staunch opponents within the regime to taking a tough line against Iraq; the positions of states in the region including the Arab countries, Turkey, and Israel; the American public and Congress; and once the use of force was on the table, the antiwar (and sometimes pro-iraq) publics at home and around the world. Having given the background on the international and domestic scenes, in the next

7 GEORGE H.W. BUSH AND THE PERSIAN GULF WAR 47 four sections this chapter works through how President Bush used the strategies to get from here to there. Turning Things Around: Intermestic Policy Making As with the other cases in this book, Bush is a leader who needed to gain support in order to achieve his goals, both domestically and internationally. While another leader in the same situation may have treated the situation in the Persian Gulf as an international policy issue or as a situation specific to the United States, Bush used strategies in ways that enabled him to blur the lines between domestic and international politics. Recall the four strategies and how they lend themselves to intermestic policy making. When he broadens audience, a leader expands his audience from only the domestic to include the international, in order to gain legitimacy at home, for example. Tying hands involves using an event at the international level to force action at home, or using events at the domestic level to force moves on the international front. Buying off means using domestic resources to secure foreign help, or using resources from overseas to co-opt constituencies at home. Finally, use of the framing threat strategy is the process of using a threat to the domestic scene to justify behavior overseas or using a threat to the international audience to justify behavior at home. As will be apparent in the sections that follow, Bush used a complex array of moves in this case. We begin with broadening audience since it was one of Bush s initial maneuvers, setting the stage for use of the other strategies. Broadening Audience The need for Bush to assemble a coalition in response to the Iraq invasion might seem obvious in retrospect. However, other leaders, notably George W. Bush in 2003, put much less emphasis on multilateralism in foreign policy in the region. Further, what makes this case so intriguing as well as a good illustration of the strategies in action is the way George H.W. Bush used the coalition idea to overcome a wide array of challenges at home and on the international front. This section presents Bush s use of the broadening audience strategy to address the obstacles generally, and also looks at how Bush used it at specific decision points to overcome opposition. Indeed, the primary obstacles addressed by this strategy were the resistance of Congress and American public opinion, the difficulty of moving from sanctions to the use of force, and the need to convince observers that the use of force would be a last resort. As with many other leaders, Bush and his advisors did not draw sharp lines between domestic and international audiences, instead understanding the need to make intermestic policy. The goal in this case became acquiring international support to be used to get Americans on board. A former advisor, David Gergen, notes, At every step, he first lined up international support for his initiatives and left Congress no choice but to come along for the ride. 43 And, as he did with Congress, Bush was cleverly able to influence [public] opinion at home by first mobilizing support overseas. 44 By using this strategy, Bush altered the situation in a way that made the use of additional strategies more necessary. Indeed, as journalist Bob Woodward noted, one of Bush s challenges was finding a successful

8 48 POLITICAL LEADERSHIP IN FOREIGN POLICY formula for speaking to the various publics out there American and coalition troops, publics, Congress, the United Nations, Arab states, Israel, and so on. 45 Subsequent sections illustrate how he dealt with this challenge. Indeed, when the news came that Iraq had invaded Kuwait, President Bush s first move was toward multilateralism. From his years as a diplomat and Director of Central Intelligence, Bush was aware of the complexities of this situation that posed some of the obstacles outlined above, such as the significance of having Moscow on board. In his own words, While I was prepared to deal with this crisis unilaterally if necessary, I wanted the United Nations to be involved as part of our first response, starting with a strong condemnation of Iraq s attack on a fellow member. Decisive UN action would be important in rallying international opposition to the invasion and reversing it. 46 Throughout the crisis Bush broadened audience through words and actions. To whom he appealed in his speeches is one indicator of his audience. In his speeches, discussed in more depth in the framing threat section later, in comparison to reasons of national interests and national security for acting against Saddam, Bush gave much greater emphasis to the universal nature of the crisis, the transgression of Saddam against international law, the threat to international security, and the reasons why the international community must act as one. For example, in August, the vast majority of statements in Bush s speeches referred to the international audience and not the national constituency (specifically, of 487 paragraphs from Bush s speeches, 229 referred to the international audience and 47 to the national audience). Bush s strategy of first garnering