Perennially in command of himself and his surroundings, Baker struck advisers and colleagues as characteristically cool heading into what would be perhaps the most historic meeting of his diplomatic career. Only later did he admit to an aide that it was just a front. “I was shitting in my pants,” he confessed.
Baker was in Geneva for a final chance to head off war with Iraq. Saddam Hussein had danced around in response to Bush’s invitation, refusing to agree to a Baghdad visit by Baker on any of the dates offered. Finally, Bush issued another invitation, this one for a meeting between Baker and Tariq Aziz on neutral territory in Switzerland. This time, Hussein accepted.
The surprise meeting angered the Saudis, who thought the Bush team had suddenly gotten cold feet on the planned military operation to dislodge Saddam and was looking for a way out. “I had to scrape an incensed Bandar off the ceiling,” said Richard Haass, referring to the Saudi ambassador. Other administration officials feared that Hussein was merely seeking to confuse matters after the clarity of the United Nations vote. “I was extremely nervous,” said Brent Scowcroft. He worried that “they could maybe sell us a bill of goods and then make any use of force that we might have to resort to harder to get to.” Would Baker buy that bill of goods?
Baker understood just how much was riding on the encounter. “The whole world was looking at this meeting,” remembered Gamal Helal, Baker’s State Department Arabic translator. Baker did not harbor illusions that he would walk out with a deal to prevent armed conflict and in fact had long since resigned himself to it. He knew that the way the war was seen by the world—in effect, its legitimacy—would depend at least in part on this meeting. And he did not completely rule out the long-shot possibility that he could still find a path to peace. “He never forgot that President Bush had hoped to solve this without a war,” Colin Powell said. “Any way you can avoid war and achieve your objective, you avoid.”
They sat down in the Salon des Nations at the Intercontinental Hotel at 11:15 a.m. on January 9, 1991, just six days before the deadline for Iraq to pull out of Kuwait. The Iraqis were exceedingly tense and no wonder. Baker noticed that sitting next to Aziz was Barzan Ibrahim Hasan al-Tikriti, Hussein’s half brother and the former director of Iraq’s dreaded Mukhabarat secret police. Barzan was a notoriously brutal figure in Iraq, known for presiding over the executions of opponents at home and the assassination of rivals abroad. With a cold expression and “the eyes of a killer,” in the words of Stephen Hadley, who attended the meeting as an aide to Dick Cheney, Barzan was clearly present as the enforcer to keep the foreign minister from drifting away from his instructions. While Baker seemed calm, Aziz seemed nervous, with those killer eyes staring at him from his own side of the table. Aziz spoke fluent English, but Baker ordered that his own words be translated into Arabic for the benefit of the rest of the Iraqis. “We wanted to make sure that the entire Iraqi delegation would understand what Baker was saying,” Helal said.
At age fifty-four, Aziz was a physically diminutive figure, belying his role as Hussein’s right-hand man. With a dark mustache, gray hair, large, thick glasses, and a wily grin, Aziz had been the mild international face of a ruthless regime for years. Born a Chaldean Christian named Mikhail Yuhanna, he worked as a journalist and joined the revolutionary Ba’ath Party in 1957, changing his name to something more Arabic-sounding. He grew close to Hussein and, after the Ba’athists took power, was appointed deputy prime minister in 1979 and foreign minister in 1983.
Baker first met Aziz in October 1989 when the Americans were still supportive of Hussein’s government after years of war with their mutual enemies in Iran. “I remember how urbane and sort of cosmopolitan this foreign minister of Iraq was and how he spoke very good English and seemed to have an excellent command of his brief,” Baker said later. “And midway through what seemed to me a fairly friendly and positive meeting, he began to accuse us of interfering in their internal affairs and of conducting clandestine efforts to subvert the government.” Nonetheless, a month later, Baker pressed for $1 billion in agricultural credits for Iraq.
Now they were meeting again under radically different circumstances. Baker consciously remembered not to smile as he shook Aziz’s hand in front of a throng of international media. “He knew that the pictures from that meeting, that handshake, that starting of that meeting, would set the tone for the stories as they played out of that room, and those pictures would be immortalized as this was the last chance for peace,” said Karen Groomes, his aide.
