On September 11, just after returning to Washington from his one-day summit meeting in Helsinki with Mikhail Gorbachev, George Bush addressed a joint session of Congress. While most of his speech was devoted to the crisis in the Persian Gulf, Bush said nothing that he had not already said many times before in the weeks since Iraq under Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait and he had then responded by sending American forces to Saudi Arabia. Yet the President’s rhetoric on this occasion was generally interpreted as a subtle effort to prepare American public opinion for the actual use of those forces in combat—for, as one commentator put it, bloodshed in the Persian Gulf.

I must confess that, watching him deliver the speech on television, I had not interpreted it that way. Perhaps the subtle effort he was supposedly making was a little too subtle. Or it may be that I was overly influenced by all the other signals which had by then been pouring forth in a steady stream from the White House and the State Department to the effect that our strategy for driving Iraq out of Kuwait rested entirely on a tightening of the economic embargo already in place and an intensification of diplomatic pressures on Saddam Hussein.

To be sure, these statements had always carefully left room for “additional steps,” and so did the joint communiquä issued in condemnation of the Iraqi aggression by Bush and Gorbachev at the conclusion of their Helsinki meeting. But then again, Gorbachev had instantly and heatedly denied that the language in question was meant to endorse the use of military force, and Bush had not contradicted him. Nor had he contradicted his National Security Adviser, Brent Scowcroft, or his Secretary of State, James A. Baker 3d, when they too had in various interviews distanced themselves—though not so emphatically as Gorbachev—from the idea of the military option.

Then, only two weeks later, the Soviets suddenly changed their position. Speaking at the United Nations on September 25, Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze warned Iraq that his country was now prepared to go along with multilateral military action “if the illegal occupation of Kuwait continues.” For this he was praised by Baker and other Western diplomats. At the same time, they all emphasized that their support for military force was contingent upon its being implemented through the UN, thereby probably precluding any speedy resort to such action and certainly ruling out any unilateral American moves.

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This issue of whether our troops and planes and ships were in the Persian Gulf to fight a war, or only to prevent (or deter) one, had by then become the only factor threatening to disrupt the amazingly happy harmony which surrounded Bush’s actions both at home and abroad. Almost everyone in the world, with the exception of a few Arab states and the PLO, had endorsed the stated goals of Bush’s policy—to make Saddam withdraw from Kuwait and to bring back the government he had driven out of that country. More surprisingly, almost everyone in the world had also endorsed the dispatching of American military forces to the region to discourage any move Saddam might be contemplating against Saudi Arabia—a move that, if successful, would leave him with an intolerable degree of control over the oil on which so many nations depend. Here at home as well, support for Bush both on goals and tactics had been overwhelming from the very first.

Overwhelming—but not exactly universal. In the “old” days—that is, up until the Iraqi invasion itself—one could safely have bet the ranch that any such action by the United States as Bush took in response to that invasion would immediately trigger vigorous opposition from the Left. Yet apart from a few pathetic demonstrations demanding that we get out of Saudi Arabia, a lonely op-ed piece in the New York Times by a father warning that he would never forgive Bush if his son were to be killed in a war with Iraq, and a soft drumbeat of complaint that American boys were being sent to Saudi Arabia only “to make the world safe for gas guzzlers,” there was nothing. Instead, to the amazement of many and the delight of some, the role we had all become so accustomed to seeing played by the Left was now usurped by certain figures on the Right.

The most visible of these was Patrick J. Buchanan. In a series of syndicated newspaper columns and in frequent appearances on television, Buchanan took the formidable polemical artillery he had always aimed at the Left and turned it on those of his erstwhile political allies within the conservative community who had been advocating air strikes that would cripple Iraq’s chemical-warfare capability and retard its development of a nuclear capability as well. He identified this group as the “neoconservatives,” a term he was clearly using as a euphemism for “Jews”¹ and in case anyone should fail to get the point, he explicitly went on to charge that the only people trying to drag us into a war with Iraq were Israel and its “amen corner” in the United States. He did not bother to explain how this brutal allegation jibed with the fact that National Review here and the Economist in London, two magazines which could in no sense be characterized as neoconservative (let alone as Jewish) and which are not exactly notable for saying amen to everything Israel does, were among the most vigorous proponents of the need for quick military action against Iraq. Not that this fact, or any others, could put a dent in the impenetrable armor of Buchanan’s by now openly virulent hostility to Israel and his thus far more covert animus against Jews in general.

