World War I led to the Bolshevik Revolution, a power vacuum in Central Europe that was eventually filled by Adolf Hitler, and a British-French carve- up of the Middle East that 72 years later still forms the background for bloodshed. World War II boosted the Soviet Union to the status of a superpower dominating Eastern Europe and challenging the other superpower, the U.S., in a cold war that began almost as soon as the bombs stopped falling. The Korean War ended with U.S. forces stationed approximately on the line along which the shooting began. In the almost 38 years that have intervened, no President has found the time to be right for withdrawing those troops.
All of which goes to show that wars almost invariably have consequences that the victors never foresee and certainly do not intend. There is no reason to believe that the war against Saddam Hussein will be any different.
The rosiest predictions for the war's aftermath envision a solution to the Palestinian problem and the emergence of new collective security arrangements that would calm the tempestuous region. The darkest prognoses foresee a Lebanon-like partitioning of Iraq and Jordan and a fueling of nationalist and Islamic extremism that would threaten Western interests and perhaps even bring down moderate Arab regimes. The array of possibilities is bewildering even to those who are leading the war effort. "Some sort of planning needs to be done," conceded Defense Secretary Dick Cheney while appearing before the House Armed Services Committee last December. "Everybody's been so busy dealing with the crisis of the moment that there really hasn't been much effort put into longer range focus."
The repercussions of Desert Storm, however, will be far more than a footnote to a glorious chapter of U.S. military history. "The only reason to make war is to make peace at the end," says Mohamad Milhem, an executive-committee member of the Palestine Liberation Organization. "If at the end there is instability and no peace, what is the point in making war?" The shape of the postwar order will depend to a great extent on how the various parties embroiled in the conflict survive the cataclysm of the battle.
IRAQ. Early in the gulf crisis, the Bush Administration realized that it would be unwise to liquidate the country's military altogether. "If Iraq is totally out of the picture," says William Quandt, a Middle East expert at the Brookings Institution, "there is no counterbalance to Iran." At the same time, the U.S. and its allies are determined to wipe out Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and seriously impair its conventional war machine. Reconciling those two aims requires a delicate balancing act. "You want an Iraq weak enough that it can't threaten the weakest of its neighbors, yet strong enough to deter the strongest of its neighbors," says Les Aspin, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.
The crucial question of who would rule a defeated Iraq is a black hole of speculation. It is conceivable that Saddam could survive and continue to govern. Though Washington would cheer Saddam's fall, the official mission of Desert Storm is to force him from Kuwait, not from Baghdad. Should Saddam manage to muddle through, Iraq's future would probably look a lot like its recent past: authoritarian, militaristic, confrontational -- and perhaps more isolated than ever.