After the journalists were escorted out of the room, Baker opened the meeting with grim candor. “Our purpose ought not, in any sense, to be to pressure each other,” Baker began. “However, it should be no surprise that I’m not here to negotiate from the resolutions passed by the” Security Council.
Baker said he had a message to pass along from Bush to Hussein. He slid a sealed envelope across the table to Aziz containing a three-page letter as well as a separate copy translated into Arabic for the foreign minister.
Aziz picked up the copy of the letter. His hands were shaking and the papers flapped noticeably as he began reading. For five minutes, the room remained silent as he underlined several sentences. “Unless you withdraw from Kuwait completely and without condition, you will lose more than Kuwait,” the letter said. “What is at issue here is not the future of Kuwait—it will be free, its government will be restored—but rather the future of Iraq. The choice is yours to make.”
Finally, Aziz looked up at Baker and dismissed the letter as an insult to his president. “That is why I can’t accept the way the letter is worded and I repeat I am going to have to apologize for not receiving it,” he told Baker. “I suggest you can publish it in the press or give it to the media.”
Aziz put the letter back on the table, but Baker left it untouched. It would end up sitting there for hours, visible to Aziz, “sort of like the sword of Damocles on the table,” as Hadley put it later.
Baker told Aziz that the letter was not a threat but simply a frank statement of reality. “The only question is by what path you leave Kuwait—a peaceful withdrawal or withdrawal by force,” Baker said sternly. “Clearly, if there is a peaceful settlement and you withdraw, those in power in Iraq today will have a say in Iraq’s future. If withdrawal takes place by force, others will determine that future.”
In effect, Baker was offering Hussein a deal: Pull out now and you can continue to rule Iraq. If you make us expel you by force, then you may not. The message was intended to reach Hussein at his most elemental level, his desire to hold on to power. But it was something of a bluff—the White House had made no decision to remove Hussein and in fact would later rule that out as the explicit goal of the coming military campaign.
Baker went on to enumerate what he called the “catastrophic consequences for Iraq” if the United States were to use its military against Iraq. “We believe these forces will really destroy your ability to run the country,” Baker said. Lest the Iraqis misjudge American resolve given its recent past, he made a point of saying: “This will not be another Vietnam.”
Then he delivered a warning that Dick Cheney and Colin Powell had specifically urged him to include: any use of weapons of mass destruction would be treated as a regime-ending moment. “If conflict ensues and you use chemical or biological weapons against U.S. forces, the American people will demand vengeance,” Baker said. “And we have the means to exact it. Let me say with regard to this part of my presentation, this is not a threat; it is a promise. If there is any use of weapons like that, our objective won’t just be the liberation of Kuwait, but the elimination of the current Iraqi regime.” America, he added, “will turn Iraq into a weak and backward country.” While he never used the words, he intended to leave Aziz with the impression that the United States would even use nuclear weapons in retaliation.
Aziz bridled at what he called the “insults” of Baker’s presentation. “The present leadership will continue to lead Iraq now and in the future,” Aziz said. “Those who will disappear are not in Iraq but some of your friends in the region.” He added that the Iraqi public would not turn on its own leaders, as Baker seemed to imply. “Our people not only support us but they love us,” he said. “These are the facts.” Aziz went on to lay out a list of grievances, complaining that the Kuwaitis had been the hostile ones by overproducing oil to drive down the price and thus weaken Iraq. Then he brought up the Palestinian dispute with Israel.
Baker dismissed that as “ludicrous” and irrelevant to the issue at hand.
“We have been committed to the Palestinian question for decades,” Aziz said.
“That is not the reason you invaded Kuwait,” Baker said.
“That’s your view.”
The two men talked around and around for roughly seven hours, taking only brief breaks to report back to their capitals. As Aziz droned on, Baker rolled his pen in his hand. Finally, at 7 p.m., Baker said he had had enough. He looked at the envelope with Bush’s letter to Hussein, still sitting unopened in the middle of the table.
