The war before the peace

National Review, Feb 25, 1991 by Ian Alexander

The War before the Peace

'THE liberation of Kuwait has begun." Although local observers had all along believed battle was inevitable, those ominous words marked the transition from Gulf crisis to Gulf War, putting the entire Saudi capital in what one British resident termed "a fine state of nerves."

Within 48 hours, Saddam Hussein had contributed tangibly to Riyadh's state of nerves with sporadically timed Scud-missile attacks. To even the calmest observer, the triple explosions of a Scud-Patriot duel are at the least startling.

The first blast of the Patriot launching to intercept the enemy is a fairly standard concussion. This is followed by a house-rattling--often window-shattering--roar, which the uninitiated assume to be the collision of the good-guy Patriot with the bad-guy Scud in fact this biggest bang is the Patriot breaking the sound barrier. The nervously awaited third blast is the report of the Scud's interception.

There is something other worldly here. The Scud-Patriot exchanges have resulted in virtually no damage to Riyadh (two buildings destroyed). The Patriots' nearly perfect knockdown record fully justifies their crews' slogan: "If it flies, it dies."

The U.S. and its allies have on the whole been very well served by efficient, intelligent military and diplomatic professionals. Cool, charismatic Commander in Chief "Stormin' Norman" Schwarzkopf is backed by solid, seemingly indefatigable Pentagon planners and State Department advisors. The American Embassy team, led by Ambassador Chas Freeman and deputy David Dunford, has provided patient, comprehensive support to the joint allied command, to the host Saudis, and to resident Americans. The American campus of the International School in Riyadh, led by Daryle Russell, has scrambled superbly to keep the educational system operating, coping with a drop in enrollment from 1,550 before Christmas to less than 550 after January 16.

The war to date has not been without its grimly humorous moments. One Western ambassador spent the first ten days of hostilities working and sleeping in a chemical-protection suit, gas mask at the ready. He was mercifully recalled after seriously proposing to his minister that the entire embassy relocate to Cairo. A prominent American attorney admitted that he had endured the first night of missile battles in a sealed room in his home dressed in Hefty trash bags, ridding boots, and a rock-climbing helmet, finishing up with a gas mask.

The serious side of such bizarre behavior is the spotty education residents were given about how to handle chemical or biological attack. Moreover, despite nearly half a year's lead time, distribution of gas masks in Riyadh had hardly commenced by the time war started.

During the first 72 hours following the commencement of Saddam's Scud attacks, the nine-hour drive from Riyadh to Jeddah took up to thirty hours, so packed was the modern highway with vehicles loaded like prairie schooners with people and possessions. A teacher at the American campus had a sardonic reaction: "None of these people has ever lived through a Venezuelan election."

So adaptable is the human animal, however, that fear dissipates quickly. A Saudi who had appeared to age ten years with the onset of war now says, "The good news is the lack of traffic on the streets. Now, I can get to the office in a fraction of the time it usually takes." At a recent dinner, the conversation over coffee stopped for perhaps eight seconds when the initial Patriot blastoff explosion sounded.

Most people felt very differently just days earlier. Particularly graphic was a British banker's answer to a solicitous friend's call from London. To the query, "Did you evacuate your house?" came the reply: "Don't be silly I was desperately trying not to evacuate my bowels."

Such pungent poignancy in this capital of the pivotal Arab member of the allied forces may serve to underscore the single most asked question: What shape will the peace take?

As of now, many Saudis are not sanguine about the Bush Administration's stomach to wage peace as successfully as it is waging war. Says one senior Saudi official, educated in the United States and an outspoken friend of America: "You guys make great firemen, but when it comes to rebuilding after the fire, you're content to throw up some portable shelters and go on to the next blaze."

Another Saudi, a retired senior diplomat, made the point by citing Israel's 1982 attack on Palestinian forces in Lebanon. "Once you had convinced Israel not to take Beirut, shouldn't you have forced both the Palestinian and Israeli sides to sit down and hammer out a serious peace? Don't say you couldn't do it say rather, you didn't do it. America had diplomats working at the upper-middle-management level but the issues simply were not major U.S. policy objectives."

"What will President bush do now?" the first Saudi asked." My guess is the entire American Administration will take the next flight to the Baltics, once again doing what it likes to do, and does so well: crisis management.