It would also have broken the unhealthy American habit, acquired during the Cold War years of absolute dominance, of assuming control without consulting anyone, and then complaining bitterly that others were not backing it up and sharing the burden.  The time to get other countries to do some burden-sharing is before making commitments that lock one in, not afterwards.  That President Bush chose to take virtually the whole burden on his country's shoulders, and that his choice was so popular with his fellow countrymen, may reveal one of the important secrets of contemporary America: Despite complaints and grumbles about burdens, and professions of relief that the tensions of the Cold War have now relaxed, the country has become much more attached to its role of superpower and leader of the free world than it cares to admit--and it would feel seriously deprived if it ever lost that role.*

More than inadequate burden sharing is involved in the feeble performance of Germany and Japan during this crisis.  A year ago it was being predicted confidently--indeed, stated as an obvious fact--that these two countries were about to join the ranks of the truly global powers.  The pronouncement was made simply on the basis of a crude economic determinism: these countries now have huge economies and are very rich; therefore they will inevitably be leading players in world politics.  Americans who asserted and accepted this were forgetting their own history.  The United States had the strongest economy in the world for about fifty years before it chose to become a fully active world power, and then it took Pearl Harbor to force the choice.  Economics is not destiny.  Wealth makes it possible to be a global power, it does not make it inevitable.

There are those, of course, who argue that it is better that Germany and Japan should remain politically quiescent, and that we should be prepared to put up with their freeloading as a necessary price for their remaining so.  It is an understandable point of view, but it really will not do.  Given our experience with both countries, there must be real concern that if they do not overcome the effects of their mid-century traumas and steadily acquire the habits of responsibility and participation in the company of others, their future history will consist of an unpredictable and dangerous lurching between extremes: timid and reticent one day, demanding and domineering the next.

Another, and more obvious, weakness of the Bush administration's handling of the crisis has been the opportunistic importance it has attached to the role of the United Nations as the authorizer of policy.  While this has had obvious short-term advantages--mainly in disarming potential critics who still believe, or profess to believe, that the UN represents "morality"--it should be equally obvious that it stores up trouble for the future.  In any dispute involving one or more of the veto-owning permanent members of the Security Council as the perpetrators of aggression--that is to say, in the most serious disputes--the moral patina of a UN resolution authorizing effective action will never be available.  By pandering to and exploiting illusions about the UN, instead of exposing them and taking the trouble to make its own moral case for acting, the administration has encouraged the belief that UN approval is a necessary condition for the legitimate use of force.  It is now commonplace for commentators on talk shows and op-ed pages to explain that certain courses of action or objectives (for instance, the removal of Saddam) exceed the limits of what is authorized by the UN, that they are not part of "the mandate"--as if that settled the matter.  We shall live to regret this much-trumpeted "UN success."

The most serious fault in the Bush administration's Gulf policy is its disproportion.  In terms of the original provocation and its perpetrator, there is something grotesquely inappropriate in the scale of response--as if, say, Muhammad Ali in his prime had been sent in against a promising lightweight.  If anyone had predicted on August 2 that in six months' time there would be half a million American troops in the Gulf, as well as five American aircraft carriers, a huge air force, and sizable allied contingents; if anyone had predicted that in the first year of the new world order more bombs would be dropped on Iraq and Kuwait in three weeks than were dropped on Germany by the American and British air forces during the period of most intense bombing of World War II--surely he would have been thought very peculiar indeed.  All other items on America's political agenda have been put on hold--or compromised--in order to concentrate on the problem of bringing a country of seventeen million people to heel.  During a critical period in the evolution of the crisis in the Soviet Union, Washington's Soviet policy has been subordinated to the need to maintain Moscow's support for U.S. Gulf policy.  (Indeed, a persuasive case can be made that the magnitude of the U.S. military response to Saddam Hussein has been a factor in hardening the Soviet military's outlook and making it more assertive and resistant to reform.)

All this has been justified by President Bush in terms of "a defining hour" and the importance of creating a decisive precedent for the new world order.  In other words, the whole thing transcends Saddam Hussein and Kuwait.  But the irony is that the very size of the reaction to the invasion of Kuwait ensures that it cannot be a convincing precedent.  This kind of behavior is simply not replicable on a regular basis, and cannot therefore establish a rule.  If there is another act of blatant aggression in Latin America or Southeast Asia in six months' time, it will be beyond the means and the will of the United States to respond in similar fashion.

Some would answer this by saying that if the action against Saddam is successful it will not be necessary to repeat it, that the terrible lesson taught him will be an effective deterrent to other potential aggressors, and that, in any case, they will not know that it cannot be repeated.  Perhaps, but it is dangerous to base policy on the assumption that other people are dumber than oneself.  The strong-arm men and bully boys of the world have many intellectual shortcomings, but one of the things they are normally fairly shrewd at--it is a necessary talent for success in their line of business--is the calculation of power realities.  If we can see that the United States cannot sustain a series of Gulf-like operations to deal with regional aggression, it is safer to assume that they too will see it.

The other effect of the gigantic scale of the operation has been to flatter, and magnify the importance of, the object of its attention.  Even as it destroys Saddam Hussein, that operation cannot help but build him up.  If before the end he succeeds in inflicting serious casualties on American forces, it may yet confer on him an heroic stature in Arab eyes.  (One says this with some trepidation.  So many contradictory things have been asserted about "the Arab mind" in recent months that any claim concerning it is unlikely to be significantly more persuasive than its opposite.)  To be defeated--even to be killed--by such a stupendous force will not in itself be a disgrace.  It could well be taken to constitute proof of his seriousness as an adversary and to validate his pretensions; and revered dead men can be formidable enemies.

As conservatives should be the first to recognize, Walter Lippmann's famous warning about the importance of keeping ends and means in balance cuts both ways: while it is important to ensure that the means used are sufficient to secure the ends, it is also important that they should not be wildly excessive.  For excessive means are the producers of collateral effects and unintended consequences, and these can be particularly unfortunate in a region like the Middle East.

By the time this is published, the United States may well have won a decisive and spectacular military victory at a very low cost in American lives.  In that case President Bush will be triumphant and criticisms of his policy will probably fall on deaf ears.  That will not in itself invalidate those criticisms, and it will not be the first example in history of military success serving to disguise political error--at least for awhile.  And it may be worth pointing out that, from Napoleon to Anthony Eden, it is difficult to recall a modern Western statesman who, in the end, enhanced his reputation by taking initiatives in the Middle East.  It will be a surprise--though a pleasant one--if George Bush turns out to be the exception.

Owen Harries is editor of The National Interest.

*On this point see Michael Vlahos in America's Purpose--Toward a New Vision of U.S. Foreign Policy, edited by Owen Harries (San Francisco: ICS Press, 1991), pp. 43-52.

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