“Mr. Minister,” Baker asked, “is it your intention not to take the letter?”
“Yes,” Aziz said.
Baker stood up and walked out, while an aide retrieved the letter. Back at the White House, in the little dining room just off the Oval Office, Bush, Cheney, and Scowcroft were watching on television with some congressional leaders. Bush would remember it as “one of the toughest days of my presidency.” But they instantly understood the outcome when Baker came on the screen even before he said a word. “You could tell by the look on Jim’s face that peace was not going to come out of this process,” Cheney recalled. Not everyone was unhappy about it. In his diary, Dan Quayle wrote: “Baker-Aziz meeting. Went as planned. Baker failed.”
Meeting the huge throng of journalists waiting in Geneva, Baker sounded glum. “Regrettably,” he said, “in over six hours of talks, I heard nothing today that suggested to me any Iraqi flexibility whatsoever on complying with the United Nations Security Council resolutions.”
The next morning, Baker headed to the airport. The plane was tense and quiet as it lifted off. “Everyone was, especially him, emotionally raw, psychologically raw,” said Karen Groomes. “You could feel the air in the plane.”
War, Baker knew, was now inevitable.
THE NEXT DAY, on January 11, Baker climbed onto a camouflage-covered makeshift platform in the hangar of an airbase in Taif, Saudi Arabia, where he had visited American troops the previous fall, to deliver one more warning in case Saddam Hussein had failed to understand the previous ones. The secretary of state’s stentorian speech before hundreds of American pilots and other members of the Air Force’s Forty-eighth Tactical Fighter Wing was crystal clear. So was the import of the F-111 fighter-bomber, a supersonic killing machine, that was parked behind him.
“When I talked to you four months ago,” Baker said, “some of you told me that you were ready. But you also asked how long before you would know whether you would be called into action to undo this terrible aggression. Now, as the clock ticks down to midnight January 15, I cannot give you an absolutely definitive answer. But I can tell you that you will not have to wait much longer for an answer to that question.”
The pilots and crews cheered, impatient after months of waiting in the desert. Part of a force that had grown to 500,000, they were ready to move and, after months of trying to avoid it, so was Baker. He had flown directly from his meeting with Aziz in Geneva to the Middle East to meet with King Fahd in Saudi Arabia, the ousted emir of Kuwait, and other regional leaders. He brought with him Lieutenant General Howard Graves, representing the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to outline the military plan. He had resigned himself to the coming war. The young American fighters did not know for sure that it was happening, but Baker did. He found it an emotional moment “because I knew they were going,” as he remembered later, “and they didn’t know they were going.”
The next day, after three days of wrenching, sober-minded, and eloquent debate, Congress voted to authorize Bush to use force. Until two days beforehand, Baker and the rest of the team were not sure they would prevail. But in the end, the House voted for the war resolution 250 to 183, with all but three Republicans siding with Bush joined by eighty-six Democrats. The Senate vote was far closer, 52 to 47, with ten Democrats joining a nearly unanimous Republican caucus in favor of the measure. As Baker expected, George Mitchell voted no despite the relationship with Janet Mullins, while Al Gore did vote yes in the end. They were the most divided congressional votes for military action since the War of 1812, but they were enough, Baker hoped, to send a message of resolve to Baghdad.
Yet it was a message that, like the letter left on the table in Geneva, went unreceived. The United Nations’ midnight deadline passed with no action from Hussein. Bush ordered the bombing to begin by the end of the day on January 16, and Baker, finally back in Washington, joined Cheney and Scowcroft at the White House at 7:15 a.m. as they divided up a list of allies and lawmakers to notify when the war began.
A few hours later, Bush asked Baker to come back to the White House for lunch. Bush was dwelling on the casualty projections by the Pentagon, which had shipped twenty thousand body bags to the Middle East.
The president was looking for reassurance not from his secretary of state but from one of his oldest friends. While Baker had served in the Marines, he had never seen combat. Bush had. He had survived the shoot-down of his plane in World War II when his crewmates died. That had never left him.
“I’m convinced I’ve done the right thing,” Bush told Baker, perhaps still trying to convince himself.
