Triumph and Tragedy, One Year Later : Gulf War, like many others, left some issues unresolved

One year after the United States and its coalition partners went to war against Iraq, U.N. inspectors continue to make startling discoveries about the extent of the Iraqi program to develop nuclear weapons, and how close it came to achieving early and horrifying successes.

And one year after the start of a 43-day air war and a ground campaign that would sweep Iraqi invaders out of Kuwait in 100 hours, Saddam Hussein continues to rule in Baghdad, preparing to mark his humiliation of 1991 with a celebration of “victory” against the international forces that opposed his aggression.

He has, to be sure, a triumph of sorts to commemorate, albeit a personal one: He has survived, when by all odds and certainly given the precedents of regional history he should have been driven from power by a military coup or lost his head for bringing on an unqualified debacle. He has survived nonetheless, despite political miscalculations and battlefield blunders that invited and produced one of the crushing defeats of recent times, despite postwar uprisings against his dictatorship, despite a U.N.-instituted embargo that has added to the miseries of the Iraqi people. Credit the ruthlessness of Hussein’s highly developed police state for that achievement.

That this tyrant does survive, after an abundance of crimes both foreign and domestic, is an affront to international standards of decency. That he survives is also being seen as a political embarrassment to his external opponents, foremost among them President Bush. This perceived embarrassment and the anniversary of the start of the war to liberate Kuwait have revived the question of whether Bush erred by ordering a too-abrupt halt to the fighting last year, whether he should not instead have pursued his battlefield advantage until a change of government in Iraq could be accomplished.

The answer today is still not definitive. What can be said--and this is as obvious now as it was then--is that there were powerful arguments against pushing on to Baghdad and attempting to reconstruct Iraq’s political order. Saudi Arabia and other Arab coalition members could well have refused to accept a Western military occupation of an Arab capital, however benign its aims. Almost certainly, such an effort--with or without Arab support--would have exposed occupying U.S. forces to terrorist attacks. And almost certainly, any successor Iraqi political leadership blessed by Washington would not have long endured after the end of the military occupation.

Yes, another day or so of combat might have destroyed many of the resources Hussein would soon use to suppress Kurdish and Shiite rebellions. That, in hindsight, may well have been a major mistake. As may have been President Bush’s exhortation to rebel forces to rise up and oust Hussein. But those events don’t nullify or mitigate what by any fair measure was a laudable achievement by U.S.-led forces. A naked act of international aggression was reversed. Hussein’s attempt to seize the Arabian Peninsula’s vast oil deposits and so manipulate the world economy was thwarted. The political outcome of the Gulf War was indeed less than fully satisfactory, making the victory realized less than complete. In this respect, it’s reasonable to conclude that the Gulf War turned out to be not so different from most others.