The columnist team of Evans and Novak also blamed Israel and its American supporters for trying to drag this country into a war which, they warned, would result in tens of thousands of body bags being shipped back to America from Saudi Arabia. Even worse, as it seemed, from their point of view, bombing Iraq would also turn the entire Arab world against us. Yet as they themselves soon went on to report (though without so much as a single indication that they were contradicting most of what they had previously been telling us), most of our Arab allies in this conflict, far from counseling restraint, were urging the United States to strike Iraq quickly and hard.

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True, that was also what the Israelis wanted. After all, Saddam had only just threatened to hit Israel with everything in his arsenal, including the poison gas he had already used against Kurds and Iranians; and if Israel had not destroyed the Iraqi reactor in 1981 (an act which had earned it universal condemnation), that arsenal might well by now have also been stocked with nuclear weapons. Now the Israelis feared that if this latest crisis should end with Iraq’s military infrastructure in place, it would not be long before Tel Aviv and Jerusalem would be under the gun of missiles effectively fitted with chemical and, eventually, nuclear warheads.

Still, while the Israelis naturally wanted the United States to remove this threat, no one in the Israeli government—apart from the irrepressible Ariel Sharon—was saying so out loud. It was widely believed that this uncharacteristic reticence had been adopted at the request of the Bush administration, precisely in order to head off the charge being pushed by Saddam, and echoed by the likes of Buchanan and Evans and Novak, that the United States was acting not in its own interests but in the interests of Israel; or, in the succinct formulation of a radical Arab opponent of American intervention, “the U.S. is here to destroy Iraq for the sake of Israel.” Obviously, if the hope of heading off that charge was indeed why the Israelis had been keeping so low a profile, they might just as well have saved themselves the trouble.

Joining the anti-Israel neoisolationists of the Right in a bizarre coalition were a number of liberal commentators who also expressed alarm over the position taken by the people the New York Times called “hasty hawks” (more or less the same group that Buchanan was calling the neoconservatives). In contrast to Buchanan, however, the Times neither suggested that these people were all Jews working for Israel nor opposed Bush’s stated goals of deterring an Iraqi invasion of Saudi Arabia and annulling the Iraqi annexation of Kuwait. On the contrary, the Times even went so far as to advocate that our objectives be extended to the elimination of Iraq’s ability to wage chemical or nuclear war—but not by bombing those facilities. How then were we to do this? By economic and political pressure, said the Times. Yet the notion that anything short of air strikes against Iraq’s military infrastructure could do the job in question was so wildly implausible that one could only see in it an example of willing the end without willing the means.

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It was at this point that a certain resemblance to the debate over Vietnam began to manifest itself.

Contrary to a popular myth (which has apparently also taken root in the Pentagon), there was virtually no opposition at first to the policy of saving South Vietnam from Communism and for the dispatch of American troops by John F. Kennedy, and then by Lyndon Johnson, to that country—no more, and perhaps even less, than there was to the dispatch of our troops by George Bush to Saudi Arabia. Thus, there were no moves in Congress to prevent American intervention in Vietnam in 1962-63, and the Gulf of Tonkin resolution—the closest we ever came to a declaration of war—passed by an overwhelming margin in 1964. Even as late as 1966, an amendment to repeal that resolution was defeated in the Senate by a vote of 92-5.

It was the same with the media. In April 1965, in an editorial that could just as easily have appeared in the Washington Post or in the two major newsmagazines, the New York Times declared that “Virtually all Americans understand that we must stay in South Vietnam at least for the near future.” And indeed, the public-opinion polls were then solidly behind Johnson, just as they now were behind Bush.