“I am too,” Baker replied.
Around 4:30 p.m. Washington time, the first wave of bombers took off from Saudi Arabia and nearby aircraft carriers, but they would take time to arrive at their targets. From his State Department office, Baker’s task was to touch base with as many allies as possible. He summoned ambassadors from Saudi Arabia, Syria, Israel, Kuwait, Germany, and Japan to the State Department, shuffling them in and out for meetings that lasted five minutes or so. He also called the foreign ministers of the Soviet Union, Egypt, the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, and Luxembourg as well as the NATO secretary-general. Baker struggled with his emotions. “You could hear it in his voice,” said Zalman Shoval, the Israeli ambassador. “I almost thought I could see it in his eyes.”
Baker telephoned Moscow, waking up Alexander Bessmertnykh, who had taken over for Eduard Shevardnadze as Soviet foreign minister. Bessmertnykh asked for a delay in the start of the operation. Mikhail Gorbachev wanted more time “so that I could try to convince Iraq to withdraw its troops,” as the general secretary put it later, but Baker sent back word that it was too late. The die was cast.
Baker turned on the television, but there were still no reports of any action. Why hadn’t anything happened? CNN’s correspondents in Baghdad were reporting that it was all quiet in the Iraqi capital. Baker called out to one of his assistants, John Crowley.
“John, bring me a big martini on the rocks,” he said.
The martini arrived, but the war did not.
Finally, around 6:30 p.m., the CNN reporters speaking by telephone from their hotel in Baghdad reported hearing explosions and seeing tracer fire from antiaircraft batteries in the sky. Operation Desert Storm was under way. At 7:08 p.m., Marlin Fitzwater, the press secretary, took the podium at the White House and announced, “The liberation of Kuwait has begun.” Baker watched Bush’s address to the nation on television two hours later announcing the start of hostilities, then at 9:30 p.m. headed home.
By the next night, as waves of American and allied warplanes rained down powerful bombs on ill-prepared Iraqi troops, Baker and the others were afraid the carefully constructed coalition might still fall apart. Iraq had followed through on a threat to launch Scud missiles at Israel in hopes of drawing it into the war. The Israelis were understandably eager to retaliate, something Baker was equally eager to avoid lest it jeopardize the alliance with Arab states. Although he had secretly obtained reassurances from Arab leaders that they would not back out of the coalition if Israel responded to an attack, he could not be sure they would live up to that. Baker rushed over to the White House and joined the team in Scowcroft’s office. As Baker absently fingered his key chain, an aide from the Situation Room arrived to tell the group that nerve gas had supposedly been detected in the debris of one of the missile strikes against Israel.
“If they’ve been hit with chemicals, Katie bar the door because they’re going to do something,” an agitated Larry Eagleburger exclaimed.
Baker tried to call Israel through the White House switchboard, only to listen in astonishment as a recording announced that all circuits were busy.
“Holy shit,” said Roman Popadiuk, a national security spokesman. “The world’s burning down and we can’t get a line out?”
Soon, the group learned that the report of chemical gas was false, but there were other reports that dozens of Israeli warplanes had launched into the air. The Israelis had contacted Cheney at the Pentagon to ask for the identification codes necessary for Israeli warplanes to avoid accidentally shooting at or being shot by American or allied planes if they streaked into Iraqi airspace. Baker was working the phones with Arab officials trying to keep everyone calm, but a debate quickly broke out. Cheney and others thought it was hard to ask Israel to restrain itself given that it was under attack. But Baker and Scowcroft insisted that they had to keep Israel out of the fight or risk losing the support of the Arab world.
“We are going after western Iraq full bore, Mr. Prime Minister,” Baker assured Yitzhak Shamir when he finally reached the Israeli leader around 10:40 p.m. Washington time. “We’ve got aircraft over the launch sites.” That was something of a bluff. Baker did not know exactly where the American planes were, but figured it was close enough. “There is nothing that your air force can do that we are not doing. If there is, tell us and we’ll do it. We appreciate your restraint, but please don’t play into Saddam’s hands.” Shamir was noncommittal.
