A Short History of the Munich Analogy, Part 3:
"Appeasement" & the Persian Gulf War
"A Short History of the Munich Analogy, Part 1" discussed the story of Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler at Munich in 1938 as a prominent rhetorical and ideological feature of American Cold War political discourse. "The Munich Analogy, Part 2: The Neocons and the Appeasement Meme"extended the discussion to the the neo-conservative "defense intellectuals" who became influential in the Reagan administrations of the 1980s, and for whom the Munich narrative was the central organizing principle of Cold War and Middle Eastern analysis.
The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 brought the Munich analogy into the foreground of American popular mythology via the constant invocation of Munich, Chamberlain, Hitler, and appeasement by politicians and pundits. This political and media barragae of Munich resulted in the creation of a dominant media narrative of the Gulf Crisis of 1990-91, in which Saddam figured as Hitler, Kuwait was the Sudetenland, and only two American stances toward the crisis were available - either Churchill or Chamberlain.
On 2 August 1990, Saddam’s tanks rolled. Tens of thousands of Iraqi guardsmen crossed the Kuwait border, occupying the small country in a single day.
"For at least a year before Saddam Hussein’s attack across the Kuwaiti border," observed William Safire on 26 August, he and other neoconservative critics had "had little luck establishing" the Munich analogy vis-à-vis Iraq's dictator Saddam Hussein:
Subversive sobriquets like "the Butcher of Baghdad" and "the hero of Halabja" (a reference to Saddam’s use of poison gas against Kurdish civilians of Halabja, Iraq, killing at least 5,000) did not persuade policy makers or the American public that a new Hitler was in the making....However, after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the threat to U.S. oil supplies, President Bush took an interest in the Munich analogy. [1]
President Bush met with his National Security Council the morning after the Kuwait invasion story broke. George Herbert Walker Bush was, as Jeffrey Record notes, "the last president for whom Munich and World War II were the dominant foreign policy referent experiences." [2] For George Bush’s generation, George Will observed, war was the formative experience, and the word "Munich" was "freighted with warning." [3] George Bush Sr. was a cautious leader, however. To the former Cold War diplomat and CIA head, the virtues of prudence and deniability went hand-in-hand. Bush preferred, and had a history of seeking, to attain goals by personal negotiation backed by undercover operations. As president, he had intervened militarily in Panama, but had abstained from taking strong stands on Lithuania or Tiananmen Square. At the outset of the Gulf crisis, Bush was not at all anxious to commit himself to restoring Kuwaiti sovereignty.
According to vice president Dan Quayle, this National Security Council meeting, held at 8:00 AM on 2 August, "seemed routine." "We’re not discussing intervention," the President told some reporters dismissively. When Bush and his security team got down to business in the meeting room, Quayle noted that "there wasn’t an overpowering atmosphere of crisis":
...In terms of punishing Saddam, the only measure really discussed was economic sanctions that would keep his own oil (and the oil he had captured in Kuwait) off the world markets. The President did not underestimate the seriousness of the situation, and he did say aggression could not be tolerated, but there was no sudden brainstorming about how we could achieve the military liberation of Kuwait—or any agreement that that was our military objective...The real catastrophe everyone feared was an invasion of Saudi Arabia by Iraq, and that’s what our military planning was concerned with on that first day. [4]
The President received cautious advice. General Colin Powell, his chief military adviser, suggested "a line in the sand" be drawn. By this expression, Powell originally meant that the U.S. could accept the takeover of Kuwait, but would stand for no encroachment on Saudi Arabia, a position with which Bush concurred.[5] From the president's security meeting of 2 August issued the president’s first public statement about the Iraqi invasion. [6] President Bush condemned the invasion as "naked aggression," but avowed that the United States had no plan to intervene militarily. [7]
Later that same day, Bush met Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in Aspen for a conference, and the two leaders discussed the Iraq problem. Mrs. Thatcher is supposed, famously, to have "stiffened Bush’s spine" and encouraged him to take a tough stance, by saying, "Now, George, don’t go all wobbly." [8] The two leaders jointly condemned the invasion, but limited themselves to asking for the imposition of economic sanctions against the Baghdad regime under the United Nations Charter.
On Capitol Hill, Axis allusions mingled with partisan potshots from the first day of the invasion. Senator Claiborne Pell, Democratic chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, was probably the first American politician to characterize Saddam Hussein as "the Hitler of the Middle East" after the invasion. Democrats blamed the president for not ordering sanctions earlier. To Republicans, Iraq’s aggression showed that Democrats should "think twice about slashing defense." House minority whip Newt Gingrich called the invasion the "act of a man who is at least as deranged as Hitler or Mussolini," and warned the House that weakness only invited war. [9]
Until the invasion of Kuwait, Americans had little knowledge of Iraq or its dictator. Other Middle Eastern affairs—the Tehran hostages, the Israel-Palestinian conflict, Reagan’s abortive intervention in Lebanon’s civil war, the deaths of 242 Marines in Beirut, Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi—had dominated the news in the 1980s. The rise of Saddam Hussein and Iraq’s eight-year war with Iran had barely registered with Americans, and the invasion of 2 August uncovered a narrative and personality vacuum, which was quickly filled by a convenient set of images and analogies.
