On the Way to Victory

...Only in recent years have we begun to understand that few can withstand calculated pressure, torture and brainwashing...

...In the interest of full disclosure, I should note that he is a friend with whom I worked when I was at CNN...

...As CBS' Moscow correspondent in the '50s, I operated under official censorship...

...The interview I arranged with Party Chief Nikita S. Khrushchev— his first television appearance—was criticized by President Eisenhower as propaganda...

...Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney and General Colin L. Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have appeared on television to explain the operational reasons for talking in the military gibberish of sorties and success rates without saying what the casualties and damage are...

...This would give him a badly-needed success at home, end a war uncomfortably close to his southern doorstep, and ensure him a role in rearranging the Middle East furniture once the fighting is over...

...But the Soviet and American Presidents seem to have different objectives...

...The President announced an undertaking by the Soviet government in the Baltics "which, if fulfilled, would result in the withdrawal of some Soviet forces, a reopening of the dialogue with the republics, and a move away from violence...

...When the American electronic surveillance ship USS Pueblo was captured off North Korea in 1968, Commander Lloyd M. Bucher and several crew members signed confessions of criminal espionage...

...Given how smoothly this war by electronics has gone so far, a lot of military contractors, under fire for cost overruns and malfunctioning weapons, must be lifting champagne glasses...

...January 20: American teams have deployed Patriot antimissile missiles in Israel—the first time U.S...

...The demand for retaliation has come most insistently from the Israeli military command, reluctant to yield the tradition that it can defend Israel without the aid of any foreign soldier...

...It is easier now to understand Bush's impatience with Soviet meddling in search of a cease-fire...

...He has sent Tarik Aziz back to Moscow, with what response to Gorbachev's proposals he does not say...

...Saddam has said he looks forward to the "mother of all battles...

...Hesaid, "Idon'tthink any of us would have shed any tears if that happened...

...Three-quarters of what I reported—from Sputnik launchings to arms control proposals—was based on government handouts of one sort or another...

...For another, there remain—or, perhaps more accurately, there have arisen—obstacles to the conclusion of the strategic and conventional arms control treaties...

...To the patent amazement of White House officials, barely an hour before the State of the Union Address, the Soviet Foreign Minister emerged from the meeting at the State Department to deliver a joint statement on the Gulf war...

...Subjected to four days of merciless beating, he agreed to make a confession before the cameras, but then blinked his eyes to spell out the word "torture" in Morse code...

...Prime Minister Yitzchak Shamir, surprisingly, has been the great advocate of restraint and cooperation with the United States...

...The worry about Arnett's reports suggests a sense of insecurity that is difficult to understand...

...But, not to personalize the matter, to me the issue seems to be whether the critics underestimate Americans' ability to hear propaganda without being unhinged from their critical faculties...

...President Bush has clearly decided to give war a chance...

...So Baghdad and Moscow, actingtogether, may have bought a few days' respite...

...Once again the lesson must be learned about what can happen to soldiers in hostile hands...

...Saddam Hussein's regime has, for the first time, raised the possibility of a withdrawal from Kuwait, albeit with many conditions...

...Out of this unanticipated situation has come a much improved Bush-Shamir and American-Israeli relationship...

...It is not very satisfactory for Americans to hear from General Powell that, even in this computer age, "theB.D...

...From the President's perspective, "What a lovely war...

...January 27: President Bush says that Saddam Hussein is simply "sick" because he isn't fighting the war by any recognized rules...

...The question is, for what...

...under duress...

...The pounding that Iraqi strategic sites are getting enters our consciousness only through the incredible pictures of laser-guided bombs pinpointed at the door of an Iraqi storage facility...

...January 19: By his Scud attacks on Israel, Saddam Hussein has distracted some media attention from the larger operations in the first three days of the air war against Iraq...

...His words, "short ofwhat would be required," suggest that he is no longer willing to take a simple yes for an answer...

...They are discussing whether there will be a summit inMoscowinFebruary, andthe betting is against it...

...I was never able to get through the censor a single word about Khrushchev's secret anti-Stalin speech to the 20th Party Congress in 1956...

...Having made his basic decision, he has been guided more by military than by diplomatic imperatives...

...But the decision is not easy...