Through the long hours into the night in what they later dubbed “Scud Thursday,” Baker dealt with the tension by writing doggerel poetry, some of it about his friend Scowcroft. He taped his racy limericks to Scowcroft’s walls and cabinets. “They were very, very funny,” recalled Robert Gates, “and very obscene.”
Baker had not been in bed for long that night before Shamir called him at home at 2:03 a.m. and announced that his cabinet had decided to prepare an immediate response. Baker pleaded with him again. “You cannot do this, Prime Minister,” he implored.
In the end, the Israelis held off that night as Baker wanted, perhaps due to the simple fact that it was too dangerous militarily to send Israeli planes into hostile territory without the American identification codes. Bush quickly dispatched Eagleburger and Paul Wolfowitz, the undersecretary of defense, to Israel to provide more reassurance and ordered two Patriot batteries operated and guarded by American troops to be deployed to Israel to shoot down any further Iraqi Scud missiles.
The pressure from Tel Aviv only intensified, however. Moshe Arens, Israel’s hawkish defense minister, arrived in Washington in the middle of the air war to push again for Israeli retaliation. By that point, thirty-one Scuds had been fired at Israel, resulting in about a dozen deaths.
“We may now have to act,” Arens told Baker.
“Our boys are doing the job for you,” Baker replied.
Arens grew angry but before he had a chance to reply, an assistant entered with a message that a Scud missile had just landed not far from where he lived. He left the room to call home and reached his wife, who was unhurt, then returned to the discussion and told Baker what had happened. Baker made polite inquiries about his wife and then moved on. “I didn’t sense any real sympathy from him,” Arens said. “Nothing. It just went on like nothing happened.”
AMERICAN WARPLANES JOINED by those from Britain, France, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait pounded the Iraqis from the sky. Although projections presented to Baker and the rest of the national security team had envisioned the loss of as many as 150 American aircraft, in fact the armada of fighters and bombers ruled the skies over Kuwait and Iraq. Saddam Hussein had promised “the mother of all battles,” but the war was playing out as a pretty one-sided affair.
For Baker, the major challenge was not the Iraqi military but his partners in Moscow, who kept trying to intervene with one peacemaking venture after another. Mikhail Gorbachev sent Yevgeny Primakov, a Soviet diplomat with deep experience in the Arab world, to talk with Hussein and then advanced ideas for calling off the American-led assault without the complete pullback from Kuwait that Bush had demanded.
Baker’s usual judgment failed him two weeks into the war when Shevardnadze’s successor as foreign minister, Alexander Bessmertnykh, visited him in Washington. After discussions at the State Department, Bessmertnykh asked if the two could issue a joint statement restating their mutual commitment to finding a resolution to the conflict. Baker reluctantly agreed, deeming the statement a fairly anodyne document that did not break any ground. Indeed, he did not clear it with the White House and just figured it would be left in the State Department press room where reporters would probably not even find it until the next day. What he did not count on was Bessmertnykh encountering a group of reporters when he left the building and eagerly pulling a copy of the statement out of his pocket to read to them. “The Ministers continue to believe that a cessation of hostilities would be possible if Iraq would make an unequivocal commitment to withdraw from Kuwait,” the statement said. Dennis Ross had made sure the statement included the word “continue” to emphasize that it did not signal a change in policy.
But in fact, it did. Baker had just suggested that Hussein could win a cease-fire simply by promising to pull out, not by actually pulling out. If Baker was too tired to recognize what he had just done, others were not. Journalists flashed out the news, which quickly reached the White House just as Bush was getting ready to go to the Capitol to deliver his annual State of the Union address. In any administration, the rule was that no one was to make news on the day of a State of the Union to avoid upstaging the president. Baker had just broken the rule.
Brent Scowcroft was conducting a background briefing for reporters when he was asked if Baker was announcing a policy shift on Iraq. Not knowing anything about the statement, Scowcroft mumbled something to the effect that he had not seen it yet.
“Was Baker out of line?” a reporter asked.
Scowcroft said he would have to see the comments.
