Kissinger's Gulf Wars
by George Jonas
Queen's Quarterly
July 1, 2008
On the fifth anniversary of George W. Bush's invasion of Saddam Hussein's fiefdom, let me succumb to the temptation of offering a counterfactual version of history. Had Henry Kissinger been born in 1943 instead of 1923, he could have helped shape U.S. foreign policy in the 1990s instead of the 1970s. What would have happened if he had done so?
Some people consider the German-born scholar and diplomat a reincarnation of Prince Klemens von Metternich, the father of the balance of power. Be that as it may, Kissinger certainly selected the 1815 Congress of Vienna for his doctoral dissertation.
He is a declared champion of realpolitik. As Richard Nixon's gift to the world, Kissinger helped America extricate itself from Vietnam and achieve peace with honour, or (some say) perhaps without it. He then laid the groundwork for the matchmaking of the century: the Forbidden City brokering of a steamy liaison between Karl Marx and Adam Smith, eventually producing the robust if somewhat bizarre lovechild of present-day China.
Question: had Kissinger been George Bush the Elder's foreign policy advisor in 1990, where would we be in 2008?
Specifically, had it been Kissinger's watch, (1) would America have stopped Iraq in 1990? If it had, (2) would it have broken off the campaign, leaving Saddam in power? Had it done so, (3) would it have invaded Iraq again 13 years later? If the answer is yes, (4) after defeating Iraq in a few weeks with almost no casualties and capturing Saddam before the end of 2003, would it have continued to sit in Baghdad's "Green Zone" year after year, incurring over 4,000 dead and 20,000 injured, for no military purpose, in order to build a Western-style democracy in Mesopotamia?
Before exploring this, a word on mixing muses. Counterfactuals entail inviting comic Thalia and epic Calliope to share a stage with historic Clio. Is this valid? Is it in good taste?
Well -- counterfactuals have gone in and out of fashion. In recent years not only writers of historical fiction, but earnest scholars, who a generation ago would have considered such parlour games unseemly, have been toying with them. History, in addition to being the teacher of life, as it was in Cicero's day -- historia est magistra vitae -- is also becoming life's song and dance man. Some blame corporate capitalist greed turning education into entertainment, while others point to the collapse of class and ethnic barriers around ivory towers leading to the toleration of fantasy, gossip, banter, and frivolity within the discipline.
I say, never mind. We know from chaos theory that microscopic changes at the source can lead to cosmic changes downstream.
"What-ifs" are legitimate questions -- even though literal-minded Montessori graduates dismiss them, arguing that counterfactuals are meaningless, and if one's grandmother had had three black legs, she would have been a piano.
So be it. Let's sit at the piano and play.
Say what you will of Saddam Hussein, he was not stupid. Wicked, yes, stupid no. Even so, he failed to understand something about the West. Failing to understand it nearly cost him his fiefdom and his life in 1990. As he was incapable of learning his lesson, fifteen years later it cost him both.
What Saddam the "realist" never understood was that Westerners are not realists. They are idealists, at least up to a point. They are not guided solely or entirely by self-interest. Much as they need oil, they would not do anything for it. Henry Kissinger understood this. It used to frustrate the hell out of him; he tried to wean the West away from idealism, but as a realist he took it into account that he could not.
Saddam simply did not get it.
Iraq's dictator was convinced America was not going to interfere with his invasion of Kuwait in the summer of 1990. That was why he reacted with a smile (noted in the transcript) when U.S. ambassador April Glaspie said that "the Kuwait issue is not associated with America."
Had Ambassador Glaspie spoken on Dr Kissinger's behalf, chances are she would not have misled Saddam, even unintentionally. The Kuwait issue would not, in fact, have been associated with America.
The misunderstanding was not entirely Ms Glaspie's fault. Iraq launched its invasion a mere four days after Saddam's conversation with Ms Glaspie on 25 July 1990. No invasion could have been launched in four days if the Bully of Baghdad had not fully anticipated (mistakenly as it turned out) a green light from America.