The equation that neoconservative pundits had hammered to little avail in the preceding eighteen months found its media echo chamber at last. From the first week of the Gulf crisis, American news coverage and editorial opinion began to juxtapose Hussein and Hitler. Rather than clear analysis of Saddam Hussein’s quarrel with Kuwait and Iraq’s relationship with the West, "mythological references to Hitler and Nazi Germany dominated the news." [10]
Before President Bush made the Munich analogy his own, the steady reiteration of the Saddam-Hitler equation and monitory sketches of 1930s Germany became routine among the journalistic "punditocracy." [11] During the week after the invasion, the neoconservative columnists led the press in giving the president a thorough drubbing as a Chamberlainesque appeaser whose spineless policies had invited aggression. Charles Krauthammer, in particular, continued to excoriate Bush after 2 August for his slowness to grasp that Saddam Hussein was the new Hitler. Saddam, the pundit argued, wanted to swallow up Kuwait first, and then Saudi
Arabia. Moreover, Saddam would undoubtedly "get what he wants because there is no one to stop him...George Bush is not eager to get bogged down in a land war in a God-forsaken patch of desert." [12]
On 4 August the veteran foreign-affairs reporter Flora Lewis took up the Munich refrain in a New York Times column entitled "Fruits of Appeasement,’ in which Saddam’s "blitzkrieg invasion" caused "European commentators to remember Hitler." Lewis asserted that Saddam Hussein was determined, Hitler-like, to bend the Western powers to his will. Through nuclear arms and control of Middle Eastern oil, he aimed at nothing less than altering "the whole balance of power." [13] The New York Times editor A.M. Rosenthal weighed in ponderously on 5 August: the Western powers had "failed in their duty" to confront "the plainest threats of aggression since Adolf Hitler." [14]
A syndicated editorial cartoon, showing Saddam giving the Nazi salute to a picture of Hitler, ran in the Miami Herald and a number of other newspapers during the first week of August. [15] The media pundits' assault on President Bush eased somewhat after 8 August, when the president made to the nation a televised speech, making it clear that American military forces were en route to the Persian Gulf.
Media pundits framed the Iraq invasion as a replay of the 1930s, creating a master narrative in which the Hitler equation raised the spectre of Munich and the Munich analogy functioned as a moral imperative upon "Hitler’s" opponent. Other pundits began to shade in the crude outline thus formed by analyzing the mind and personality of the psychopathic god. George Will explained that Hussein "radiates a more virulent and personal viciousness than Mussolini did." "On meeting him," noted a Time columnist, "a visitor is first struck by his eyes, crackling with alertness and at the same time cold and remorseless as snake eyes on the sides of dice. They are the eyes of a killer." [16]
These amateur psychological profiles personalized the menace of the little-known Iraqi leader, and personalizing process bolstered the credibility of the Munich-Hitler analogy. During the Cold War, the Munich analogy was generally applied to a communist threat without a clear-cut face. The threat emanated from an implacable expansionist ideology that had various faces, or no face. After America’s former ally Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, pundit prose about his cold, remorseless eyes gave new life to the Munich analogy by bringing the Hitlerian enemy into sharp focus once more.
While the print and broadcast media were constructing this familiar and eminently marketable narrative framework during the first week of August, events on the ground moved rapidly. Within a week of the invasion, the American president and his deputies had rallied the international community, including several key Arab nations, to condemn Iraq’s seizure of Kuwait. The European Community, Turkey, Japan, China, and Switzerland imposed economic and diplomatic sanctions on Iraq. Most significantly, Secretaries Baker and Cheney persuaded the government of Saudi Arabia to allow US troops to deploy on Arabian soil as a protective "shield." War planes and soldiers began to pour onto Saudi Arabian bases—elements of the 82nd Airborne Division, Navy SEALs and other special forces, airmobile and armored units, and thousands of Marines. The deployment was well under way before Bush took his case to the American people in a televised speech on 8 August 1990. [17]
President Bush’s television address, his first formal speech to the American people on the Gulf crisis, began, "In the life of a nation, we’re called upon to define who we are and what we believe." The speech touched on the mythic dimension of American identity, connecting Americans of 1990 with the generation that had avenged Pearl Harbor and fought Hitler. "I ask for your support in a decision I’ve made, to stand up for what’s right and condemn what’s wrong," Bush stated, suggesting a simpler, more positive era of American life, one that knew not self-doubt or malaise. "Less than a week ago, in the early morning hours of 2 August, Iraqi armed forces, without provocation or warning invaded a peaceful Kuwait" [18] "Without provocation or warning" evoked Roosevelt’s speech before Congress after the Imperial forces of Japan had "suddenly and deliberately attacked" Pearl Harbor. [19]
Bush described Iraq’s tanks as "storm[ing] in blitzkrieg fashion through Kuwait in a few short hours," precisely as Hitler’s panzers had rolled into Czechoslovakia and Poland. Lest this evocation of Axis military power should seem incommensurate with the stature of a second-rate Third World tyrant, Bush explained that
[t]he stakes are high. Iraq is already a rich and powerful country that possesses the world’s second-largest reserves of oil, and over a million men under arms. It’s the fourth largest military in the world.
These assurances and the Hussein-Hitler equation forestalled arguments that Saddam’s ambitions were regional, rather than global, and that his actions were in any way tied to specific historical and recent circumstances involving the Rumaila oil fields and the price of petroleum. Iraq had
...massed an enormous war machine on the Saudi border...Given the Iraqi government’s history of aggression against its own citizens as well as its neighbors, to assume Iraq will not attack again would be unwise and unrealistic. [20]
Thus had Hitler been appeased at Munich and aggression encouraged.
The central image of President Bush's 8 August speech was the 1938 Munich Conference: "If history teaches us anything, it is that we must resist aggression, or it will destroy our freedoms... Appeasement does not work. As was the case in the 1930s, we see in Saddam Hussein an aggressive dictator threatening his neighbors." [21] If history taught anything, Bush argued, it taught that Saddam Hussein’s territorial ambitions were equally insatiable. The moral imperative implicit in the Munich analogy taught that only force could restrain him.