On the other hand, then as now, the New York Times, like a growing number of liberal doves in other parts of the political forest, was up to its inveterate trick of willing the end but not the means. Shortly after we had begun bombing the North, for example, a Times editorial declared:

The Americans went into Vietnam . . . to contain the advance of Communism in that part of Southeast Asia. The motives are exemplary and every American can be proud of them, but the crucial questions are: Can it be done? Is the price too high? . . . Is the United States losing more than it is gaining?

Then as now, too, the administration in power reacted to such qualms by struggling to achieve its objectives on the cheap. In the case of Johnson, this meant fighting a war without, as he himself once proudly put it, trying to generate a war fever in the country (which, he feared, would jeopardize his domestic programs). It also meant persuading himself that he could save South Vietnam through a negotiated settlement (even though, as might have been suspected then, and as we now know for certain from Hanoi itself, there never was any such chance).

In the case of Bush (at least up until the beginning of October) the analogous illusion, also helped along by the dovish sentiment building up around him, seemed to be that he could win a war without actually fighting one—that he could drive Saddam out of Kuwait through tightening the economic noose and increasing Iraq’s diplomatic isolation. Yet even in the unlikely event that this turned out to be possible, there would still be the problem of how to deal with Saddam’s military machine. For if the Iraqi tyrant, or for that matter some thuggish successor who might overthrow him, were to withdraw from Kuwait while being permitted to hold onto his missiles and his chemical weapons and his nascent nuclear capability, the threat Iraq poses to our vital interests in the region would remain.

And so, of course, would the mortal threat to Israel. In mentioning this, I realize that—being both a neoconservative and a Jew—I risk providing evidence for the pernicious charges which have been made by Buchanan and his ilk. But refusing to mention it would be to capitulate to the same kind of intimidation, emanating in the 1930’s from Buchanan’s political ancestors on the isolationist Right, that led American Jews to be cautious about advocating American entry into the war against Hitler. Surely it is much too late in the historical day for Jews to bow to such despicable pressures.

Why in any case should they? The war against Saddam is no more a “Jewish war” than was the war against Hitler. It is a war to prevent control of a vital resource from falling into the hands of a ruthless aggressor. It is a war to discourage others from engaging in such aggression. It is a war to establish a more peaceful order in the post-cold-war world. Conversely, just as the threat Hitler posed to European Jewry ought to have been an additional reason for decent people to stop him rather than something to be kept quiet and to be embarrassed about, so too with the threat Saddam poses to Israel.

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As of early October, elimination of the Iraqi threat, which is no less fervently desired by enemies of Israel like Saudi Arabia and Syria than it is by Israel itself, has yet to become a declared purpose of American policy. In fact, signals are now being sent both by Saddam and by Bush that a diplomatic settlement (which is also being pushed by the French) may after all be in the works. This would inevitably entail economic and political concessions to Iraq in exchange for the promise of a phased withdrawal from Kuwait, and would therefore constitute, and be perceived throughout the Middle East as, a victory for Saddam, no matter how loudly it might be declared the opposite by its dovish proponents in the West.

Yet it is also possible that these diplomatic signals will turn out to be nothing more than a feint. It is even possible that, by the time these words are published, with our forces fully deployed and with the weather conditions in the desert more propitious, George Bush will have begun using whatever degree and combination of military power may be necessary to neutralize the military power of Iraq. (For specifics, see Eliot A. Cohen’s article below.) If, however, he should fail to take such action, then he will also fail to achieve even the more limited objectives he has so far set for himself, with incalculable damage to his presidency, to his country, and to the world.

—Norman Podhoretz

¹ Buchanan is not alone in suggesting that the two are interchangeable. But tiresome though it is to keep repeating the point, the fact remains that a goodly number of the most prominent neoconservatives are not Jewish (Jeane Kirkpatrick, William J. Bennett, Michael Novak, James Q. Wilson, Richard John Neuhaus, and Peter Berger are a few who come immediately to mind). Nor, as the names of Henry Kissinger and William Safire prove, are all Jewish conservatives neo (that is, converts to conservatism from a formerly liberal or radical position).