international support precipitated the need to couch the Iraq situation in terms of how it affected the international arena. Bush s actions also exemplified the effort to broaden audience beyond the American public to whom he was accountable. The same day of the invasion, August 2, 1990, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 660 calling for Iraq s withdrawal, settlement of the dispute with Kuwait through negotiations, and an arms embargo on Iraq (with a 14 0 vote, Yemen abstaining). Bush continued to make policy in the international arena with the proposal for economic and financial sanctions, passed as Resolution 661 on August The initial decision to go to the United Nations for the economic sanctions resolution was followed by consideration of a resolution approving a blockade. Bush wanted to be sure that the sanctions policy had teeth, and though the navy had stopped Iraqi vessels, none had been boarded. A decision point was reached: should the United States assert authority to act unilaterally (to board ships) or wait for the UN resolution? Secretary of Defense Cheney, Joint Chiefs Chairman General Powell, and Secretary of State Baker relayed to the president their views that using the United Nations was a better option. On August 25, the Security Council voted to give the U.S. navy and the navies of other states the right to use force to stop any trade with the outlaw regime. It was the first time in the UN s 45-year history that individual countries outside an umbrella UN command were authorized to enforce an international blockade, an extraordinary diplomatic victory for the administration. 48 Indeed, the administration had already made the argument that the situation was one in which they needed to get or keep much of the international community on board. Taking the United Nations as the audience on the sanctions enforcement issue was a key part of that effort.

9 GEORGE H.W. BUSH AND THE PERSIAN GULF WAR 49 Bush did not involve the domestic audience at all during the first part of the crisis. In fact, he did not address the nation until August 8, after the first two resolutions and much international diplomacy had already been conducted. It was at this point that American troops were sent to the region with the beginning of Operation Desert Shield. In fact, one of the reasons Bush did not want to tell the American public earlier about the upcoming troop deployment was that, in order to get the Saudi rulers to agree to having U.S. troops on their soil, the administration had to promise silence on the issue for awhile. 49 As far as Congress goes, Bush did invite leaders to Maine at the end of August and on a trip to visit troops in the Gulf region in November. Also, during the first week in September, when things were going well in terms of public support for the multilateral sanctions regime, Bush hoped to use the successes on the international front to push through a domestic budget deal with Congress. Referring to the budget negotiations, he wrote in his diary on September 7, Maybe this Helsinki trip with Gorbachev and the Iraq crisis will be the fulcrum that we need to lever a deal through Congress. 50 Without prompting from the president, the House passed a nonbinding resolution on October 1 (with a vote of ) supporting Bush s objectives in the Gulf and urging continued effort at a diplomatic resolution. The Senate passed a similar measure, also falling short of backing military action. 51 For the most part Bush focused his efforts on the international audience, actually keeping the domestic audience separate until after the vote for UN Resolution 678 at the end of November. Indeed, one of the significant signposts of this case is UN Security Council Resolution 678, passed on November 29, to authorize the use of force against Iraq to remove Saddam s army from Kuwait. The activities showing the broadening audience strategy in action were remarkable. For example, Bush had dispatched Secretary of State Baker to travel over 100,000 miles over 10 weeks, holding over 200 meetings with heads of state and foreign ministers. 52 Bush engaged in a stepped-up effort to emphasize the international dimensions of the crisis. The UN resolution was the culmination of these efforts. Then, as Baker put it, Now we not only had the diplomatic authority for waging war, but also the potential leverage to, in effect, shame the recalcitrants in Congress into doing the right thing. 53 As noted in the previous section, members of Congress and others opposed the move away from sanctions and wanted to wait longer before authorizing the threat of force. In a meeting with congressional leaders on November 30, Bush argued about how congressional opinion was crucial to the diplomacy (directed at Saddam) undertaken by Bush with a vast array of international allies. By pointing out that Congress and the international actors in the coalition were one, Bush argued that the Congress must act to send a strong signal to Saddam by going along with the use of force policy at the United Nations. 54 It was only through supporting the international actions that the sanctions could work. Senator Nunn resisted the link between the UN audience and America, arguing that it would not be the soldiers of the foreign countries who would die. Still, Bush responded to this criticism by stressing that world unity was achieved. 55 He also emphasized that the international support demonstrated to the American public that Iraq would not be another Vietnam, addressing head-on the Vietnam syndrome.

