(4 of 5)
The Administration's case for a military operation against Iraq has a number of movable parts, moral components that have periodically changed in emphasis and importance: Are Americans in the gulf to stop Saddam's naked aggression? To restore the rulers of Kuwait? To ensure international law and order in the aftermath of the cold war? Or to protect the West's access to oil? To separate Saddam Hussein from his nuclear weapons?
Bush's performance at his Friday press conference may repair a lot of the damage he sustained earlier by failing to explain clearly, persuasively, his case for sending the troops. Americans, a people who have historically required a sense of their own virtue almost as a matter of self-definition, have not felt entirely clean or clear about their motives in the gulf. Says Hermann Eilts, director of Boston University's Center for International Relations: "The split is going to be over questions like Why are we doing this for the Kuwaiti royal family? Or why are we doing this for Saudi Arabia?" Americans feel least clean, least morally comfortable with themselves when they think they are going to war to protect their own profligate consumption of oil.
Making war is an atavistic business that may require a profound harmony of purpose among people, a sort of tribal agreement. Americans feel a moral dissonance about certain stray complexities involved in the gulf. The problem is full of crosscurrents and moral baffles. The National Organization for Women, for example, fired off a bitter statement about the Saudi subjugation of women. Why would America defend such a system? If there is war in the gulf, some American women soldiers may die. Some will leave widowers in the U.S. That prospect produces a novel moral disturbance in the American mind.
War, as the military theorist Karl von Clausewitz said, depends to a large extent upon imponderables, including the enormous, unpredictable force of public opinion. One of the profound lessons of Vietnam is that no President can fight a war (except the quick Grenada-Panama kind) without the full backing of the American people.
Bush may yet obtain that support, but it will not be nearly enough. Bush is a sort of flawed perfectionist working on a colossal project -- as he says, the making of a new world order. To keep his enterprise in the gulf together, he must orchestrate not only American opinion but also that of the international alliance.
If character is destiny, is the President's character America's fate? In times of war, it is a disturbing thought that is in some sense true: think of Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War, Franklin Roosevelt and World War II, Lyndon Johnson and Vietnam.
In an article in the Boston Globe, M.I.T. political scientist Barry R. Posen argued, "President Bush is doubling U.S. strength in the Persian Gulf to create an offensive option. Since the President cannot want war, his purpose must be to frighten Saddam Hussein to leave Kuwait. This is coercive diplomacy." But, as Posen adds, the chaotic multiple voices of American democracy can sometimes sabotage a President who is trying to make a point: "Democracy thrives on debate, but once a policy of coercive diplomacy has been well and truly launched, debate can only reduce the odds of success."