The Press : World’s Editorials View Anniversary of Gulf War

Newspapers and columnists in many countries took time out from their domestic concerns last week to mark the first anniversary of Operation Desert Storm--the beginning of the Gulf War to liberate Kuwait. In retrospect, they gave the U.S.-led campaign mixed reviews. Some samples:

“When the Gulf War started a year ago . . . it seemed a hazardous but necessary enterprise. No one knew if the Iraqis would fight, if American weaponry would work, or if the coalition would hold together. The military planners prepared for heavy casualties . . . .

“The fears of the pessimists proved unjustified . . . .

“Little imagination is required to outline what the present situation would be if President Bush had shied away from the use of force. Saddam Hussein would be the dominant military and political figure in the area . . . . He would be a hero to the common people and a power that no government in the region would dare defy. Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states, calculating that the West could no longer be relied upon, would be cultivating his goodwill. Oil prices would be vulnerable to his whims.

“Unsatisfactory though the present situation is, it is much better than that . . . .

“In retrospect, President Bush’s failure was not that he refused to march on Baghdad but that he stopped his armies from closing the ring around the retreating Iraqi forces, thereby allowing them to crush the revolt in Basra. That revolt, coupled with Kurdish efforts in the north, might have toppled Saddam’s regime . . . .

“President Bush is reported to be considering ideas for making good his error by supporting a future insurrection. . . . The longer the job is delayed, the more difficult it will become. The unfinished business of the war still awaits attention.”

-- The Independent, London

“All over the world people are mumbling: ‘What was the Gulf War about in the end?’ The Japanese are wondering too. People ask themselves, ‘What has changed since the war?’ because all we can find when we look around is unfinished business . . . .

“President Bush fought the war by calling for ‘a new world order.’ But neither the structure nor the substance of this new order has yet become clear . . . .

“What made this war possible was President Bush’s initiative based on his political ambition and other favorable international conditions that happened to work his way. The United States will be unable to repeat the same action, even if it becomes the only superpower in the world. The backdrop to Bush’s visit to Japan, which was widely criticized, is that Americans are filled with anxiety about their future and that the government doesn’t know how to respond . . . .”

-- Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Tokyo

“One . . . great disappointment troubling America a year after victory in the Gulf arises from unreasonable expectations. Washington saw a new order to be culled in the Middle East, which would bring security, peace and prosperity to the crisis-plagued region. The wide-reaching project, which Bush and Baker developed at the time, would not be realized. . . . A further war objective, which no one in the U.S. likes to talk about, was . . . reached. Supplying the big industrial states with oil is guaranteed for the foreseeable future (and) the price of crude has also clearly gone down. The American economy would look a lot worse if a barrel of crude oil cost as much today as it did two years ago.”

--Washington correspondent Siegfried Maruhn in General-Anzeiger , Bonn

“Everyone thought that the United States had won the war with Iraq, but now we realize that it lost! If you don’t believe it, tell me what the United States won. It spent thousands of millions, billions of dollars, in exchange for nothing. Nothing! If you don’t believe it, look how Saddam Hussein is still alive and kicking, calmly celebrating ‘the anniversary of victory.’

“For the United States, this war and its supposed victory was ‘the mother of all entanglements,’ because it served only to aggravate that country’s economic crisis. That is, by taking Kuwait, Saddam Hussein succeeded in involving the United States in a war to liberate it, thus dealing a strong blow to the country’s economy, to the point of making it totter. How astute, that Hussein! And the gringos fell in the trap.”

--Columnist Adolfo Miranda Saenz in El Nuevo Diario, Managua, Nicaragua

“A year ago . . . President George Bush launched the Gulf War, instead of relying on economic sanctions to overturn the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.

“Millions of innocent civilians, mostly Iraqis, are still paying the price for it. Their unparalleled suffering casts a dark shadow over this anniversary . . . .

“This legacy of the war in which Canada was a participant should weigh heavily on our conscience.”

-- The Toronto Star

“One year later, there are fewer illusions. The ‘smart’ bombs were not so smart after all. Thousands of Iraqi civilians died--precisely how many is in dispute. Saddam Hussein is still thumbing his nose. Utopia has not arrived.

“Still, the world really has moved a step closer to a ‘new world order.’ The test now will be whether it can make a habit of uniting against aggressors.”

--The Gazette, Montreal

“The (Middle East) region, which witnessed so much action and got so much international attention, is back to what it was before Aug. 2 (1990), when Iraq invaded Kuwait. It looks as if nothing at all had happened in the area . . . .

“People have succeeded in erasing the nightmarish experiences of those days. Gas masks, which became a part of a normal lifestyle, have now become a war souvenir . . . .

“It is not that the war did not have any effect. It had some very positive effects, mainly on the business in the region.”

--Dhahran correspondent Saeed Haider in Arab News, Riyad

“Let’s imagine . . . that the international community had accepted the annexation of Kuwait: Iraq re-established itself financially, built its influence over the price of oil, after several years developed an atomic weapon and rallied behind it a part of the Arab world. Two nuclear powers would have been face to face in the Middle East: Israel and Iraq.”

--Jacques Lesourne in Le Monde , Paris

“Instead of gratitude and appreciation (for its conduct during the Gulf War), President Bush treats Israel with disdain and anger. In retrospect, it appears that the policy of restraint was a mistake. The next time an Arab dictator aims his missiles at Israel, our pilots will not be ordered to sit passively in their cockpits.”

--Defense analyst Gerald Steinberg in the Jerusalem Post

“The really big lesson . . . is: After the Gulf War it has become more difficult for dictators to satisfy their lust for aggression at the cost of other countries. Confronted with a comparable lesson, Adolf Hitler presumably would not have been able to set the world ablaze.”

--Commentator Walther Stuetzle, Tagesspiegel , Berlin

“Great events are expected to produce great change. Yet, the Gulf War, for all its sound and fury, disappointed those who predicted world-transforming results. After the passage of a year, what is remarkable about the war is that it has changed so little . . . .

“Does all this mean the Gulf War was a failure? Hardly. The war was not designed to change the world. It was designed to force Iraq’s invading forces out of Kuwait, restore that country’s sovereignty and prevent further regional aggression by Mr. Hussein. These were reasonable, realistic objectives, successfully achieved.”

-- The Globe and Mail, Toronto

“It is true . . . that no new world order, as promised by Mr. Bush, has been put in place, partly because of the disappearance of the Soviet Union. But the lessons of the war point to that order’s essential ingredients. They are that no country, not even the world’s remaining superpower, can do it all on its own; that the U.N., an effective European Community and a more outward-looking Japan, must all play important roles. If, as we wrote a year ago . . . ‘war is the result of miscalculation’ (in this case by Saddam Hussein), peace and security should not be.”

--Financial Times, London

“The first lesson (of the Gulf War) is that multinational management of a crisis must be perfected in order to make it work. The Croatian crisis shows both the U.N. and the EC how far away this target is. The second lesson concerns the capacity to discover evidence of an aggression before it happens, with a view to avoiding it rather than repressing it. With the invasion of Kuwait, world intelligence was a fiasco. The third lesson regards the capacity of withstanding aggression by producing a sufficiently credible lineup of opposing forces. If the Americans had intervened in time between Iraq and Kuwait, there wouldn’t have been an invasion and then a war.”

--Defense expert Luigi Caligaris, L’Indipendente, Rome