10 50 POLITICAL LEADERSHIP IN FOREIGN POLICY After focusing primarily on the international community as his audience and then tying this broader constituency to the domestic audience as he worked with Congress, Bush made a move that made little sense if we consider the international coalition as the main audience. Indeed, at a crucial moment in the battle for American support to forgo sanctions and move to a war stance, Bush broadened audience from the international to include a domestic audience and took action to address the concerns of this domestic constituency. November 30, the day after the UN Security Council voted to approve the Resolution 678 authorizing the use of force against Iraq, President Bush announced an initiative that shocked the international community. He stated that the United States would go the extra mile for peace by having James Baker meet with Tariq Aziz (Iraq s ambassador to the United Nations). 56 Members of the coalition feared Saddam would see this move as a sign of weakness. However, since he had secured the international support in the United Nations, Bush was more free to turn to the concerns of the domestic audience. As Scowcroft put it, this was a needed step to prove to Congress and the American public that the President was willing to exhaust all diplomatic alternatives before war. 57 Baker brought home the point of the way the administration was using the international to further domestic goals and vice versa: With the United Nations solidly behind us, no congressman could credibly oppose the war if these high-level meetings could not get Iraq to withdraw. Paradoxically, only by offering these meetings could we ever hope to obtain the domestic consensus necessary to wage war. 58 This section has illustrated how Bush used broadening audience in his intermestic diplomacy. In summary, to overcome congressional resistance and the Vietnam syndrome in the American public, Bush emphasized the universal nature of the crisis and took action through the United Nations first (pursuing resolutions on condemning the invasion, placing sanctions, and enforcing sanctions). He actively excluded an American audience. When he wanted to move away from sanctions and toward the use of force, Bush mobilized the United Nations, through a very active global diplomatic campaign, to authorize the use of force. Once that was accomplished, he turned to Congress and argued that congressional cooperation was a crucial part of the threat of use of force against Saddam. Failure of the United States to cooperate would undermine the effort at coercive diplomacy. Finally, once he had involved the domestic arena, the demand from within America that force would only be used as a last resort led Bush to suggest the extra mile policy. Some congressional opposition was about the cost of the military option; Bush would need to address this concern directly. The next section discusses the skillful way in which the president engaged in buying off. Buying Off As with the other cases in this book, leaders often use the four strategies in tandem. For the Bush administration during the Iraqi crisis of 1990, buying off was a significant tool in Bush s success at broadening audience. In other words, Bush s move to use the United Nations to get international support did not overcome many of the obstacles outlined at the beginning of this chapter. In some cases,

11 GEORGE H.W. BUSH AND THE PERSIAN GULF WAR 51 resources were mobilized to co-opt those who were reluctant to join the coalition, for example. The challenges Bush addressed with buying off were the fear of some states about the impact of increases in the price of oil, garnering support of states whose votes were needed on the Security Council, easing the worries of regional states concerned about physical and economic damage from the war, dealing with Israel s role, and the impression within the United States that other countries, especially the rich states of Japan and Germany, were not contributing as much as the United States to the coalition effort. As the last item in the given list indicates, this section shows how this strategy was not limited to one arena; domestic resources were used to secure foreign help and international resources were used to get domestic audience support. The American public and congressional opposition were bought off with funding from other states, and the economic and other concerns of states were bought off with American resources. Many states, including some Eastern European countries, initially had reservations about economic sanctions and then the use of force because of their need for oil from Kuwait and Iraq; they feared that war would bring shortages and a steep rise in price. Working with the International Energy Agency, the United States agreed to provide half of the 2.5 million barrels of oil that would be released per day if war began. By acting to guarantee a certain level of oil to the nervous states, the United States was able to get them in the coalition. In the end, prices only went up a little, then fell once the air war was going well. 59 In some cases, the United States worked with states to help them get multilateral aid to offset the problem. For example, when Bush visited Vaclav Havel in Czechoslovakia, a state foundering from the loss of oil from its Soviet supplier, he offered to help the newly free country to get aid from the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. 