William A. Dorman and Steven Livingston coined the term "the establishing phase" to denote the period of the Gulf crisis from the invasion of Kuwait on 2 August to the President’s televised speech on 8 August. It was during the first week of the crisis, they contend, "that the news media and political elites first accepted what came to be the dominant rhetorical frame for understanding the Gulf conflict." [22] The dominant rhetorical frame was Munich. The mobilization of elite opinion in the media and on Capitol Hill early in August put political pressure on George Bush to take an aggressive stand, or be stigmatized as the new incarnation of Neville Chamberlain.
Neoconservative pundits had been castigating Bush as an "appeaser" for many months but to little effect. The invasion of Kuwait created a huge media forum where the analogy now resonated.
George H. W. Bush's decision to mobilize troops, which he announced in medias res in his speech on 8 August, set the scene for what Dorman and Livingston designated the Gulf crisis’s "nominal debate phase." Between 9 August and the U.N. deadline of 15 January 1991, political elites built a consensus on the probability of going to war, if not on precise war aims or the terms on which war should be waged. Political debate over the nature of the enemy was nominal indeed; the Munich and Hitler analogies prevailed, and this period of months before the bombing began might more aptly be styled "the media saturation phase."
Although here and there an editorialist criticized the continual reiteration of the "Saddam-equals-Hitler" theme, some of these criticized the equation only to reaffirm the Munich analogy’s appropriateness to the case. For example, a Time magazine columnist affected to deconstruct the recent use of the trope only to conclude that "[i]n the case of Saddam, the name-calling is far from preposterous. He has unleashed a blitzkrieg against a weak neighbor...committed mass murder..."[23] The few journalists who warned of "the dangers of demonization" tended to hedge on denying the metaphor outright, and so served to keep the Munich analogy before the public, and perhaps reinforced it. [24]
As August wore on, Bush referred repeatedly to the lesson of the 1930s. Addressing the Pentagon, Bush warned that "A half a century ago, our nation and the world paid dearly for appeasing an aggressor," and he pledged not to make that mistake again. [25] Bush’s speeches shaped the conflict as one of good against evil, while investing the crisis with a sensibility redolent of World War II. By proclaiming that Iraq "threatened our way of life," Bush projected the regional conflict on a global scale and conflated, in the same breath, the consumption of oil and gasoline with traditional ideals. [26]
This rhetorical feat probably helped deflect onto another target the resentment Americans already felt towards U.S. oil companies as gasoline prices shot up another ten or fifteen cents at the pump during August. [27] A Gallup poll taken on August 8-9 found that 58% of Americans thought the U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia "should engage in combat" if Saddam Hussein "begins to control or cut off world oil." The same poll showed that only 42% thought U.S. forces should fight if Saddam "refuse[d] to leave Kuwait and restore its rulers." [28]
"By the end of August," Dan Quayle recalled, "the Saudi desert was filling up with GIs and I was out on the road in my salesman’s role, explaining the rationale for our involvement on the Arabian Peninsula." Quayle was Bush’s emissary to the American heartland in the autumn of 1990, speaking in American Legion posts and malls to rally support for the coming war. Addressing at the annual American Legion convention in Indianapolis, Quayle told the assembled Legionnaires that in the midst of so many hopeful changes in the post-cold war era, they were now faced with
...a man who rules through terror and slaughter, who has used poison gas against his own countrymen ... who aspires to gain control of the oil resources on which the entire world depends for economic well-being; who threatens his neighbors with weapons of mass destruction; and who poses a growing threat to the peace and stability of the region. [29]
"Was it any wonder," Quayle pondered in his memoir, that the President had insisted "that Saddam’s aggression ‘would not stand?’" "The uncertainties about our ultimate objectives in the Middle East had gone." The Bush administration wanted Saddam Hussein, the Middle East’s new Hitler, "back where he had been before August 1." [30]
By September, President Bush had established himself in the public mind as a forceful leader and a skilful diplomat who had assembled a wide coalition of allies to stand against Saddam’s naked aggression. Many Americans probably shared Newt Gingrich’s "sense of awe at how brilliantly Bush has handled this." [31] Although Bush had narrowly escaped becoming a ritual casualty of the Munich analogy, the mantle of Chamberlain was still rhetorically available for other shoulders. In the heated partisan atmosphere of a Congressional election year, which no calls for "national unity" could overcome even under the shadow of war, the Chamberlain mantle began to gravitate to the Congress, where it hovered over the shoulders of those members who opposed or questioned the Bush administration’s actions or strategies.
