The Mission Thing

...This is a real-world situation and we're not walking away until our mission is done and the invader is out of Kuwait—and that may well be where you come in...

...Bush's dogged determination to maintain a relationship with China, in spite of Tiananmen Square and congressional protests that he was kowtowing to Deng Xiaoping, helped secure Peking's de facto support of his policy in the U.N...

...That happened three days after the invasion when ABC's Ann Compton was telling him about a pro-Iraqi interview given by Jordan's King Hussein and Bush snapped, "I can read, what's your question...

...Anyone schooled in the art of war is taught that the mission is paramount...

...All other considerations, including possible loss of life, are secondary...

...Characteristically, he sent a handwritten note of apology to Compton the next day...

...It not only froze growing congressional and public opposition to U.S...

...Not at all," Bush said, appearing genuinely, pained at the thought...

...It was the one personality change we noticed...

...It's almost as if George Bush's entire life and entire career was geared for this moment...

...Tomahawk cruise missiles and allied bombers began raining destruction on Baghdad—the Persian Gulf War was on...

...We are united in the belief that Iraq's aggression must not be tolerated...

...Unlike Lyndon Johnson, who personally selected bomb targets in Vietnam, and Carter, who was on an open line to his field commanders during the tragic Desert One raid to rescue U.S...

...Two weeks later, after abortive Geneva peace talks between Baker and Aziz, a close pro-war vote in Congress, and the expiration of the U.N...

...forces had to cope with, when he was forced to go to a warship anchored in international waters off the Saudi coast to participate in Thanksgiving worship...

...deadline, U.S...

...He spoke to Desert Storm commander Gen...

...Acting as if he hadn't a care in the world, he took aides and reporters on a long, punishing "power walk" on the beach near his Kennebunkport, Maine, vacation home the day the Soviet truce bid was unveiled—and regaled his entourage with shaggy-dog stories when he wasn't exhorting them to pick up the pace...

...It was the largest protest Bush had seen to that point and, coupled with a flurry of newspaper reports suggesting that the Saudis were ready to make a deal with Iraq, it led him to strike a defiant tone...

...Bush was unappeased by the hostage release, which occurred during his Latin American trip...

...The Iraqi Army is defeated...

...Some members of his war council, including Quayle and Cheney, saw Soviet treachery in the maneuver, but Bush did not...

...As they exchanged farewells, Ozal remarked that it would be hard for him, the leader of a small country, to reach Bush after he entered the White House...

...A few days before his inauguration in 1989, Bush received the short, heavyset Turk in his vice-presidential office in the Old Executive Office Building, and afterwards escorted him to a waiting limousine...

...It is aggression...

...While preparing for war with boldstrokes, like the first major military reserve callup since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, Bush worked the diplomatic circuit unceasingly to muster international backing for the buildup, drawing on leaders won over by the personal touches for which the President is famous...

...Although he had previously kept his doubts about the effectiveness of sanctions to himself, Bush had dropped hints about which way he was leaning even before the U.N...

...I thought she would have duked it out," the lad said...

...There was a real fear that Israel would retaliate, the coalition would fall apart, and wed be fighting alone...

...It isn't oil that we're concerned about...

...Marines and British "Desert Rat" tank troops gathered before him in the setting sun...

...That small gesture helps explain why Ozal overrode strong domestic political opposition and sided with Bush from the start, severing a vital Iraqi oil pipeline through Turkey and providing key bases for U.S...

...And it reflected an element of Bush's background that his detractors ignore—his experience Gene Gibbons is senior White House correspondent for Reuters...

...Security Council voted on November 29 to authorize the alliance to use force to liberate Kuwait unless Iraq withdrew by January 15...

...Don't worry about this,' he told us...

...During his Thanksgiving visit, Bush got a firsthand taste of the bleak, gritty desert environment in which the troops had to operate...

...One occasion that stood out was a Vermont breakfast speech for Rep...

...My door is always open to you...

...The most obvious was his announcement on November 8 that U.S...

...But, whether by accident or design, his overture proved a strategic coup...

...Security Council...

...He was so determined and so focused and so persistent in prosecuting the war...

...T hrough it all, Bush seemed to relish 1 working the crisis...

...I never expected Saddam to withdraw and therefore thought that we should have to use force to eject him," Mrs...

