Sand trap; U.S. diplomacy did work: it got us into war.

• Author: Bennet, James
• Position: Persian Gulf War

James Bennet is an editor of the Washington Monthly. Research assistance was provided by Elliott Beard and Deborah Yavelak Sieff.

Historians will no doubt debate for decades the what ifs of the fierce war of signals leading up to January 16, and then again to February 23: What if George Bush and Saddam Hussein hadn't publicly demonized each other from the beginning of the crisis? What if the coalition had given the Soviet peace initiative some time to develop? Perhaps Saddam is such a maniac that he would never have complied peacefully with the United Nations resolutions. One thing is certain: Although we can make some educated guesses, we'll never really know the answers, because the Bush administration never tried to find them out.

Then again, why should anyone care? After the breathtaking success of the American armed forces, trying to examine the missed opportunities to resolve the crisis bloodlessly seems not only futile but slightly nuts, like trying to Monday-morning-quarterback a game of hockey. But Saddam Hussein isn't the only ruler in the world who tortures his people and covets his neighbor; even some of our coalition allies fit that description. And he's certainly not the only one who collects unconventional weapons. It would be inhumane and ultimately self-defeating to try to maintain the new world order by spending billions of dollars, risking hundreds of thousands of troops, and killing tens of thousands of people to rein in every threatening dictator who comes along. To have alternatives to military action available down the road, it would seem useful to try to extract some lessons from the what ifs of the brief, undiplomatic diplomatic history of the Gulf crisis. Contrary to so much that has been written on the crisis, the Gulf war was not "inevitable." The Bush administration merely made it look that way by foreclosing other options besides using force to execute the UN resolutions.

There is a strong prima facie case that both our multilateral diplomacy with our allies and our bilateral diplomacy with Iraq, rather than serving to develop alternatives to war, were merely arms of our military strategy. The contrast between the two tracks of diplomacy alone supports this point: The same administration that skillfully built and manipulated a coalition of antagonistic nations repeatedly bungled its efforts to peacefully reverse the Iraqi invasion. The best example of a missed or ignored opening was the hostage release, which somehow became a minor footnote in the crisis. To uncover some roots of that case, it's helpful to first reexamine the infamous kickoff of the conflict.

Hussein asylum

As we go to press, former U.S. ambassador to Iraq April Glaspie has just offered the first glimpse of the administration's long-awaited version of the prehistory of the crisis. According to her, the gentle message ("We have many Americans who would like to see the price [of oil] go above $25 because they come from oil-producing states") revealed by the transcript had a tougher twin: Glaspie says she told Saddam several times that we would not countenance violence, or in fact threat or intimidation."

That's a strong message, but did Glaspie actually deliver it? On a common-sense level, it doesn't add up that James Baker and his aides have repeatedly distanced themselves from Glaspie, rather than dismissively asserting right away, as she does at last, that there were "many inaccuracies in the so-called transcript." More important, Glaspie's own testimony undercuts the notion that she protested so much: She says there was no difference between what she told Saddam...