"Appeaser" equaled "wimp" in the shorthand of the day. A New York Times column of 14 September speculated that "the wimp mantle has been passed from George Bush to Capitol Hill." [32] On Capitol Hill, the unwanted mantle was passed back and forth—Republicans could garner political capital by castigating Bush’s opponents as Chamberlainesque appeasers, and the President could still be styled an appeaser by hawkish Democrats who wanted more force, quicker results, and discerned some residual advantage in pointing out that Bush’s initial appeasement of Saddam Hussein had invited the aggression in the first place. [33]
Media pundits threw their support behind the President’s show of military force. Many of them, indeed, had been instrumental in creating a narrative in which a show of force was necessary. Whether the American people would a support a war was another matter. On 9 August, a poll showed that 77% of Americans approved of Bush’s handling of the Gulf crisis. By 29 October, only 61% approved.[34] That autumn, the American public was the target of one of the largest public-relations blitzes in U.S. history. Beginning in August, the Kuwaiti government-in-exile and its supporters in the U.S. poured tens of millions of dollars into public-relations, law and lobby firms in a campaign to mobilize American support for military intervention. Led by PR firm Hill & Knowlton, these firms saturated the media with newspaper advertisements, pamphlets, media "fact kits," and video news releases on Iraqi atrocities in Kuwait. Dozens of pro-Kuwait organizations appeared, including "Citizens for a Free Kuwait," a Hill & Knowlton-created front group, into which the firm channeled $11.9 million in Kuwaiti funds. [35]
In August, Citizens for a Free Kuwait placed an advertisement in the New York Times, thanking President Bush and the American people for refusing to be Chamberlains:
...the world cannot permit this prospect [of a new era of world peace] to be undermined by another 1939 [sic] Munich where appeasement led to further aggression. The American people well know the cost of appeasement and are fully aware that an aggressor, bent on conquest, will not be stopped by any concession to his appetite. [36]
Citizens for a Free Kuwait staged two major events that reinforced the identification of Saddam with Hitler. One was the testimony on Iraqi atrocities given before Congress members in October 1990. On 10 October, the Congressional Human Rights Caucus heard a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl testify anonymously that she had been in the al-Addan hospital in Kuwait City when marauding Iraqi soldiers arrived and removed 312 premature babies from incubators and left them "on the cold floor to die." "Citizens for a Free Kuwait" also distributed a media kit containing the girl Nayirah’s written testimony about the Iraqi atrocities. Citizens for a Free Kuwait made another, similar presentation to the United Nations Security Council in November, shortly before the UN would vote to authorize the use of force. In the period between 10 October and the launching of Operation Desert Storm, President Bush, administration members, Congressmen, television pundits, columnists, and radio talk show hosts repeated and discussed as fact the story of infants torn from incubators. President Bush frequently cited the story of the babies who died "scattered like firewood" on the cold floor. [37]
"Of all the accusations made against the dictator," observed Harper’s publisher John MacArthur, "none had more impact on American public opinion than the one about Iraqi soldiers removing 312 babies from their incubators." The "Congressional Human Rights Caucus" was not informed that Nayirah was a member of the Kuwaiti royal family and the daughter of Kuwait’s ambassador to the U.S. Amnesty International at first accepted these atrocity stories, but an investigation in Kuwait after the war turned up no corroborating witnesses or evidence, and the human rights organization repudiated these claims in 1991. [38]
The Vice President did his part that autumn to educate his constituency on the dangers of appeasement. Dan Quayle, whom the press treated with nonstop levity during his term as Bush's vice president, was nonetheless a serious politician with a serious foreign-policy agenda. [39] Bush had chosen the Indiana senator for his ties to the Republican right wing. Quayle could speak for, and to, a major constituency of conservative Christians in the nation’s heartland. In the White House, Quayle surrounded himself with neoconservatives. His chief of staff was William Kristol, whom he had met through Kenneth Adelman, [40] an assistant to Donald Rumsfeld in the 1970s and an arms-control official during the Reagan era. [41]
In November, Joseph Shattan, another Reaganite neoconservative (and former speechwriter for Jeane Kirkpatrick), wrote for Quayle "what I consider the most important speech in my four years as Vice President." [42] The heart of his 29 November address at Seton Hall, Quayle noted, "went to what I saw as the first crisis of the post-cold war world." In this "new world order," Quayle argued, "parallels and precedents and the long historical view were more important than ever." The speech’s main historical parallel consisted of the Western powers’ dilemma in the 1930s as Hitler grew ever more aggressive. Quayle’s central, Churchillian message, that "resoluteness at the right hour" would have prevented the Second World War, was surely not lost on his audience. [43]
As Operation Desert Shield assembled its forces in Saudi Arabia, Bush continued to invoke Munich. "In World War II," military officers at Pearl Harbor were told, "the world paid dearly for appeasing an aggressor who could have been stopped. Appeasement leads only to further aggression, and, ultimately, to war. And we are not going to make the mistake of appeasement again." [44] On 1 November, Bush cited "the awful similarity" between the entry of Iraqi troops into Kuwait and "what happened when the [Nazi] Death’s Head Regiments went into Poland." [45]
November 1990 saw the culmination of Bush’s efforts to equate the Gulf crisis with Munich. A week-long trip through Europe and the Middle East carried Bush to Czechoslovakia. His first words to the Czech Federal Assembly invoked the "parallels between the appeasement that preceded the unopposed Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1939 and Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait." Bush argued that when nations faced with aggression turned away from, in Neville Chamberlain’s phrase, "a quarrel in a faraway country between a people of whom we know nothing," tragic consequences ensued. Bush’s rhetoric was growing progressively more Manichaean, verging on the apocalyptic at times. "Good will prevail," he avowed in his Prague address; "The darkness in the desert sky cannot stand against the way of light." [46]
The continual iteration of the Hitler equation and Munich analogy had its effect on the American public. A Newsweek article of 26 November cited the findings of a Gallup poll taken on 15-16 November: "Some people have compared Saddam Hussein to Adolf Hitler. Do you agree or disagree with this comparison?" 53% of respondents agreed, while 41% disagreed. [47]
Munich over Vietnam
Lyndon Johnson had said, "Everything I knew about history told me that if I got out of Vietnam...then I’d be doing exactly what Chamberlain did in World War II. I’d be giving a big fat reward to aggression...and so would begin World War III." [48] Although President Bush had determined that he would not give a big fat reward to aggression and so trigger World War III, everything he knew about history made him uneasily aware, as 15 January approached, that history afforded other analogies besides Munich, and that one in particular warned Americans of the hazards attendant upon intervening militarily in a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom they knew nothing.
Hitler and Munich had dominated the discourse in the Gulf Crisis. By December 1990, the dark specter of "a new Vietnam" dampened the World War II mood. In a Gallup poll of 15-16 November, only 24% of those polled thought President Bush "should quickly begin military action against Iraq" while 70% thought he should "wait to see if economic sanctions are effective." [49] In 1990 the majority of Americans were reluctant to intervene militarily in a foreign land, and the conventional wisdom held that the Vietnam War had conditioned this outlook.