60 When the United States was working on securing the vote for the use of force resolution (UNSCR 678), Bush dispatched Baker to many of the countries on the Security Council. He recounts that the Ivory Coast told him how their concerns were not with the Gulf but with the issue of development, and that debt forgiveness would be extremely helpful. Baker agreed to look into including Ivory Coast in a debt forgiveness plan previously formulated by the G-7, the seven major industrialized countries. 61 Ethiopia, Colombia, and Zaire were offered new aid packages as well as access to World Bank credits or rearrangements of International Monetary Fund loans. Ethiopia, which had long been denied access to arms, and Colombia were offered military assistance. 62 The Chinese wanted to exchange capital visits between the president and their premier, but the most Bush would offer was a brief pull aside during a White House visit of the Security Council s five members. 63 In this case, the Chinese might have been bought off (though with diplomatic and not financial resources) but the United States was unwilling to pay the price. The Chinese abstained in the vote for UN Resolution 678; getting them not to vote no cost a brief meeting with the president. In addition, one week later the World Bank announced that China would receive access to $114 million in economic aid, though it is unclear whether the Bush administration helped with this package. 64 Finally, because Bush wanted to make a symbolic gesture thanking the United Nations for its help on the Gulf crisis, on the day of the vote Baker took Secretary

12 52 POLITICAL LEADERSHIP IN FOREIGN POLICY General Perez de Cuellar checks for $186 million in partial payment of the back dues the United States owed the United Nations. 65 The buying off of the Soviet Union was more convoluted. In this case, the Bush administration explained to Prince Saud and Prince Bandar that Gorbachev was under a lot of pressure from the old guard (the Arabists ) described earlier, making his cooperation against Iraq a tough sell. The Saudis were told that Gorbachev needed something to sustain him in the face of that pressure. The Saudis extended a $4 billion line of credit to the Gorbachev government. Baker stated that, I believe that our role in arranging the line of credit was instrumental in solidifying Soviet support for the use-of-force resolution and keeping them firmly in the coalition throughout the crisis. 66 In the region, Turkey and the other states so close to Iraq were given a great deal of economic assistance to ease their concerns about the U.S. policy, including physical and economic damage that might befall them due to their proximity to the conflict. Trying to wean Jordan s King Hussein away from Iraq and offset damage to others became a major policy initiative, as Scowcroft put it. This strategy never worked with Jordan, whose leader was more convinced by Saddam s effort to buy him off. 67 As noted earlier, Turkey suffered about $7 billion in economic losses due to the economic sanctions. 68 Working with President Turgut Ozal, Baker promised that the United States would help with aid to offset some of the losses from sanctions and the pipeline. Ozal asked Baker to help convince the World Bank to increase its loans to Turkey from $400 million to about $1 billion; the request was granted. 69 Also at Ozal s request, NATO sent alliance aircraft and air defense batteries in case of Iraqi retaliation to American strikes from this NATO member s bases. 70 Egypt was given a very large debt forgiveness package, and Bush invoked special authority under the Foreign Assistance Act to sell Saudi Arabia an arms package (certain special munitions could not be sold to non-nato states without a waiver). Under the law the president had to notify Congress, where there was some objection but not enough to stop the sales. 71 Recall that Israel s position raised significant issues during the entire crisis. To the Bush administration, a priority was to keep Israel out of the conflict and out of the coalition. Because of the Arab-Israeli conflict, combined with the perceived need to have the Arab states in the coalition, Israel could not be a part of the effort. 72 Further, Saddam gave speeches during the conflict to try to inflame Arab- Israeli tensions and also to link his withdrawal from Kuwait to Israel s withdrawal from the territories it captured from its Arab neighbors in the 1967 war. The fear was that Israel would be tempted to launch a preemptive strike on Iraq that would escalate into an allout battle in the region. A key strategy Bush used to manage Israel was buying off. As the president noted in describing the crisis, for the most part it [Israel] cooperated, but from early in the crisis it made many demands of us for aid and information sharing. 73 A brief background is necessary to understand one way in which this strategy was applied to Israel. In late 1989, the United States was engaged in diplomacy over the conflict with Palestinians; at that time, Israeli Prime Minister Shamir s ultimate intransigence ended that round of talks. In frustration, the Bush administration refused to allow $400 million in housing loan guarantees that Congress had