...January 26: The new Soviet Foreign Minister, Aleksandr A. Bessmertnykh, is back in Washington (where he was, until recently, ambassador) to confer with Secretary of State James A. Baker III and President Bush...

...One hears that there has been an intense behind-the-scenes struggle about this in the Israeli government...

...February 22: President Bush preempts the Moscow agreement by issuing his own ultimatum for an Iraqi pullout from Kuwait—totally, immediately, unconditionally, without a formal ceasefire—starting at noon Saturday...

...In Malta, the two leaders held a first-ever joint news conference, and Bush spokeof "a new epoch looking toward a safer and brighter future...

...The President, for one thing, is busy with the Gulf war...

...Has the battering from the air diminished his appetite for a land war...

...Bush, preparing for the Malta summit a year later, grasped the proffered hand, saying that the superpower relationship was indeed "moving beyond containment to partnership...

...Many prisoners in Vietnam were broken...

...Iraqi resistance seems to be crumbling...

...This is a nation nurtured on football, accustomed to knowing the score at theend of each period...

...January 23: After a week of war there has developed among Americans not so much war weariness as war wariness— an uneasiness at not being sure what is going on...

...This has been the planning date, it now emerges, since February 11, when the President was publicly saying he had "no immediate plans" for a ground war...

...Sunday in the Gulf), just eight hours after the expiration of the ultimatum and on the eve of Kuwait's national day, the ground war is launched...

...Having recalled milestones on the way to the hostilities as reflected in my daily commentaries for National Public Radio, let me here mark the way to what already appears certain to be an impressive victory...

...Partnership lives, and so does dealmaking...

...He has lobbed Scud missiles at Israel and Saudi Arabia without military purpose, flooded the Persian Gulf with oil, and committed atrocities in Kuwait...

...I figured that, if necessary, the ground war could be started without me...

...One of the terrorist's weapons is horror, intended almost literally to sicken us...

...Television has concentrated on interviews about the Scud threat with correspondents and an Israeli official (Deputy Foreign Minister Benjamin Netanyahu) speaking through gas masks—the stuff of a Woody Allen movie...

...February 24: Offensive operations appear to be going well—spectacularly well...

...Following 11 months in captivity, they returned home to face charges of collaboration...

...February 16: (To level with the reader, I have been on vacation for 10 days...

...January 28: The Moscow summit has been postponed, ostensibly because of President Bush's preoccupation with the Gulf war, in reality because of the Baltic situation...

...It is as though the Bush-Gorbachev relationship rests on an understanding, tacit or otherwise, that the Soviets will support "law and order" in the Persian Gulf and the United States will not be too critical of Soviet enforcement of "law and order" in the three little secession-minded states...

...Although Bush denies that Saddam Hussein is being targeted for assassination, he adds that "no one will weep for him when he is gone...

...It comes as a surprise, therefore, when after midnight Moscow time an agreement is announced between Gorbachev and the Iraqi Foreign Minister...

...It is recalled that President Reagan insisted on meeting with dissidents in Moscow in 1987...

...January 30: The Baker-Bessmertnykh talks concluded last night in a most remarkable manner...

...February 23: On this Saturday night (4 a.m...

...What the President seems not to grasp is the way of the terrorist, who knows that if he fights by conventional rules he will lose...

...Only a week earlier President Bush had said there could be "no pause now that Saddam has forced the world into war...

...February 1: Like Manuel Noriega's palace in the 1989 invasion of Panama, the presidential palace in Baghdad was one of the first bombing targets...

...Regardless, the Bush Administration pretends that while going after Iraqi command and control centers it is not going after the chief commander and controller...

...Interestingly, Bush uses Gorbachev's name less than he used to...

...Still, for citizens of the world's most powerful nation it is hard to realize how power can melt...

...Secretary of the Navy John H. Chafee canceled the proceedings, saying, "They have suffered enough...

...February 19: Bush and Gorbachev may be playing "good cop, bad cop" with Saddam Hussein, the one saving face as the other kicks ass...

...He is a cool, experienced reporter of many wars...

...The clock was ticking toward the conclusive phase of the war, and it would have taken more than Gorbachev could have delivered in the way of unconditional compliance with United Nations resolutions to stop it...