"Bush is betting his presidency, well aware that Vietnam cost LBJ his," one pundit argued, while others hastened to explain "Why the Gulf is Not Vietnam." [50] As the U.N. deadline for Saddam’s withdrawal from Kuwait neared, President Bush began to spend less time assuring the public that he was no Neville Chamberlain, and more time reassuring it that he was not Lyndon Johnson. [51]
Bush stressed that the war (if war should come), would not be "a protracted, drawn-out war" like the Vietnam War. The president enumerated the ways in which the coming war would be different: the "forces arrayed are different; the opposition is different...the countries united against him in the United Nations are different; the topography of Kuwait is different, and the motivation of our all-volunteer force is superb." [52]
In January, Vice President Quayle visited the troops in the Gulf, bringing them the message "they most wanted to hear...that this will ‘not be another Vietnam.’" [53] Thus the Vietnam analogy became the Munich analogy’s rhetorical opponent, and the two analogies guided the debate over whether not to go to war.
America’s poorly-defined national aims had compounded the debâcle of Vietnam. With this idea in mind, pundits and politicians began to demand that the president clarify his policy (or war), aims—if Americans were to fight and die in the Gulf, precisely what would they be dying for? For a "free Kuwait," a restored balance of power, to ensure the flow of oil, or in order to remove the "new Hitler" from power? "The administration’s failure to state its aims with clarity and candor," warned neoconservative defense expert Richard Perle, "is creating a policy vacuum likely to be filled by those opposed to a firm line against Hussein. Already the specter of Vietnam haunts the emerging debate." [54]
In a New York Times editorial, former Secretary of State Alexander Haig ponderously warned that the Bush administration must neither reward aggression à la Munich, nor be trapped by its rhetoric into going to war without well-defined military goals, as in Vietnam. [55] Bush’s "policy vacuum" did indeed prompt his Democratic opponents to counter Munich with Vietnam.
In November, House speaker Thomas Foley and Senate majority leader Richard Gephardt jointly proclaimed Bush’s aims in the Gulf "muddled": "President Bush has stopped emphasizing the need to protect oil supplies...He now concentrates on opposing aggression, comparing Mr. Hussein to Hitler." The Democrats urged the President to justify his choice of historical analogies, and clarify whether the U.S. was really heading off another Hitler, or about to repeat "the Vietnam experience." [56] Bush was forced to assure the public that "no Vietnam" was going to take place. Bush continued to make such assurances after the air attack on Baghdad had been underway for several weeks.[57]
It would be pleasing to say that the Congressional debates, held only a few days before the U.N. deadline, had much to do with the outcome of the crisis, but this was not the case. Bush stated flatly in his political memoir that Congress's failure to pass a war resolution would not have restrained the him from attacking Iraq: "In truth, even had Congress not passed the resolution I would have acted and ordered our troops into combat. I know it would have caused an outcry, but it was the right thing to do. I was comfortable in my own mind that I had the constitutional authority." [58] As Eric Alterman observed in 1992, "by the time Congress finally got around to exercising its constitutional prerogative to determine whether to commit the nation to war," Congress’s role had almost ceased to matter. [59] But it had not ceased to matter entirely. The televised debates demonstrated publicly the political alignments and positions of America’s legislators, and revealed a full-blown "war party" flush with life.
Munich, the analogy that urged military confrontation, had prevailed over Vietnam, the analogy that counseled restraint, back in August, when the President committed U.S. military forces to the Gulf. The presence of nearly 600,000 American and "allied" troops, assembled on foreign soil by executive authority and presidential diplomacy, ensured that a diplomatic solution (had one been arrived at) would be unsatisfactory to the pundits, the president, and perhaps the public. The Bush administration had, by its rhetoric, committed itself and the Congress to a war from the beginning of the crisis. The Munich analogy, embraced by Bush but also wielded against him by the neoconservative foreign-policy punditocracy as a cudgel with which to chastise him when he "went wobbly," had succeeded in defining the crisis for the nation. [60]
So narrow and Manichaean a narrative of "good versus evil" had been established, by the time of the Congressional debates, that any position advanced as an alternative to war was indeed made to appear "the equivalent of national humiliation, retreat, denial, and cowardice in the face of evil." [61]
To suggest that the Congressional debates were a ritual whereby the legislative branch veiled its impotence to control the outcome of the Gulf crisis is not to say that some members of Congress did not make forceful, historically-based arguments against war and in favor of allowing some less drastic form of coercion to induce Saddam to withdraw. Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa, for example, pointed out the irony of deciding to oppose "naked aggression" in one case when history afforded so many other instances of naked aggression that had gone unchallenged by the United States:
...Not too long ago, Syria—now one of our allies—Syria went into Lebanon and massacred 750 civilians. Well, that’s naked aggression. We didn’t do anything about it...What about Indonesia’s bloody excursion into East Timor, where they basically wiped out a country, killed a lot of people? We didn’t do anything. Or when Saddam Hussein gassed the Kurds in his own country. That’s naked aggression. We didn’t do anything...Does this mean that we are now going to say that the United States will indeed become the policeman of the world, and that we will respond to every instance of naked aggression? Or does it mean that we’re just going to kind of pick and choose which ones we want to respond to or not. [62]
History, or competing versions of history, is a time-honored constituent of American political argument. The U.S. Congress weighed the two most resonant historical analogies of the day, Munich and Vietnam, in order to generate (or reject), a historically-anchored casus bellum. In the January, 1991 debates a ritualized version of history operated as a shorthand for discussing the projected war in terms of "just war theory," the set of moral norms derived from Catholic theology and Enlightenment political thought that inform the rules of warfare found in international law. [63]
During the three days of Congressional debates in 1991, politicians such as Rep. Ike Shelton, a Democrat, proclaimed that
"Chamberlain...returned from the Munich meeting with Adolf Hitler, proclaiming ‘peace in our time.’ How wrong he was...The lesson in history of which I speak is found in the phrase, ‘We should have stopped him when we could.’" [64]
In the global vision of Senator McCain of Arizona, any appeasement of Saddam Hussein would not only encourage one dictator, but would ensure the rise of "a succession of dictators."