...intervention, buying time for the transfer of three armored divisions from Western Europe to the Gulf, where they went on to spearhead the allied ground offensive...

...forces in the Gulf would be doubled "to ensure that the coalition has an adequate offensive military option...

...One official said, "He understood that Gorbachev wanted to be a player and felt we needed the Soviet Union in the postwar period to help us with these problems...

...Charter," Bush and Gorbachev said in a joint communique...

...When a reporter asked, "Is there any hope of avoiding war...

...One young Marine told the President he was disappointed...

...Though unwilling to compromise, Bush was prepared to try to reason with Saddam—thus his offer on November 30 to receive Iraqi Foreign Minister 'Pariq Aziz in Washington and send Jim Baker to Baghdad to meet the Iraqi leader...

...Even within the White House, it was widely assumed that the first big crisis of the post-Cold War era would be resolved with some sort of messy compromise One less Iraqi Army later, when Bush speaks, people listen...

...Dictators do these things and they do not withdraw...

...Embassy in Monrovia atthe height of the Liberian civil war...

...Our objectives are met," Bush told the American people in a speech from the Oval Office that night...

...Thatcher recalled during a visit to Washington in March, saying she was guided by her experience in 1982 when an Argentine junta invaded the Falkland Islands...

...But he had offered glimpses of his state of mind while traveling the country earlier in the fall to stump for Republican congressional candidates...

...Only once in the long crisis did Bush let the strain show publicly...

...The President came to the senior staff meeting on January 3 and told us he had wrestled with all the moral issues involved and was more certain than ever he was doing the right thing," a senior White House official said...

...hostages in Iran, Bush was not so preoccupied that he allowed himself to micromanage the operation...

...And the incident on November 8 at Jerusalem's Temple Mount, when Israeli security forces killed more than a dozen unarmed Palestinian protesters, raised fears within the White House that sooner or later Saddam would drive a wedge between the United States and her Arab allies...

...There can never be compromise—any compromise—with this kind of aggression," he said sharply, adding new fire to his Gulf crisis rhetoric...

...T he march to war quickened over 1 the Christmas season...

...Baghdad unsuccessfully sought to capitalize on a flaw—Bush's failure to set a time limit for the Baker visit...

...I can hardly wait to get out and see it for myself...

...By signaling that he was ready to write off Iraq's unlucky foreign "guests," the President added gravity to his oft-repeated statement that he was "deadly serious" about reversing Iraq's invasion...

...In the fall of 1990, he sent the Marines to evacuate the besieged U.S...

...T 've not been one who has been 1 convinced that sanctions alone would bring [Saddam] to his senses," Bush revealingly admitted during a Latin American goodwill tour shortly after the U.N...

...I guess there's a really good feeling out in the country," Bush told a visitor a few days after he had clinched the first major U.S...

...This set him apart from Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, both of whom subordinated larger national interests to concern for the suffering of a few unfortunate citizens...

...There wasn't much humor in the inner councils between January 17 and February 23," one of his confidants revealed...

...And this aggression is not going to stand...

...If the current steps fail to end it, we are prepared to consider additional ones consistent with the U.N...

...Aides say that was not the private Bush...

...They also knew that an extended U.S...

...warplanes...

...Mike McCurry, a former spokesman for the Democratic National Committee and now a political strategist for the opposition, has called Bush's performance a "remarkable display" of presidential leadership...

...and forty-eight hours later, when he called to tell Schwarzkopf he planned to announce the suspension of hostilities...

...The most vivid occurred on the second day of the war, when Iraqi Scud missiles first slammed into Israel...

...Far from it being a lonely ordeal for him, he seemed glad of the challenge and supremely confident of his ability to master it...

...He also experienced the religious sensitivities U.S...

...16 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1991...

...In the early days of the Gulf crisis, Bush's instincts were reinforced by Margaret Thatcher, Britain's remarkable prime minister, who lost a Conservative party power struggle and resigned midway through the seven-month Gulf crisis...

...The war was consuming for him...

...But Saddam is making the mistake of his life if he confuses an abundance of restraint with lack of resolve...

...Peter Smith (who even-tually lost to Bernie Sanders, Burlington's Socialist mayor...

...When you don't have Americans there, and if force is required, that's just one less worry I've got...

...Bush learned of her unexpected decision while visiting the troops on November 22...

