Drift

chairman of the Joint Chiefs had spent too much time in the previous three months focused on political considerations and too little on military planning. He sometimes questioned whether the general was “on the team.”

“Listening to him,” Cheney wrote of Powell, “made me think about how Vietnam had shaped the views of America’s top generals. They had seen loss of public support for the Vietnam War undermine the war effort as well as damage the reputation of the military. There was a view in the Pentagon, for which I had a lot of sympathy, that the civilian leadership had blown it in Vietnam by failing to make the tough decisions that were required to have a chance at prevailing. I understood where Powell was coming from, but I couldn’t accept it. Our responsibility at the Department of Defense was to make sure the president had a full range of options to consider.”

If Cheney believed Powell was dragging his heels all through the early stages of Desert Shield, he was partly right. Throughout the process Powell had agitated for a clear statement from the president of mission objectives, a real effort by the president’s political team to win the support of the American people, and a commitment of all necessary resources. He would admit to overstepping his bounds in pressing the president on these essentially political questions, but he would not apologize for it. He had observed very little internal debate in the White House about whether or not we ought to make this war, and he believed the men and women sent to fight in the Persian Gulf deserved a real and genuine consideration of that question by their civilian leaders. He’d lived through two tours in Vietnam, seen his brother officers demoralized, seen the Army disavowed by the general public and close to broken as an institution. Reluctant warrior? “Guilty,” Powell would write in his autobiography. “War is a deadly game; and I do not believe in spending the lives of Americans lightly.” There would be no repeat of Vietnam while he was in charge, no lives needlessly thrown away. “Perhaps I was the ghost of Vietnam,” he told a television interviewer in 1995. “If it caused me to be the skunk at the picnic,” his compatriots in the George Herbert Walker Bush administration could all “take a deep smell.”

According to Powell’s excellent biographer, Karen DeYoung, the general’s presentation at the October 30 meeting gave the president’s closest confidant on matters of war and peace, National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, a snootful of something he didn’t much like. “Scowcroft was taken aback by the size of the attack force Powell was proposing,” DeYoung wrote of that moment. “The military, he believed, had moved from reluctance to undertake an offensive operation at all to a deliberately inflated plan designed to make the president think twice about the effort.”

Scowcroft… he was onto something there.

The thing was, there was no other institutional brake on the war-making machine, at least not one the president acknowledged. One of the last remaining brake lines had been severed by the disintegration of the Soviet Union. In the previous year, since the fall of the Berlin Wall signaled the beginning of the end for the United States’ Cold War foe of more than forty years, the Department of Defense had been fighting a fierce bureaucratic battle to hold on to the lion’s share of its spectacularly large Reagan-inflated budget. It was still a dangerous world out there, and Secretary of Defense Cheney, for one, meant to keep the nation’s military on high idle. He had made it clear that all those hopelessly irenic congressmen and senators like Ted Kennedy who insisted on redirecting resources from the military into programs like job retraining and education and—my God!—universal health care were simply harebrained. “In a speech in Washington before a Princeton University student group,” the Los Angeles Times reported a month after the fall of the Wall, “Cheney excoriated ‘irresponsible’ critics who suggest ‘there is some kind of big peace dividend here to be cashed in and to buy all the goodies everybody on Capitol Hill can think about buying.’ ”

Within six months, the Hill’s most powerful Democrat on the budget had conceded Cheney’s point. The chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee bluntly waved off a gathering of mayors who asked that defense money be reallocated to urban programs. “There’s no money…. The peace dividend is already going to be swallowed.”

The real “peace dividend,” it turned out, in a twist of sad and stunning irony, was that it became much easier to make war in places like the Persian Gulf without worrying about the opportunity cost for our ongoing standoff with the Soviets. “We could be so lavish with resources because the world had changed,” Powell later said. To fight a war in the Gulf, for example, “we could now afford to pull divisions out of Germany that had been there for the past forty years to stop a Soviet offensive that was no longer coming.”

And of course Reagan’s presidential antidote for the nation’s Vietnam syndrome—to simply ignore the Constitution, or go around the Congress, when you want to make war—had proved hugely successful in cutting the constraints on war in all but one particular. The only line still tying down the US war machine was the legacy of Creighton Abrams, the good old Abrams Doctrine—the idea that sending the military into war would mean, by definition, sending the country into war. In 1990, it was not possible to mobilize the military for action of any considerable size (as Lyndon Johnson had tragically done in Vietnam) without calling up the Guard and Reserves. The wrenching actuality of calling all those weekend warriors to active duty—active combat duty, active you-could-be-killed-on-the-field-of-battle duty—would not go unnoticed. Colin Powell had told President Bush, “Sir, call-up means pulling people out of their jobs. It affects businesses. It means disrupting thousands of families. It’s a major political decision.” The Abrams Doctrine made sure that a decision in Washington, DC, to start a war rang clear in every state and every city and just about every one-horse town in America. Colin Powell was counting on it.

Not that Powell was opposed to kicking Saddam’s ass, but he hoped to have public recognition, and public debate, and a real show of popular support, before the bombs started flying. When the president’s pushy little chief of staff, John Sununu, had suggested they could simply leave the Reserves at home and still whip Saddam, Powell insisted. The Reserves needed to be called up, right away, and a lot of them.

The best Sununu and the White House politicals could get was an agreement to hold the official announcement of the call-up for a week or ten days. “The political experts,” wrote Scowcroft, “wanted to delay the announcement until after the congressional elections.” The decision with the war council had been made on October 30, the elections were November 6, and on November 8 the troops were officially called up. By the time Cheney picked up the phone and told congressional leaders that the president’s massive and momentous buildup on the Kuwaiti border was under way… and by the time George Bush stepped up to a White House podium to make the bland statement that “I have today directed the secretary of defense to increase the size of the US forces committed to Desert Shield to ensure that the coalition has an adequate offensive military option should that be necessary to achieve our common goals,” warning bells were already pealing throughout the land. The formal announcement rang clear and rang loud. It was the Abrams Doctrine at work. Not just the president, not just the military, but the country was facing up to the very real possibility of war. “After 14 weeks of proceeding virtually unchallenged at home,” the New York Times lead political reporter wrote within days of Bush’s announcement, “the United States policy in the Persian Gulf has become the focus of a national debate.”

Right!

The debate got tense, and in a hurry. The 101st Congress had come to a close before the elections, and the 102nd wasn’t scheduled to reconvene until the beginning of January, but that just meant there wasn’t much else on the national agenda to crowd out war talk. Big-time Democrats in the Senate ran for the open and available microphones and, as Bush saw it, started playing to the headline writers. Ted Kennedy remonstrated against the president’s reckless “headlong” drive toward war with Saddam. “Silence by Congress,” Massachusetts’s senior senator said, “is an abdication of our constitutional responsibility and an acquiescence in war.” The Senate majority leader George Mitchell was tougher on the president, stating flatly that Bush “has no legal authority, none whatever,” to take the country to war. “The Constitution clearly invests that great responsibility in the Congress and the Congress alone.”

And it wasn’t just Democrats.

Even Dick Lugar, a Republican senator, supposedly a friend to the administration, was promising to stick the congressional nose deep into the White House’s war-making business. He suggested it might be prudent for the president to spend as much energy convincing the American people that a shooting war against the Iraqi Army was the right thing to do as he was spending in convincing the rest of the world. Lugar went so far as to call for a rare special session of a lame-duck Congress to vote on a resolution authorizing a war in the Persian Gulf.