13 GEORGE H.W. BUSH AND THE PERSIAN GULF WAR 53 approved for Israel in early On another dimension, Congress was rethinking the overall structure of American aid in reaction to changes in Eastern Europe. No exceptions were discussed for Israel in proposals to reduce aid by 5 percent to the top five recipients of U.S. assistance. As violence against Palestinians continued, reducing aid to Israel specifically was on the table. These recent changes were reversed during the Persian Gulf crisis. More aid was given for settlements, and new economic and military aid was provided. When the Gulf War ended, the $400 million in housing loan guarantees, requested to help with the immigration of Soviet Jews, was released, presumably a reversal based on good behavior during the war. Bush requested from Congress an additional $10 billion for Second, in response to the Bush package of debt forgiveness to Egypt, Congress authorized Israel to redirect from economic to defense purposes $200 million of its total $3 billion aid for Congress also approved another $700 million of additional military aid in the form of advanced weapons systems. 74 Six days after the bombing of Baghdad began, Israel gave the United States an assessment of its costs for exercising restraint during the war, for which the Congress approved payments beginning in March. Of a total of $13 billion, $400 million was for keeping its military at highest alert, $1 billion was for economic losses when the country shut down for four days at the start of the air campaign, $1 billion was for losses to the tourist industry, and $10 billion was for additional housing loan guarantees needed to settle Soviet Jewish immigrants. 75 Also, prior to the launch of the war, Bush sent diplomats Paul Wolfowitz and Lawrence Eagleburger to Israel to offer to improve Israel s defenses. The Patriot missile deployment, already in progress, would be expanded. Israel accepted the offer, which eventually included American operation and maintenance crews. The Israelis also took Bush up on the offer of a top-secret voice communications link between the Pentagon center of operations and the headquarters of the Israeli Defense Forces. 76 In addition to addressing concerns of states fearful of increases in oil prices, getting on board states whose votes were needed on the Security Council, easing the worries of regional states concerned about physical and economic damage from the war, and dealing with Israel s role, a major challenge on the home front was confronted by buying off. The issue was the impression among Congressmen and the broader American public that other states, especially the rich states of Japan and Germany, were not contributing as much as the United States an especially salient topic because the United States was in the middle of a budget crisis. By involving a wide range of states in the coalition, Bush sought to counter the image of the United States carrying the burden alone. Baker made the connections in the following statement: At a time of economic uncertainty at home, it would be politically impossible to sustain domestic support for the operation unless we demonstrated that Uncle Sam wasn t footing the bill while others with pockets as deep as ours sat on the sidelines. 77 In November, Les Aspin, chair of the House Armed Services Committee, assessed the efforts of other countries, giving only Egypt and Turkey grades of A while Germany and Japan received a grade of C. 78 From the beginning Bush was concerned about costs, with Desert Shield averaging about $28.9 million per day by the end of August. 79 With states who would not or could

14 54 POLITICAL LEADERSHIP IN FOREIGN POLICY not contribute troops ( Japan and Germany both had constitutions that confined the use of military forces to self-defense), the administration sought to buy off the domestic criticism by pushing them hard to contribute financially. In September, Baker went on what was dubbed the tin cup tour. Prior to his arrival in Germany on September 16, congressional members criticized the way the German government came up with $8 billion to support Soviet troops in East Germany until they could be repatriated. On this trip, Baker managed to get a package worth several billion dollars, much in the form of economic aid to states in the economic front line. 80 Japan s contribution was an important resource that Bush was able to use in his effort to buy off domestic concerns. The initial behavior of Japan at the outset of the crisis drew fire from Congress, as noted earlier. The first aid package finally announced by Japan provided for $1 billion to be spent on sending food, water, medical supplies (such as tents and water carriers), and medical specialists. There were many constraints on how the supplies would get to Iraq. In anger, members of the House of Representatives passed legislation that threatened to withdraw American troops from Japan. The American tin cup team visited Prime Minister Kaifu right before his visit to the United States and the Middle East. A new package was announced on September 14, adding $3 billion to the $1 billion package. Half of the $4 billion was to help with mobilization of the military and half was economic assistance to Jordan, Turkey, and Egypt. Assessing this turn of