...The news media, focusing at the time on the budget battle and a Republican rebellion over Bush's flip-flop on taxes, gave little notice to his Burlington speech...

...It's pretty tough to call up the head of a country right after he's had a missile attack and ask him not to strike back...

...Outside the hotel when Bush arrived were more than 200 demonstrators carrying signs and placards reading: NO BLOOD FOR OIL...

...Thrkish president Thrgut Ozal was a case in point...

...People would begin meetings with jokes and things and the President never joined in...

...But there were many moments of high drama at the White House...

...the two men simply looked past him...

...They knew that Soviet economic troubles and ethnic unrest threatened Gorbachev's hold on power, raising questions about the longterm stability of the partnership between Moscow and Washington...

...Bush displayed his diplomatic agilityyet again in defusing a Soviet ceasefire proposal that would have saved the Iraqi Army from collapse...

...military victory since World War II...

...I think you can make the case that this facilitates the toughdecisions that might lie ahead," he said...

...Moreover, Bush's two-year record as America's leader showed him to be a warrior-President...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1991 15 F rom the start, Bush and his top advisers—Baker, Vice President Dan Quayle, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell, National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, Deputy National Security Adviser Robert Gates, and White House chief of staff John Sununu—a group that came to be called "The Big Eight," knew that the anti-Iraq coalition was fragile and that the window for action was narrow...

...That night, Bush made the first of several telephone calls to Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir to urge restraint, and had to argue at length to persuade him...

...One scene lingers from that fateful day—hours before the war commenced, Bush and Baker, his closest friend, lunched together in the White House residence and afterwards walked back to the Oval Office silent and deep in thought...

...and other third-country nationals in Kuwait and Iraq would not affect his policy...

...Bush took his family to Camp David for a long, quiet holiday that was only occasionally interrupted by meetings of the Big Eight, and he returned to Washington after New Year's Day strengthened in his resolve to stand firm...

...And by persuading Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev at the September 9 Helsinki summit to agree in principle to the use of force, Bush completed Saddam's encirclement...

...During Bush's visit to the Gulf, the exiled Kuwaiti ruler, Sheikh Jaber al-Ahmad al-Sabah, showed him a batch of gruesome color photographs of people who had been beaten or tortured...

...They can't, because they would lose face with their people," she said...

...Norman Schwarzkopf only twice during the conflict—on the second day of the ground offensive, when he called to offer congratulations on its success...

...This is no exercise...

...At the time, Bush's stern rhetoric seemed so much bravado, like his visit to the Gulf—made for television and perhaps marginally useful in bluffing Saddam Hussein to leave Kuwait without a fight...

...action...

...In 1989 alone, he ordered Delta Force commandos to San Salvador in an effort to rescue American military advisers, provided air cover to help Philippine President Corazon Aquino survive a coup, and used paratroops and airpower to topple Panamanian strongman Manuel Antonio Noriega...

...it also created a short-lived climate of reduced tension that prompted Iraq to free its hostages...

...He had some very difficult conversations with Shamir," the adviser said...

...Bush, a self-styled Texas good ol' boy with the standards of a flinty New England schoolmaster, tipped his hand when he said the plight of thousands of U.S...

...Secretary of State James Baker told reporters at the summit that what Bush and Gorbachev were hinting at was invoking an article of the charter that provides for collective self-defense—an interpretation that went unchallenged by the Soviets...

...Adding to pressure for swift, decisive action were reports of Iraqi atrocities in Kuwait...

...as a World War II Navy pilot who lost two friends and narrowly escaped death himself when his plane was shot down near a Japanese-held island in 1944...

...Last Thanksgiving Day, at a dusty desert outpost in eastern Saudi Arabia close to the Kuwaiti border, George Bush warned of the fury that would descend on Iraq if it refused to withdraw from the tiny Gulf emirate it had overrun on August 2. "So far, I've tried to act with restraint and patience," he said, squinting at hundreds of U.S...

...It was a very tense time," a top Bush adviser said...

...ground stay in the Gulf would be problematic because of the weather and cultural and religious factors...

...But it should have been clear from the start that this President, portrayed by his critics as hesitant, short-sighted, and a bit of a wimp, would throw the book at Baghdad if necessary and not lose a moment's sleep over it...

...Kuwait is liberated...