The Icarus Syndrome A History of American Hubris by Peter Beinart

Author:Peter Beinart [Beinart, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2010-09-22T21:00:00+00:00

By any reasonable standard, the Gulf War was a success. Facing a public, a Congress, and a military still deeply scarred by Vietnam, Bush had taken America to war and won it at a price—in money and lives—that Americans were willing to pay. Yes, Saddam was still in power, but he was weaker. His military had been ravaged and as the price of defeat he was forced to accept a humiliating regime of sanctions and inspections designed to ensure that it was not rebuilt. The Kurds and Shia paid a terrible price for America’s decision to end the war early, but the Bush administration eventually established a safe haven in Iraq’s north that gave many Kurds some respite from Saddam’s horrors. And in both north and south, American planes patrolled the skies to make sure Saddam did not menace his neighbors again. The hawks who had wanted not merely to liberate Kuwait but to cripple Iraq had achieved their goal.

The war also dramatically expanded American dominance of the Middle East. When Reagan took office, Central Command (CENTCOM), which oversaw U.S. military operations from Kenya to Kazakhstan, and ran the war in the Gulf, had not even existed. Back then, America had jostled for influence in the Middle East with the U.S.S.R. Now Syria, one of Moscow’s former clients, had joined a U.S.-led war against one of its other former clients, Iraq, while the Soviets watched from the sidelines. In the 1980s, America’s military presence on Middle Eastern soil had been limited to a navy supply base in tiny Bahrain and a few hundred peacekeepers in the Sinai desert. Now, after the Gulf War, U.S. ground troops occupied six Middle Eastern countries and U.S. planes patrolled the skies above much of Iraq. In 1985 the United States had accounted for 15 percent of arms sales to the Middle East. A decade later it was 72 percent.

Yet despite all this, as George Bush began his 1992 reelection campaign he found himself attacked by both conservatives and leading Democrats for having left Saddam in power. In April 1991, Tennessee Senator Al Gore, who only months earlier had agonized about whether to support the war at all, demanded that Bush develop a strategy of democratic regime change so that “we advance the day not just when Saddam Hussein is out of power, but when there exists in Iraq a government that grants reasonable consideration to all its peoples.” At the 1992 Democratic convention, Georgia governor Zell Miller said that President Bush “talks like Dirty Harry but acts like Barney Fife.” It was the same fate that had befallen Harry Truman when he pulled back from MacArthur’s bid to liberate the Korean peninsula from communism. American power had expanded dramatically, just not as dramatically as American confidence. It was a telltale sign that hubris was starting to build. The higher America flew, the more fervently critics demanded that it fly higher still.

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