events, one historian of the conflict notes that the assistance tended to confirm the impression that Japanese contributions were geared to keeping the United States quiet as much as an assessment of need. 81 Once the war began Bush initiated another tin-cup trip in an effort to head off congressional concerns. In addition to Japan, a small group of other states played a predominant role. The plan of the Bush administration was to have Japan provide 20 percent of the costs, the United States and its allies another 20 percent, and the Gulf States the remainder. The end result was close: in addition to what each had committed earlier, Japan said it would pay another $9 billion (total of about $10 billion), Saudi Arabia and Kuwait would pay $13.5 billion each (total of about $16.8 billion and $16 billion, respectively), and Germany would pay $5.5 billion (total of about $6.5 billion). The United Arab Emirates paid a total of $4 billion. The final costs of the war were $54 billion, with the allies pledging $48.2 billion of that total. 82 The conduct of intermestic diplomacy by the Bush administration is very clear in the use of the buying off strategy. In summary, Bush faced states that were uncertain about the impact of war on their ability to pay for oil, countries on the Security Council that were not yet signed on to the American-sponsored resolutions, regional states with multifaceted fears of the war s impact, Israel s need for security and the American need to keep Israel out of the war, and the American feeling that the United States would have to carry too much of the war burden. He was able to meet these challenges through paying for additional oil supplies to the world market, increasing bilateral aid and helping states get access to multilateral aid programs, creating packages of debt forgiveness and military supplies, and pushing rich allies to provide money for the U.S.-led war effort. The third strategy, tying

15 GEORGE H.W. BUSH AND THE PERSIAN GULF WAR 55 hands, was also a key part of Bush s effort to conduct diplomacy using intermestic policy making. Tying Hands Facing obstacles at home and abroad to the policy in the Persian Gulf crisis, Bush used the broadening audience strategy to justify focusing on an international (multilateral) approach. He further was able to succeed in this approach by buying off the domestic audience and many of those in the international constituency that he created or invoked. In this section we will see how tying hands was also used in conjunction with the other strategies. During several points in the crisis, Bush acted internationally to create new facts 83 and then used those facts to argue at home that his response to the new situation was the only viable one. He also used elements of the domestic policy debate to tie his hands on the international front. Indeed, the use of this strategy is clearly linked to the rise of particular obstacles. First, in an uncertain world, Bush had to set the agenda in terms of what tools would be on the table. Second, many parties abroad and actors within the United States were not willing to consider the use of force even though Bush wanted to use this threat and knew he had a time limit for when attacks could occur (because of weather and Islamic holidays). Finally, once Bush decided to use force, he still faced resistance from Congress to authorizing the use of force. The words of one observer sums up the fact that Bush tied hands: Bush managed to rally a reluctant nation to a successful war not with inspiring words or soaring visions, but with a series of shrewd and forcing actions (emphasis added). 84 Though in a subtle way, Bush acted to tie his hands at the outset of the crisis, shaping the outlines of the entire policy debate and thus the course of the reaction. In a speech at the White House on August 5, at which time the administration had been working through the United Nations to condemn the invasion and impose sanctions (for which the resolution was passed on August 6), Bush stated, This will not stand. This will not stand, this aggression against Kuwait. 85 His statement was in response to a question concerning whether or not he planned to move militarily. Bush s advisors, including General Powell, were shocked. Uh-oh! Powell said to himself. The President had now clearly, categorically, set a new goal, not only to deter attack on Saudi Arabia and defend Saudi Arabia but to reverse the invasion of Kuwait. 86 Recall that as autumn came in 1990, one of the primary debates in American politics was about Bush s move to threaten the use of force versus giving economic sanctions more time to work. His approval ratings were high, for example, when sanctions were the main focus of action: a New York Times-CBS poll on August 22 showed 76 percent. 87 In August these numbers stayed in the percent range, but dipped to the percent range in October and November as people grew uneasy about the possibility of war. The polls showed these numbers begin to rise in December and January. 88 The administration s desire to threaten and prepare for the use of force emerged from several factors. First, if force was to be used, military planners explained that it had to happen in a window from December (when the adequate troops would be in place) to mid-february because of bad weather in late