With Dr Kissinger in charge, Saddam would have had a green light.
Metternich himself, let alone Machiavelli, would have viewed green as a sensible colour. It did not require the ambassador's infelicitous remark -- "We have no opinion on your Arab-Arab conflicts, such as your dispute with Kuwait" -- for Saddam to reach his conclusion. Had U.S. President George Bush, Sr., been guided by realpolitik, as Saddam believed him to be -- or had he been guided by Kissinger, which would have amounted to the same thing -- he would have spoken to Iraq's tyrant as follows: "My friend, why should we quarrel? We have no essential conflict. You live in the Middle East; we don't. You have no territorial ambitions in our part of the world; we have no territorial ambitions in yours. You want to sell oil, and we want to buy it. Well, we can buy oil from you as easily as from the Emir of Kuwait."
What any student of realpolitik -- Saddam, Kissinger, Metternich, or Machiavelli -- would have known was this: if the West cared only about oil -- as the West's enemies always maintained it did -- embracing Saddam would have been the logical thing to do. Saddam was not trying to hijack the oil supply of the Middle East to feed it to the camels.
Oil would be of no use to him unless he could sell it, and he could sell his oil profitably only to the developed industrial democracies. This being so, giving Saddam a free hand in the Gulf region would have been the essence, the veritable Armagnac, of realpolitik.
By the logic of the Congress of Vienna, it would have made sense for America not to challenge the strongest power in the region.
Consolidation under Saddam could have brought about stability in oil prices and production. Unscrupulous? You bet, but Saddam would have appreciated America's unscrupulousness, which was the code by which he lived himself. By dumping his Kuwaiti and Saudi allies, Bush, Sr., would have won Saddam's respect. Saddam's respect -- especially if coupled with a threat to nuke him if he did not live up to his bargain -- could have ensured a supply of fossil fuel for America and its allies for at least a generation.
Too scrupulous for its own good, the West also turned out to be too scrupulous for Saddam's good. It is scruples that tie hangman's nooses and make roadside bombs.
In terms of realpolitik, there was no reason for Bush, Sr., not to prefer Saddam to the theocrats of Tehran or to the hypocritical potentates of Riyadh. Unlike the ayatollahs of Iran, or the equally medieval sheiks, emirs, and sultans of the oil kingdoms, Saddam was just a straightforward despot, a kind of Middle Eastern Don Corleone. He was not a fanatic, an Islamist, a suicide bomber. He never thought of America as the Great Satan. Far from being a fundamentalist, in 1990 Saddam was barely Muslim. He had no quarrel with Christendom. By the standards of the region, he was not even virulently hostile to Israel. He had other fish to fry, bigger and more accessible fish. He did become a champion of the Palestinian cause, but only after the First Gulf War. For Saddam, Palestine was an afterthought.
Before 1990, far from funding terrorists like the treacherous Wahabi sheiks, Saddam had spent years fighting the America-hating ayatollahs of Iran. He had received military assistance from the West. Why would Bush suddenly turn on him? America's reaction to his gambit in Kuwait was a total puzzle for Saddam. All he wanted was to grab the riches of the region, not in order to keep them from America, but to sell them to America in due course. Sell for heaven's sake. Sell all the oil in the Middle East -- well, first grab it of course, grab it from Kuwait, from Saudi Arabia, from Iran, from Iraq, gather it, own it, and then sell it all. Hell, he wasn't going to drink it! For what reason did Bush, Sr., think Saddam was invading and fighting and poison-gassing his own Arab and Muslim cousins throughout the region? He did it for Bush, for America, to make sure he had all the finest oil he could sell for a good price. Why else would he go to the trouble? Surely Bush would understand this, or someone would explain it to him.
When Ambassador Glaspie spoke, Saddam thought someone had explained it to Bush -- as Kissinger probably would have, had he been twenty years younger and had he worked for Bush, and had Glaspie worked for him instead of a straight-arrow Colin Powell. Because Kissinger did understand realpolitik as well as Saddam. He understood it even better, in fact, which is why he was more frustrated with it.