"And those dictators will see a green light, a green light for aggression, a green light for annexation of its weaker neighbors. And, indeed, over time a threat to the stability of this entire globe." [65]
These congressional Churchillians, for whom the Gulf crisis was a simulacrum of Munich to be resolved only by military confrontation, believed that the president had in his favor all the elements of jus ad bellum (the right to wage war): just cause, legitimate authority, and right intent. [66] The Munich analogy had simplified a complex situation into one of good versus evil. Who could doubt that the cause of preventing a Hitler-like figure from committing further aggression was just. Who could doubt that America’s intent to free Kuwait and punish aggression was right and moral?
As to legitimate authority, the president’s opponents never argued that the commander-in-chief had not the power to deploy troops. As the debates resulted in a resolution authorizing Bush to attack, [67] the question of precisely what authority he had to make war under the Constitution, which must have arisen had Congress withheld consent, never obstructed the path to war. The unresolved questions about the efficacy of the War Powers Act of 1973 were never seriously raised. [68]
Congress members who opposed the Gulf war raised some doubt about Bush’s just cause and right intent (several Democrats contended that "the reason we are in the Persian Gulf is oil"), but the main force of their antiwar argument derived from a historical analogy—that of Vietnam. A debater asking whether the war would be "another Vietnam" questioned, in effect, the president’s claim to satisfy the requirements of jus in bello as understood by average Americans. Justice in the waging of war stipulated that force must be proportional to the evil it opposed, so that the damage must be less, preferably much less, than the original wrongdoing.
For most antiwar debaters, the pertinent "lesson" of Vietnam was that "proportionality" had been violated, as had the principle of "discrimination" which designated soldiers only as objects of attack and exempted civilians and their means of supporting life. Gulf War opponents’ construction of jus in bello leaned heavily towards avoiding the loss of American lives—many, like John Glenn of Ohio, emphasized the dismal and Vietnam-conditioned prospect of "flag-draped coffins of soldiers and sailors and marines and airmen...in the hangars in Dover, Delaware." Rep. Barbara Boxer showed a more transnational sense of war’s injustices, foreseeing
a huge price if we choose this route...The price is in body bags, in babies killed, in an uncertain, unstable Middle East even after the crisis. In a decade that will be lost as we once again have put our resources into war and weapons and rob our people of what they need in this country. [69]
War supporters drew an entirely different "lesson" from Vietnam. Rep. Gary L. Ackerman, Democrat of New York, construed it thus:
There were lessons in Vietnam. Saddam Hussein thinks he’s learned one, that the United States has no national resolve, that Americans will do anything short of shedding blood, that the Congress will pick apart the President and undermine our troops and our strategy, and let him have his violent way. Mr. Speaker, let us learn him a new lesson. [70]
For Senator Robert Dole, as well, the master lesson of Vietnam was that domestic opposition to any war encouraged, and gave aid and comfort to, the enemy. Saddam Hussein had not backed down because he thought he had learned a lesson from America’s failure in Vietnam and its aftermath. "It’s because he thinks, when push comes to shove, we won’t [fight]. He doubts our will. He doubts our staying power. He doubts our unity." [71]
The Gulf crisis debate marked an epoch in the development of two historical analogies that have entered into American folk culture. The relentless application of the Munich analogy during the Gulf crisis and Gulf War promoted a simple, easy-to understand model for assessing a foreign threat and for gauging whether war was the correct response. Under this model’s influence, foreign threats tended to take on absolute and Hitlerian proportions, and among the possible responses to such threats, military measures would always be deemed appropriate, and diplomatic efforts would always smack of Chamberlainism and appeasement, and be thought likely to encourage further aggression.
("The Munich Analogy Part 4: Munich über Alles," which discusses Muniching in more recent years, will appear in a couple of days.)
NOTES:
- William Safire, "War Words" New York Times (26 August 1990): SM18.
- Jeffrey Record, Making War, Thinking History: Munich, Vietnam, and Presidential Uses of Force from Korea to Kosovo (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2002), 97.
- George Will, "Wolf out of Babylon" Washington Post (3 August 1990): A23.
- Dan Quayle, Standing Firm: A Vice-Presidential Memoir. (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), 205.
- Gary R. Hess, Presidential Decisions for War: Korea, Vietnam, and the Persian Gulf (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 2001), 163-4.
- Earlier, a White House spokesman had condemned the invasion, and called for ‘‘the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all Iraqi forces,’’ while another announced the Administration was considering all options but declined to give details. Gordon, Michael R. "Iraq Army Invades Capital of Kuwait in Fierce Fighting." New York Times (2 August 1990): A1.
- Quayle, 205.
- Bush published the following private journal entry of 7 September 1990. The president noted that Mrs. Thatcher was "staunch and strong and worries that there will be an erosion on force. She does not want to go back to the U.N. on use of force, nor do I. She does not want to compromise on the Kuwait government, nor do I. In essence, she has not "gone wobbly" as she cautioned me a couple of weeks ago...I love that expression." George H. W. Bush, All the Best, George Bush: My Life in Letters and Other Writings (New York, NY: Scribner, 1999), 479.
- R.W. Apple Jr., "Invading Iraqis Seize Kuwait and Its Oil; U.S. Condemns Attack, Urges United Action" New York Times (3 August 1990): A1, A8; Richard Wolf, "Congress, World: Harsh Reaction; In Washington, Partisan Potshots, Concern" USA Today (3 August 1990): A1.
