"A nation blessed" - Persian Gulf War as turning point in US military history

Naval War College Review, Autumn, 2001 by George Bush

A little over a decade ago, a true revolution in world affairs took place. The Soviet Union imploded; the Baltic States and the captive nations of Eastern Europe were freed. Then, when Iraq invaded Kuwait, the world made a very important statement in coming together to see that that aggression would not stand. Such a revolution required a fundamental rethinking of the role of the United States in world affairs and of the nature of warfare in a radically transformed military environment. The Gulf War forced us to face up to this revolution, this transformation, almost before we knew it was upon us.

We did not know it at the time, but the Gulf War was in many respects a preview of things to come. It's hard to remember how surprising it was in 1990 when the Soviet Union stood with us in condemning Iraqi aggression and actually voted with the United States in the United Nations to condemn Iraq. This remarkable development was absolutely crucial to our strategy in dealing with that situation. It also raised the possibility of a new world order, and I think it stemmed from the way we managed the winding-down of the Cold War.

You may recall that when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, one of the leading television commentators asked me, "Why, Mr. President, do you not show the emotion the American people feel and go to the Wall and dance with those students, as the leaders in Congress are urging you to do?" That might have been the stupidest thing an American president could have done--to tweak Mikhail Gorbachev's nose when things were moving peacefully toward the reunification of Germany. So we didn't do that kind of thing.

Consequently, a year later, in the matter of Iraq, the Soviet Union voted with us in the Security Council. (China abstained--and we had to work very hard to induce the Chinese to do that.) The Soviet Union's vote in the Security Council was indispensable; it implied a world in which the great powers would stand together against international aggression--a world in which the United Nations could undertake to protect world peace as its founders had envisioned in 1945, a world that was more democratic, and a world that had more market economies.

This vision was not fully achieved while I was president--though we went a long way toward it--but the world order today is in fact completely new. The new world order" we strove for does not mean putting everything under the United Nations or surrendering an ounce of sovereignty; it means working cooperatively with other countries so there would be more democracy, more market economies, more freedom.

The Gulf War taught us several lessons about the use and limits of American military power in the post--Cold War world. It might be instructive to recount some of the features of our strategy for that war and some of the lessons we learned then--lessons that perhaps are taught today in our war colleges.

To begin with, we knew immediately, almost instinctively, that our response to Saddam Hussein could not and should not be unilateral. We felt--I was blessed with a wonderful team of people to help me make these decisions--from the very beginning that we could not do it alone. We had the military force to do it alone, but we needed other countries with us.

So we went forward. We asked Kuwait to take the issue to the United Nations Security Council. We ourselves went to Nato to explain what we would have to do. Richard Cheney, the secretary of defense, and General Colin Powell, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, went to Saudi Arabia. They asked the Saudis to do something that was almost impossible, culturally, for them to do, but that they knew was in their own interest--to accept the deployment of U.S. forces into the kingdom itself. We urged others to join us in a military coalition. Eventually thirty-one nations did, and many other nations agreed to support us in nonmilitary ways.

Our first step was to isolate Iraq, isolate Saddam Hussein, by blockade and sanctions. The United States, Britain, and France did most of the "heavy lifting" in the actual interception of ships. I will never forget the day in the Oval Office the White House staff told me that the maritime interception force intended, because of persuasive intelligence we had, to permit a ship then in the Gulf of Oman to return to Aden without being inspected. Someone asked, "Well, who's going to tell Margaret Thatcher [the British prime minister] that we're not going to inspect every ship? We told her we would inspect every ship." I looked around for volunteers; no hands went up. So I called Margaret Thatcher myself. I told her that we were going to let this particular ship turn around--to violate the fundamental rule of inspecting all of them--and I told her the intelligence information that led us to do that. I will never forget Margaret's words: "George, that's fine with me. But this is no time to go wobbly." (There was ne ver any question that Margaret Thatcher might "go wobbly" herself, I might add.)