After the briefing was over, Scowcroft obtained a copy of the statement and went to tell Bush what happened, finding him in the White House basement having makeup applied for his televised address. “His face turned ashen even under the makeup,” Scowcroft said. “Then the anger—as sharp as I’d ever seen in him—started to rise.” Bush later acknowledged that he “was furious,” even though he knew Baker “had not meant to ‘blindside’ me.” Marlin Fitzwater, who recalled showing Bush a wire story about the Baker-Bessmertnykh statement in the limousine returning from the Capitol, said the president “got that steel jaw he gets every once in a while when you know he’s not happy.”
Baker was so upset at the screwup that he told aides the next morning that he had only slept three hours. He called Bush to apologize. “Sorry about the way it was played,” Baker wrote in notes preparing for the conversation. “WH aides say ‘trying to upstage’—BS. Saw statement as non-event; breaks no new ground.”
Bush forgave his friend, but Baker’s critics saw it as a sign that his own sense of self-importance had grown out of control. “He should fire him for this but he won’t,” Richard Nixon told Monica Crowley, his foreign policy assistant. “Baker took it upon himself to do this. God he’s just dying to be president.”
Even Cheney grumbled about Baker’s mistake. As Gorbachev continued trying to play peacemaker, he dispatched an envoy to Baghdad and then sent Bush a letter reporting the results, suggesting that the Americans hold off a ground attack pending further talks. Cheney tied that to the opening provided by the statement with Bessmertnykh. “Baker bends over backward to please the Soviets and now the Soviets are bending over backward to help Saddam,” he told associates. “That’s just great!”
Three weeks later, Gorbachev came back with a refined peace plan, reporting that Hussein was open to a withdrawal over three weeks. Returning from Ford’s Theatre, where he saw a play called Black Eagles about the Tuskegee airmen, Bush met with the Gang of Eight in his private study upstairs at 10:20 p.m. on February 21 to consider the latest Soviet move. Cheney and Quayle were in tuxedoes from an event they had attended. No one thought Gorbachev’s plan was viable, but Baker did not want to alienate the Soviets either. Cheney thought they should tell Gorbachev to go to hell. Colin Powell suggested they issue another ultimatum with a deadline for Iraq to leave Kuwait or face a ground assault. They settled on noon Saturday, less than two days later. Bush liked it.
“What’s it do for you, Jim?” Bush asked.
Baker wondered whether the land operation was still necessary given the pounding the Iraqis had taken from the air, but Bush and Cheney wanted to make sure to take out a substantial portion of Hussein’s military.
Seeing the direction the decision was going, Baker opted to sign on. “It’s good for me too, but it’s a new item that the allies don’t know about and we need to get back to them about it.” He returned to the State Department and began calling foreign ministers late into the night.
The deadline was issued and then ignored, so after six weeks of bombardment, the ground war began on February 24, with American troops joined by units from some of Baker’s coalition, a remarkable collection of three dozen countries that included not just traditional allies such as Britain and France but Arab states such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Oman, Kuwait, and even Syria, normally hostile to the West.
The ground war did not take long. After just three days of pummeling by American ground forces, it was clear that Iraq had lost and its troops were fleeing Kuwait. The real question became how long to continue the fighting. There was a desire to keep going enough to cripple the Iraqi military, ensuring that it would not continue to be a threat to its neighbors. But there was growing discomfort both inside and outside the administration at the level of the killing. The “highway of death,” as the media now called the road out of Kuwait, was littered with corpses and burned-out tanks.
Baker’s team debated the issue with him before he went to the White House to discuss it with the president. “Margaret and I were both, ‘What are we doing here?’ ” recalled Janet Mullins. “The boys were like, ‘Yeah, let’s keep killing them.’ ”
At a meeting in the Oval Office on the afternoon of February 27, Bush asked whether it was time to call a halt to the war.
Baker said yes. “We have done the job,” he said. “We can stop. We have achieved our aims. We have gotten them out of Kuwait.”
No one disagreed. Even Cheney concurred. “We were all in agreement that we’d done what we had set out to do, achieved our objectives,” he said later. “Nobody argued, ‘Let’s go to Baghdad.’ It wasn’t an option.”
