The Fire Last Time: What doves, and hawks, got wrong in the first Gulf War

National Review, Sept 30, 2002 by Ramesh Ponnuru

Advocates of a war on Iraq can be forgiven for some exasperation with the doves' demands for a debate. For one thing, these demands often serve as a substitute for their actually engaging in it by taking a clear position. For another, the hawks tend to think that we already had this debate -- twelve years ago. James Robbins recently wrote on National Review Online: "The same [antiwar] points are being made today as [in] 1990, frequently by the same people." The doves made fools of themselves then with predictions of military disaster; why should their counsel be sought now?

Robbins has the critics dead to rights. Many of the antiwar arguments really are remarkably similar: The Iraqi army is highly loyal to Saddam Hussein and will fight to the end; the Bush administration lacks sufficient support from Republicans, the American public, the Europeans, or the Arabs to go forward; action will only provoke Hussein to use weapons of mass destruction; Israel will be drawn into the war, and the "Arab street" will rise up against us. Then as now, Pat Buchanan was charging the hawks with pursuing Israel's interests rather than America's.

Above all, the critics warned that there would be massive American casualties. Chris Matthews, then a columnist, wrote, "The casualties will strike at the heart of the country." Barbara Boxer, then a congresswoman from Marin County, said that 3-4,000 dead was "the best- case scenario." Robert Novak and the late Rowland Evans reported that the minimum was 20,000 casualties. A ground assault on Iraqi-occupied Kuwait would mean "tens of thousands of U.S. dead," warned Buchanan. Sen. Paul Wellstone spoke for all of them: "We stand on the brink of catastrophe."

In the event, the public and the allies supported Bush, the Iraqi army turned out to be a paper tiger, and fewer than 150 Americans lost their lives in combat. The fact that the Cassandras were spectacularly wrong last time does not, of course, prove that they are wrong this time. But one might have expected them to issue fewer confident predictions of doom, or even to reconsider their assumptions. Nothing of the sort has occurred. The above worthies and their like-minded peers seem to have learned only one thing from Gulf War I: Don't put specific numbers on casualty estimates. We are still sure to get mired in the next quag. Hardly anyone even bothers to call the anti-warriors on their statements from 1990-91.

There is no accountability in the world of punditry (and a good thing, too, for those of us who bet that Al Gore would be our 43rd president). But there are other reasons that Gulf War I has not damaged the doves' standing, and some of those reasons hold lessons for the hawks.

The debate this time is different in several ways. Political circumstances have changed. Some of the changes have made it easier for the hawks to prevail. This President Bush is more popular than his father was in the run-up to the last war. The public, made hawkish by last year's terrorist attacks, is more supportive of action against Iraq than it was then. Among conservatives, the opinion leaders who opposed the first Gulf War are much less influential than they were in the early '90s. Buchanan, Joseph Sobran, and Samuel Francis have all been marginalized: a result of their opponents' ruthlessness, they would say; of their own folly, the opponents would retort.

On the other hand, the debate this time is murkier. The administration has not always communicated a clear purpose. The first Bush administration had internal disagreements about Iraq as substantial as this one does, but it mostly kept them internal. The Democrats, most of whom opposed Gulf War I, especially in the Senate, are being circumspect this time. The polls make them leery of opposing the president outright on Iraq. Instead, they keep raising the bar for action. Tom Daschle first wanted Bush to explain why we had to end the Iraqi regime. Now he's asking why ending it is more urgent than it was two years ago.

This war is different from the last one, most importantly, in its objective. Gulf War I aimed to restore the status quo ante Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, not to overthrow the Iraqi regime. This difference has led some of yesteryear's hawks, or apparent hawks, to become doves for this season. Opposition to war with Iraq includes not only those who wrongly predicted a debacle in the last war, but many of those who led that war.

In relation to Gulf War I, then, many contemporary hawks are fighting a two-front battle, criticizing both the first Bush administration's peacenik critics and the administration itself, for not driving on to Baghdad. That second line of criticism reportedly drives former president Bush up the wall. It's easy to sympathize with him. Madeleine Albright last year carped that Bush should have "finished the job in the Gulf War." Never mind that she opposed Gulf War I herself, would surely have condemned Bush for recklessness if he had gone on to Baghdad, served in an administration that left every element of Iraq policy weaker than it had found it -- and now opposes going to war to do the very job she now says should have been done in 1991.