- William A. Dorman and Steven Livingston, "News and Historical Content: The Establishing Phase of the Persian Gulf Policy Debate" in W. Lance Bennett and David L. Paletz, ed. Taken by Storm: The Media, Public Opinion, and U.S. Foreign Policy in the Gulf War (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1994), 69.
- Eric Alterman, "Operation Pundit Storm" World Policy Journal 9, 4 (Fall 1992): 609
- Charles Krauthammer, "A Festival of Appeasement" Washington Post (3 August 1990): A23.
- Flora Lewis, "Fruits of Appeasement" New York Times (4 August 1990): 24.
- A.M. Rosenthal, "Making a Killer" New York Times (5 August 1990): E19.
- Quoted in Marjorie Williams, "Monster in the Making; Saddam Hussein; From Unknown to Arch-Villain in a Matter of Days" Washington Post (9 August 1990): D1.
- Quoted in ibid., D1.
- Russell Watson, "Battle Ready" Newsweek (August 20, 1990): 20; Lionel Barber, "Crisis in the Gulf; Bush succeeds in stiffening Saudi spines" Financial Times (8 August 1990): Sec.1, p.2.
- George H. W. Bush, "‘If History Teaches Us Anything, It Is That We Must Resist Aggression’: Address by President Bush on the situation in the Middle East" Washington Post (9 August 1990): A36.
- The World War II analogy also quelled the notion that there had been any sort of provocation or warning. For an incisive analysis of the Bush administration’s dealings with Saddam Hussein prior to August, 1990 and a brief historical account of Iraqi-Kuwaiti relations, see David Campbell, Politics without Principle: Sovereignty, Ethics, and the Narratives of the Gulf War (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1993), 43-50.
- Bush, "‘If History Teaches Us Anything," Washington Post (9 August 1990): A36.
- Ibid., A36.
- Dorman and Livingston, 63-4.
- Strobe Talbott, "The Dangers of Demonization" Time 136, 8 (20 August 1990) [online source] available at: http://www.time.com/...
- U.S. Rep. Steven Solarz, (D-NY) neoconservative and co-author of the House bill granting Bush war powers, wrote in January 1991, "President Bush’s parallels between Hitler and Saddam are wildly overdrawn. But if there are fundamental differences between Saddam and Hitler, there are also instructive similarities. Like Hitler, Saddam has an unappeaseable will to power combined with a ruthless willingness to use whatever means are necessary to achieve it." Steven J. Solarz, "The Stakes in the Gulf" New Republic (January 9 and 14).
- R.W. Apple, Jr., "Bush Says Iraqi Aggression Threatens `Our Way of Life’" New York Times (16 August 1990): A14.
- Americans understood that the supply of oil figured heavily in any concerns about changes to the balance of power in the Middle East, but were unclear and divided on whether the flow of oil constituted a legitimate casus bellum for Americans. Bush’s address tied the oil issue to American security and the ideals of friendship [with Saudi Arabia], sovereignty, and independence. "If History Teaches Us Anything," A36.
- Robert Reinhold, "Around U.S., a Cautious Chorus of Support" New York Times (August 9, 1990): A1; Apple, "Bush Says Iraqi Aggression Threatens `Our Way of Life,’" A14.
- Russell Watson, "Battle Ready" Newsweek (20 August 1990): 20.
- Quayle, 207-8. 62.
- Ibid., 208.
- Quoted in Richard Cohen, "Amidst Bush’s Success, Quayle Causes Unease" St. Louis Post-Dispatch (5 September1990): 3C.
- Nathaniel C. Nash, "Confrontation in the Gulf: Washington Talk; Congress and the Crisis: To Intervene or Not?" New York Times (13 September 1990): A10.
- The Munich analogy graced Congressional campaign rhetoric that autumn. Senator John Kerry’s Republican challenger, Jim Rappaport, deployed newspaper ads that questioned Kerry’s support for Israel and likened his stance on Iraq to that of Neville Chamberlain at Munich: "Kerry’s formula is the same diplomatic strategy used to appease Hitler before World War II. Like Mr. Kerry, the diplomats kept surrendering. They kept giving Hitler ‘wiggle room.’ Kerry, the affronted war veteran, issued a press rebuttal, stating: "Anyone who has fought for this country ought to resent it when some people throw around gratuitous references to Neville Chamberlain or Adolf Hitler." Michael Rezendes, "Kerry assails ads by Rappaport on Kuwait invasion" Boston Globe (4 October 1990): 48; "Bush tried to ‘appease’ Saddam before invasion, lawmakers charge" Toronto Star (19 September 1990): A16.
- Melinda Beck, Ann McDaniel and Russell Watson, "No Fear: A Newsweek Poll" Newsweek (29 October 1990): 33.
- "Citizens for Free Kuwait Files with FARA After a Nine-month Lag" O’Dwyer’s FARA Report 1, 9 (October 1991): 2; "H&K leads PR charge in behalf of Kuwaiti cause." O’Dwyer’s PR Services Report 5, 1 (Jan. 1991): 8; Arthur E. Rowse, "Flacking for the Emir" The Progressive (May 1991): 22.
- Citizens for Free Kuwait, "Thank You President Bush and the American People (Display Ad 8)" New York Times (24 August 1991): A13.
- "HBO Recycling Gulf War Hoax?" Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (December 4 2002) [online source] available at: http://www.fair.org/...
- See David Campbell, "The Gulf War in Context," in Michael McKinley, ed., The Gulf War: Critical Perspectives (St. Leonards, N.S.W., Australia: Allen & Unwin; Canberra: Dept. of International Relations, RSPAS, ANU, 1994), 43-4. The Congressional Human Rights Caucus was not an official Congressional committee, but an association chaired by California Democrat Tom Lantos and Illinois Republican John Porter, who were active in forging bipartisan support for military intervention in the Gulf. Congressmen Lantos and Porter also co-chaired of the Congressional Human Rights Foundation, a separate body that occupied free office space in Hill & Knowlton’s Washington, D.C. headquarters. John R. MacArthur, Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War (Berkeley: University of California, 1992), 54, 58-60.
