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Importance on Our Minds. Mr Desert Shield/Storm. February 1991. Nothing flies away from us so fast as time, when we have much of :importance on our minds. Mr. ·nooley, the fictional Irish-American commentator invented by a newspaper columnist, said that scales and clocks were not to be trusted to decide anything that's worth deciding. 1/llhy tell~ time by a clock? he asked. Every hour is the same to a clock and every hour is different to me. Some are long, and some are short. But they all grow shorter as we find more of them behind us than before us. The Irish poet W. B. Yeats said that the young and the beautiful have no enemy b~t t:ime ••• which may mean that to my class of people time has become a friend. But how quickly the now becomes the then, and today becomes yesterday, and last month, and three years ago. It was on the night of November 8, 1989 that the world witnessed by live satellite TV the fall of the wall in Berlin, and the sudden lifting of the threat of military invasion into the ancient heart of Europe, and the nuclear threat to civilization. People danced in great joy on what had been for a generation the symbol of a divided and hostile and ugly world. If the Russians aren't coming, then who is? we asked ourselves, and people spo~e of a balanced budget, and a peace divi• dend, and and new and peaceful world a-borning. But how quickly it all collapsed, with the final• ity of the wall itself. One year and three weeks after I stayed up late into the night to watch the deliriously happy people dancing and hugging and sharing champagne at the party that was the funeral wake for a separated eastern block of captive nations, in new·York the security council of tne UN acted to ase military force against the Arab republic of Iraq. At that moment, on Thursday, November 29, 1990, the dancing stopped in mid-step ,4 and the dream of peace and plenty came crashing down into nightmare. It was only the second time in the 45-yr history oft he UN that the peace-keeping international body had voted to fight to protect a member of the commun• ity of nations, whose territorial integrity and political independence was threatened by an ag• gressor's unprovoked invasion. The other time was in June, 1950, when the invader was an artifi• cial state on the northern end of Korea, whose objective itwis to unite the two wrongfully sev• ered portions of the Korean nation into a whole. After a three-year war, and 50,000 U.S. cas• ualties, followed by 35 yrs of military occupation along a demilitarized zone, the country re• mains divided. Patriots on both sides of that line are constantly at work to undo the UN's intervention and restore the unity of a divided nation. I begin with the experience in Korea to suggest that the record of UN military action to compel the retention of imaginary political lines upon the earth is not one to inspire confidence. Then as now most of the troops, and therefore most of the expected casualties, will be American. But how quickly time has erased the memory, and the bitterness, of the Korean conflict. This time the military complement is called a coalition and not a UN police force, but still it is true that the greatest proportion of them are American. That situation, and that UN vote to approve military force to carry out a UN resolution, explains why we are gathered here today to discuss what happened, and "'1.y, and what it might mean to this present generation and the country in which they live. The present conflict began on August 2 of last year, when the Iraqd. war machine rolled al• most unresisted across a line in the sand between their own country and the Emirate of Kuwait. At first they announced, in Baghdad, and in Washington, and at the United Nations, that their incursion would be a brief one, to insure the security of their southern border. But very quick• ly it became clear that they intended to annex the territory of Kuwait and make it the 19th prov• ince of their country. Firstt~ust understand why the Iraqli.s decided.to invade a neighboring country, and why they intended to keep it. As you all know, in the past 10 yrs Iraq has waged a bloody and costly war against her neighbor to the east, Iran. It was fought over oilwells and refineries and the trade routes by which petroleum leaves that rich region and enters world com• merce. Oil is the one crucial raw material upon which theW3alth and the political stability of the industrial world depends. The finger on the pulse of the pipeline or the tanker lane has the power to produce prosperity or poverty in Japan, America, and Europe. Seventeen yrs ago it was Saudi Arabia that ceased its exports to us, in an attempt to compel a change in our foreign poli• cy toward Israel and the Palestinian Arabs. A dozen years ago it was Iran, and the Ayatollah, who seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran, and condemned America as the Satan nation. At that time, when Iraq with its Sunni Moslem sect and its Ba'ath Party, was the enemy of the Shi'ite Moslems in Iran, Iraq was America's ally. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, however brutal or barbar• ic. Western powers armed and trained the Iraqi forces. The British sold them the desert uni• forms they now wear in their bunkers, the Germans with traditional Teutonic thoroughness built "those bunkers for them, and ~50;f}bought chemical and biological weapons, and the ingredients for nuclear weapons, where they were offered for sale. When the war is over there will undoubtedly be Congressional investigations of the diplomatic messages that led up to the fighting; they will provide interesting and perhaps also chilling reading. But for the present it is a nice piece of irony that in the war with Iraq the coalition is largely facing weapons of its own manufac- wi+'V ture. I do not know the current state of U.S.-Soviet collaboration, but in the wineland-roses days when Mr. Gorbachev won the Nobel Peace prize, the Red Army provided the Iraqis/both fixed position and mob:i,,lqj>~ud ground to ground missiles, and sent technicians to teach the Iraqis how to use them, and~~sent others to the U.S. military to teach them how to attack the weapons. In the murky waters of the international arms trade, strange creatures hatch and grow into mon• aters. But 1988 saw a war-weary Iraq finally win a peace. How quickly that has receded into the past. It was a costly conflict. Iraq employed gas shells against the Iranians, and when Iraq's Kurdish minority rose in rebellion to win their independence, they used gas to kill them also. In all, both sides may have lost a million dead in the conflict, and both sides suffered physical destruction of its assets. In Iraq the ldrshp asked for assistance. For 8·yrs its ex• ports of oil were drastically reduced, thus depriving the country of its income. During the war the Kuwaitis moved into an oil field in the region between the two, and began to pump oil. When the Iraqis asked compensation, the Kuwaitis paid a ransom to keep the peace. That did not satis• fy the Iraqi rule~ Saddam Hussein. He planned an act of larceny, grand theft of an entire coun• try. But before~rooved, he asked the U. s. administration wh~r~pponse itw:>uld make to such an a ct. In July, the U.S. ambassador Ln Baghdad, a woman named/'Gl~pie, and the appropi:iate of• ficials at the Middle East desk of the state Dept in Washington, both assured Saddam that con• flicts between Arab and Arab lay outside U.S. national interests, and that the U.S. took no notice of Arabic borders. Acting upon those assurances, Saddai~ moved intc Kuwait on August 2. Last week Pres Bush declared that Saddam had miscalculated the response to his aggression. In retrospect, it is easy to understand why. · And then there was Kuwait. It would be a rich prize for anyone. It is the only seaport on the northwestern(X)rner of the Persian Gulf, and serves as shipment center for the world's richest oil deposits. It is separated from the other inhabited portions of the region by 200 miles of moonscape, the most forbidding and life-threatening terrain to be found anywhere out• side the polar ice caps. There is no water, so that the human body dehydrates in a very short time. Most of the year the temperature is unbelievably high at noonday, when not e ven madsdogs and Englishmen venture out of a protective shield. Then, in the small hours of the morning, it drops below freezing. Strong winds turn the sand into blindin~ curtains, and the grit gets in• to everything--eyeballs, living quarters, the delicate portions of tank or helicopter engines. Until the present century@was only a seaport through which little commerce pass~ A century ago, in 1889, the sheik gave over to the British the protection of his interests. PlB Wa1 'f · · · · In 1919, as part of the peace settlement, the British assigned its control to the same fami y which still, until last August, governed ~e seaport: In 1921 the present-boundaries were drawn by a British military official.
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