PERSONAL PERSPECTIVES ON THE DAY THE WAR BEGAN: JANUARY 16, 1991 : THE CIVIL RIGHTS LEADER

Only a few days before the current war broke out, I was in Cairo attending a conference of Africans and Americans hosted by the Egyptian government. Among the delegates, and particularly among those from the moderate Arab states, there was apprehension that Saddam Hussein was on the verge of a shrewd maneuver that would vastly enhance his stature in the Arab world.

He was expected to reject proposals from the U.S. secretary of state, the European Economic Community delegation and the U.N. secretary general, but then, at the last possible moment, accept a very favorable “peace plan” proposed by a delegation lead by Algeria, and including Libyan leader Mohammar Kadafi, Syrian President Hafez Assad and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.

In a stroke, this would elevate him to a preeminent position of leadership in the Arab world while maintaining his military forces entirely intact. The stability of moderate Arab countries like Egypt, and the entire Middle East, would be profoundly undermined.

So it was with deeply mixed emotions that I learned of the jet fighters pouring into Iraq. For virtually all of my public life, I have been an advocate of negotiation in international affairs and an opponent of the use of force. I was steeped in the principles of non-violence in work with the late Dr. Martin Luther King, and I have had the deepest reservations about the wisdom of almost every post-World War II attempt by the United States to impose its will in Third World countries by force.

But, in this case, there were two reasons why I felt that Saddam Hussein could not be allowed to achieve what would appear to many Arabs as a victory by agreeing to negotiations rather than capitulation. First, the stakes are far greater than the future of Kuwait or the price of oil. Since the beginning of this century, the real needs of the peoples of the Middle East have been constantly subordinated, first to rivalries among European colonial powers and then to superpower competition. Today, with the reduction of Cold War tensions, the possibility has emerged that the Arab world might finally begin to develop a regional formula for long term political stability and economic growth.

Saddam Hussein’s ambitions fundamentally threaten this goal. Although he began his conquest of Kuwait for the limited economic objective of replenishing his war depleted treasury, his subsequent demagogic appeals to the Palestinians and the poor threaten to undermine every pro-western government in the region and unleash a civil war within the Arab world that could last for decades.

It is an easy exercise to show that Hussein’s concern for the Palestinians and the “have-nots” of the Arab world is cynical, and utterly self-serving. Many of the civilians slaughtered by the Iraqi army in Kuwait, for example, were Palestinian workers.

It is the perennial mistake of people in the developed countries to think that they can decide for the dispossessed of the Third World who they ought to accept as their champions. A smoldering sense of social and economic injustice is so deeply rooted in millions of Arab hearts that Saddam’s demagogy need have no basis in fact at all to be persuasive.

In addition, Saddam’s maneuver would have established a dangerous precedent for the future. One tragic consequence of the Cold War has been tremendous proliferation of advanced weapons in the Third World. Long range missiles, chemical, biological and nuclear weapons and delivery systems represent in essence instruments of mass terrorism which can be used for political blackmail. Iraq is the first and most blatant example of this new Third World military terrorism in action, first during the Iran-Iraq war and then in its bombing of Israel only days ago.

Had Saddam appeared to have deterred a military attack because he possessed these weapons and threated to use them, it would have ensured that similar blackmail would become a constant feature of regional conflicts in many Third World countries in the years to come.

It was for these reasons that I felt an unaccustomed ambivalence as I watched the reports of Operation Desert Storm. But, at the same time, I felt two sad and familiar reactions to the outbreak of war.

The first was that, once again, the issues at the root of the conflict would quickly be forgotten. While there is some hope that a post-war conference will make some progress on the issue of the Palestinians, simply out of obligation to Arab members of the alliance, it is far less likely that the disparities between the underpopulated and wealthy countries like Kuwait and Saudi Arabia and the poor, overpopulated areas of Egypt, Jordan and Iraq will be considered.

Yet, without facing up to the economic issues, simply reducing Iraq’s military arsenal and ejecting it from Kuwait will amount to reshuffling the deck in the same game of cards. America did not really win World War II on V-E Day, but at the completion of the Marshall Plan, when the defeated were given an alternative to another cycle of armament and war.

My other reaction was to regret, once more, the appalling disproportion between mankind’s skill and capacity for peace and for war. As reporters described the largest airfield in the world being built in a month, I thought of hospitals I know in Africa that have been delayed for years. As they described supersonic fighters that could deliver their ordinance to within a few feet of a target, I thought of food that rotted on the docks of Somalia because there was no laser-guided “delivery system” to get it to the village or province where hunger was most acute. As they described 300 ships loaded with tanks and artillery, I wondered what would have happened if 10 or 20 years ago a similar armada had arrived with tractors and irrigation equipment instead.

The stark paradox of wars is that they can never actually be won. We can only win the peace.