- Quayle’s foreign policy interest lay mainly in the areas of strategic defense and controlling the proliferation of arms in the Third World. In 1987, Quayle wrote an editorial piece in the Washington Post warning of the dangers of ballistic missile proliferation in the Third World, and particularly the Middle East.
- It was this Ken Adelman who, in February 2002, made the celebrated prediction that "demolishing Hussein’s military power and liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk." Kenneth Adelman, "Cakewalk in Iraq." Washington Post (13 February 2002): A27.
- Quayle, 88.
- Ibid., 214.
- Ibid., 215.
- "Remarks to officers and troops at Hickham AFB in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, October 29, 1990" in George H. W. Bush, Public Papers of the Presidents, 1990. (Washington, DC: U.S. General Printing Office, 1990), 1483.
- "The President’s news conference in Orlando, Florida, November 1, 1990" in ibid., 1514.
- Ann Devroy, "Bush Likens Kuwaitis to Czechs; President Visits ‘Appeasement’s Lonely Victim,’ Condemns Saddam" Washington Post (18 November 1990): A23.
- Tom Morganthau, "Should We Fight?" Newsweek (26 November 1990): 26. 48. Quoted in Kearns, 264.
- Morganthau, "Should We Fight," 26.
- Stephen Budiansky, "Presidents and powers of war" U.S. News & World Report 109, 23 (10 December 1990): 10; Richard Perle, "Why the Gulf is not Vietnam" U.S. News & World Report 109, 20 (19 November 1990): 53.
- See Jeffrey Record, Making War, Thinking History: Munich, Vietnam, and Presidential Uses of Force from Korea to Kosovo (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2002), 103.
- Evan Thomas, "No Vietnam" Newsweek (10 December 1990): 24.
- "Their morale, as I wrote in my diary, was ‘skyhigh,’ but everywhere I heard the same concern: ‘Let’s make sure we get the job done so we don’t have to come back here.’ That was the constant theme, and that’s what I reported to President Bush." Quayle, 219-20.
- Perle, 53.
- Alexander M. Haig, Jr. "Gulf Analogy: Munich or Vietnam?" New York Times (10 December 1990): A19.
- Michael Oreskes, "A Debate Unfolds over Going to War against the Iraqis" New York Times (12 November 1990): A1.
- On 16 January, as the air war commenced, Bush said in a TV address, "I’ve told the American people before that this will not be another Vietnam...Our troops will have the best possible support in the entire world, and they will not be asked to fight with one hand tied behind their back." On Jan. 23, Bush repeated, "This will not be another Vietnam. Never again will our Armed Forces be sent out to do a job with one hand tied behind their back." George H. W. Bush, Public Papers of the Presidents, 1991. (Washington, DC: U.S. General Printing Office, 1991), 44; 60.
- Bush and Scowcroft, 446.
- Alterman, "Operation Pundit Storm," 609.
- Space will not permit enumeration of all the "Muniching" Bush was subjected to every time neoconservatives began to detect in him signs of "wobbliness" towards Saddam Hussein. Just as an example, however, when Secretary Baker met with Iraqi foreign minister Tariq Aziz in November, Rep. Stephen Solarz, a neoconservative Democrat and co-author of the Congressional resolution authorizing force in the Gulf, remarked, "I hope and trust that this is not a prelude to a Middle East Munich." Judith Miller, "Bush’s gambit; a way into war and a way out." New York Times (2 December 1990): Sect. 4, p. 1.
- Alterman, "Operation Pundit Storm," 609.
- "Confrontation in the Gulf; Day 2: Lawmakers Debate War and More Time for Sanctions" New York Times (12 January 1991): A6.
- For a discussion of the Vietnam War’s relation to just war theory, see Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations 2nd ed. (New York: Basic Books, 1992), 97-101, 188-96; 299-303. 309-15. For a group of essays on just war theory and the Gulf War, including one by Walzer, see David E. DeCosse, ed. But Was it Just?: Reflections on the Morality of the Persian Gulf War. (New York: Doubleday, 1992). For a critique of Walzer’s arguments in But Was it Just, see Campbell, Politics without Principle, 23-4, 49.
- "Confrontation in the Gulf," New York Times, (A6.
- Ibid., A6.
- Another tenet of just war theory stipulates that war should be waged only as a "last resort;" this principle is structured into the U.N. Charter, Article 33 of which requires that parties must exhaust the peaceful means of settling a dispute before force can be used. Bush sent Secretary of State Baker, armed with a demand for unconditional withdrawal, for a last discussion with Iraq’s foreign minister on 9 January 1991, a few days before the UN deadline. This mission is widely believed to have been staged to show the U.S. Congress that war, if war came, would indeed be a "last resort;" see Campbell, 58-9.
- The Solarz-Michael Resolution passed in the House by a vote of 250 to 183. The Senate narrowly passed a similar resolution, 52 to 47.
- The War Powers Act, passed at the Vietnam War’s end, restricted the president’s powers to deploy US military forces abroad in hostile situations without prior Congressional approval. It required the president to report such action to both Houses of Congress within 48 hours, and provided that Congress could recall the troops despite a presidential veto. The act, passed over Nixon’s veto, aimed at restricting the president’s ability to engage in warfare without a Congressional declaration of war. Each president since its passage has disputed its constitutionality, and its provisions generally have been ignored—its status might have been tested had Congress refused its assent in 1991.
- "Confrontation in the Gulf," New York Times, (A6.
- Ibid., A6.
- Ibid., A6.