Iraq's dictator might have been contemplating his wardrobe for his first ceremonial visit to the White House when, out of the blue, America's incomprehensible demand to withdraw from Kuwait, or else, had reached him in 1990. He was probably astounded. Why would America ally itself with the weaker powers in the region against the stronger power? Why would it ally itself with the House of Saud that sponsored terrorists against Israel, America's only friend in the Middle East?
If Kuwait or Saudi Arabia had been Western-style democracies, Bush's sympathy might have been explained by a sense of ideological kinship -- but the sheikdoms of the Gulf were no more democratic than Saddam's regime. The emirates were worse in that they were historical throwbacks. At least Iraq's Ba'athist "socialist" system was a modern, rather than a monarchical, despotism. So why was President Bush so hostile? Just because Saddam used poison gas against his Kurdish subjects in the north? Or because he oppressed and massacred his Shi'ite countrymen in the south? What were the Kurds and the Shi'tes to America?
Even 13 years later, in 2003, after a lot of bad blood had been spilt, Saddam might still have been hoping. There had to be someone in America who was not carried away by boy scout idealism about friends and allies and Kurdish civilian corpses and poison gas. An entire country could not be without someone of a practical bent of mind -- after all, Kissinger was still alive. Perhaps George W. the son would understand the logic that eluded his father. Perhaps Kissinger could explain to Bush, Jr., that realpolitik did demand a coalition, yes, but not against Saddam. It demanded a coalition of America with Saddam against the Islamic sheikdoms and republics of the Gulf.
Kissinger would have recognized that behind the shield of such a pragmatic alliance the tide of puritanical Muslim militancy could be stemmed. Supported by American air power, Saddam's elite Republican Guard could cleanse the region of Islamist forces, whether of the Saudi Wahabi or the Iranian Shi'ite variety. All terrorism, from Hamas to al-Qaeda, could be eradicated, and the chaotic whims of OPEC's ludicrous princelings could be replaced by the tranquillity of a well-regulated monopoly ensuring the flow of oil to America under Iraq's wise leader, the one whose life-size picture would grace every public square in the region, Saddam Hussein.
As for Israel, if it mattered so much to Washington, Saddam might have acquiesced in the existence of the Jewish state. A narrow strip of land with no oil, big deal! If Saddam could have the rest of the Middle East, let the Jews have their pitiful sliver of a Promised Land between the river and the sea. Had the Palestinians balked at such a solution, Saddam would have had ways of dealing with them. There was plenty of poison gas left over from the Kurdish reserves.
Come 2008, with Kissinger in charge of U.S. foreign policy, Bush and Saddam could have marched arm-in-arm underneath the curved swords of the great arch of triumph in Baghdad at the conclusion of George W.'s second term, applauded by multitudes in both countries.
Under the joint rule of their pragmatic alliance, oil would freely flow West, revenue freely flow East, and blood would flow mainly from the Islamist enemies of hegemony and the balance of power.
realpolitik = peace. Moralpolitik =war. That's the lesson of the Congress of Vienna, Kissinger's doctoral thesis. It would be displayed on a marble walkway, decorated with the skulls of Shi'ite mullahs and Wahabi sheiks, stretched out above the executioner's block set up in the main square of the twin cities of nineteenth-century Vienna and twenty-first-century Baghdad, a magnificent city of royal and presidential palaces. From the sands of the Gulf to the peaks of the Hindu Kush, the dangerous and volatile Middle East would be as silent as the grave.
Well -- so much for counterfactuals. Facts show the opposite. In 2008 the Middle East is in turmoil. Bombs are going off. Artificial limb-makers prosper. Most Americans view the Bush presidencies that waged two victorious wars in the Gulf as failures. Triumph has brought disaster. After hanging Saddam for a sheep, America is being hanged for a lamb. Prince Metternich is spinning in his grave.