...But, in what clearly seemed a tradeoff, Bessmertnykh made a concession on the Baltic issue that enabled Bush to put a new top on a lackluster State of the Union Address...

...Gorbachev seeks minimal compliance with the requirement that Iraq leave Kuwait...

...A President who has staked out a position on the Gulf as "a clear case of good vs...

...The Bush-Gorbachev "partnership," though strained, is being maintained by the desire and needs of bothmen...

...America has never quite come to terms with the appearance of collaboration with the enemy...

...Senator...

...It is not likely that Bush expects compliance, and he is apparently not about to brook any further delay...

...Washington Notebook BY DANIEL SCHORR On the Way to Victory Theke must surely be a more important way of demarcating history, but this column falls due with the start of the ground war in Kuwait, just as the deadline for my previous one was the imminent start of the air war...

...Ronald Reagan resorted to the same dry-eyed disingenuousness when asked whether, in bombing Colonel Muammar Qaddafi's compound in Libya in 1986, he wastryingto kill its occupant...

...However, with Soviet economic reform bogging down, with the role of the KGB and the military being expanded, and with a return to such repressive practices as the suspension of press freedom, there is a question of how suitable a partner Gorbachev can be in building the "newworld order...

...February 21: Saddam Hussein makes a cliche-ridden recorded radio speech that lacks specifics...

...Gorbachev first spoke of partnership in his December 1988 United Nations speech, in which he envisaged expanding individual rights and ethnic harmony at home, andaperiodof peace internationally...

...Yet I always felt that some newswasbetterthan no news—and that there would be the opportunity to tell more once out of the country...

...President Bush calls the speech "disappointing...

...Several times in recent days the President has said, "The war is on course and on schedule," and today we know what he meant...

...soldiers have ever operated from Israeli soil...

...In addition, the President, who was much criticized during his visit to Beijing for bowing to Chinese demands that he not see the dissident astrophysicist Fang Lizhi, does not want to repeat the experience by facing the problem of whether to meet with representatives of the Baltic States while in the Soviet Union...

...Furthermore, it referred to the need for a "comprehensive settlement" of Middle East problems, including the Palestinian problem, thus inferentially violating the Bush taboo on linkage...

...In Helsinki last September, after the invasion of Kuwait, they announced "a common approach to this unjustifiable act of aggression...

...But Iraqi Foreign Minister Tarik Aziz is due in Moscow in two days, and Gorbachev has asked Bush to hold off launching a ground war pending that visit...

...The B.D.A., I now know, is Bomb Damage Assessment...

...President Bush calls the proposal "a cruel hoax...

...evil" can hardly ignore the desperation of the Baltic leaders, who have already accused him of appeasement...

...Baghdad Radio calls the ultimatum "shameful...

...The Executive Order banning any involvement in the assassination of foreign leaders, originally signed by President Gerald R. Ford in 1976, was reinterpreted during the Reagan Administration to specify that it does not cover state sponsors of terrorism or leaders killed during military operations...

...Not quite on the same scale as Saddam Hussein, Peter Arnett of the Cable News Network has become an irritant to the White House (and apparently to many Americans...

...Postponing the summit may further damage President Mikhail S. Gorbachev's battered influence in the USSR...

...We probably will never know whether Kuwait could have been liberated by sanctions alone, or by air power alone...

...January 21: America is shocked to see some of the seven allied airmen who have been shot down over Iraq, including three Americans, making disloyalsounding statements on television, obviously under duress...

...Allied bombing has deprived him of a television capability...

...There is no cease-fire in prospect...

...Bush, though, implies that the liberation of Kuwait is no longer enough...

...He is the only representative of the American media in Baghdad, operates under Iraqi censorship, and has been treated to an interview with Saddam Hussein...

...It said there could be a cessation of hostilities "if Iraq would make an unequivocal commitment" to pull out of Kuwait—without mentioning anything "immediate" or "unconditional...

...A. takes time to process...

...Nevertheless, it appears that the search for a ne w world order may have run afoul of the old order in the Kremlin...

...For now, Israel is not retaliating against the Scud attacks...

...He often refers instead to "Soviet leaders" and "the Soviet leadership," especially when criticizing the use of force in the Baltics...

...A heroic exception was Commander Jeremiah Denton (later Admiral and subsequently a U.S...