The Presidency

By Hugh Sidey

It was only a wisp of information that slipped through the rings of security that girdle the secret enclaves of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But once loose, it ravaged the beltway's old establishment.

It was that a war to oust Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, to invade, contain and ultimately neutralize Iraq as a military threat, would take 1 million American troops. To anyone familiar with the war planners' imperative to be ready for any contingency, the figure is not startling. The White House has been told of the Pentagon's estimates; the figures reflect the fear generated by the U.S. failure in Vietnam that without massive battlefield superiority at specified points, the U.S. could easily get bogged down in the Persian Gulf.

What that whispered piece of information showed was that the U.S. has no other plans for extricating itself from the shifting sands of a determined and enduring Iraqi aggression. The brutish truths of a million-man conflict are stunning, beyond anything this nation has contemplated doing to free Kuwait and probably beyond anything it would support. There is an alternative, of course: a war ill-conceived and hastily launched, which could be lost because of a lack of preparation, with all the humiliation and internal devastation that would come from such a defeat.

George Bush is right -- at least in part -- to be angry at critics who suggest he is skirting the brink of war to pump up his political standing and divert attention from the nation's economic angst. The real danger is far more subtle and menacing. It lies in the environment of the presidency itself. In the splendid isolation of the White House, the best and the brightest in crisp uniforms and Brooks Brothers pinstripes can, with purpose and convincing logic, expound the virtues of force to fill the voids of doubt that come with such crises. That happened to Lyndon Johnson in Vietnam. It made so much sense to him.

No wonder the aging cold warriors around Washington were dismayed last week. "At the start of this, we said we were not going to gradually escalate our presence the way we did in Vietnam," said former Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger. "Now, 90 days later, we are asking ourselves whether we should add another 100,000 to our forces in Saudi Arabia. The circumstances of military logistics force on you the very escalation you renounce." When that possibility seeped out of the Pentagon, L.B.J.'s pledge against "mindless escalation" came back to haunt the broad avenues of the capital. "Let's make sure that there really is a light at the end of any tunnel before we get into it," said another of Johnson's confidants from that era.

The Iraqi crisis came too suddenly for the U.S. to do anything but ride to the defense of the oilfields. But once poised for battle, armies make war so easy to start -- and sometimes so gratifying, as in Panama.

Neither Bush nor any of his governing brotherhood -- Baker, Cheney, Powell, Scowcroft, Sununu -- were at the Tuesday luncheons in the 1960s when a swaggering Johnson thumped a map with his forefinger and unleashed massive American power -- only to fail. Many of the current members of Congress were in grade school when the Vietnam commitment climbed to 540,000 troops. Some of the television reporters now graphically describing the Iraqi commitment on the nightly news were not even born back then. This is a time to let history speak and then to listen to its warnings.