Powell picked up an Oval Office phone and reached Norman Schwarzkopf to see what he thought. The general agreed it was appropriate to end offensive operations, but asked for time to consult his commanders before giving a final view. The team reconvened at 6 p.m., by which point Schwarzkopf had checked with his team and confirmed his opinion. They agreed to end hostilities at midnight Washington time, when the ground war would be exactly one hundred hours old.
Rather than feeling elated, Bush was somewhat dispirited. “It hasn’t been a clean end—there is no battleship Missouri surrender,” he recorded in his diary. “This is what’s missing to make this akin to WWII, to separate Kuwait from Korea and Vietnam.” Saddam Hussein remained in power. At cease-fire talks in Safwan, the southern Iraqi town where Schwarzkopf met his Iraqi counterparts, the Americans allowed the dictator continued use of his military helicopters, which he then employed to crush internal opposition.
In later years, Baker and other administration officials would emphasize that their mission had always been to liberate Kuwait, not drive Hussein from power. In fact, there was a growing desire on their part as the war proceeded to do both. On February 15, Bush in a speech urged “the Iraqi military and the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands to force Saddam Hussein the dictator to step aside.” Cheney the next day suggested “there’s an incentive for some of the senior commanders to want to replace Saddam.” And Baker himself chimed in the day after that, saying in an interview that “there would be no tears shed if the Iraqi people decided to change their leadership.”
But the Bush administration was not prepared to do anything to help the people they were encouraging to stand up to Hussein. In the end, the strongman in Baghdad was left with enough military might to destroy uprisings by Shiites in the south and Kurds in the north while American troops stood on the sidelines. Baker feared the “Lebanonization of Iraq,” a messy conflict that would fracture the country and drag American forces into a quagmire. “We are not prepared to go down the slippery slope of being sucked into a civil war,” he told reporters as he traveled to the region in April. “We cannot police what goes on inside Iraq and we cannot be the arbiters of who shall govern Iraq.” Yet just a day later, the cost of that realpolitik decision stared him in the face as he visited a refugee camp in the Kurdistan region of Iraq, where 50,000 people had fled, a fraction of a much larger displacement. Baker was stunned by the misery he witnessed. “We are suffering,” one man told him. “Our children are suffering from starvation. We need doctors, we need medicine, we need water.” Baker stressed to Bush the scale of the humanitarian disaster and aid was flown in. But not combat troops. While the United States would eventually set up and enforce no-fly zones in the north and south, Hussein remained in charge, a regional menace thumbing his nose at American power.
Still, it was a military victory that achieved its stated aims and avoided the dangers of mission creep. Kuwait was liberated and its government restored. The world had stood as one in declaring that the sort of aggression waged by Hussein would not be tolerated. Thanks to Baker’s diplomacy, the United States and the Soviet Union worked in tandem for the first time since World War II to resolve a major regional conflict. The Arab world joined the coalition that Baker forged against one of its own and, however reluctantly, Israel stayed out of the fight, preventing Hussein from transforming the crisis into a confrontation with the Jewish state. One hundred and forty-eight American troops were killed in battle, about a quarter of them due to friendly fire.
Bush felt that the Vietnam syndrome that had hobbled the United States for nearly two decades had been finally purged. America was emerging from the Gulf War a more confident power at a time when it would increasingly assume the responsibility of unchallenged leadership. Bush’s own stature was unquestioned. His approval rating shot up to 89 percent in the Gallup poll, at that point higher than any American president had seen since the advent of opinion surveys.
Bush was not the only one to emerge from the war with his public standing enhanced. Baker was enjoying an 84 percent approval rating and some considered him a prospect for higher office. Asked about the 1992 ticket, only 44 percent of Americans said Bush should keep Quayle as his running mate while 41 percent said Bush should replace the vice president with Baker.
On March 6, Bush addressed a joint session of Congress to hail the victory in the Gulf. Baker and Cheney sat side by side. The hall erupted in cheers.
“It doesn’t get any better than this,” Cheney said.
“No, it doesn’t,” Baker agreed.