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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
During the last Gulf War, 32 nations sent troops. This time around, 3 nations did. So how is Donald Rumsfeld claiming Operation Iraqi Freedom is larger than the '91 coalition?
Mar 21, 2003 | President Bush's critics are constantly slamming his "unilateral war against Iraq," as former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, a Democratic presidential candidate, constantly puts it. So it must have been a shock to hear the president say Wednesday night that "more than 35 countries are giving crucial support -- from the use of naval and air bases, to help with intelligence and logistics, to the deployment of combat units." The White House calls this group the "Coalition of the Willing," and on Thursday its numbers increased to 43.
Some critics have questioned how much of a true coalition this is, given that only three countries -- the U.S., U.K. and Australia -- have actually sent soldiers. Asked about this apparent weakness in the "coalition," White House press secretary Ari Fleischer on Tuesday said that the White House has "all along said, in terms of actual active combat, there will be very, very few countries."
Since that admission, the White House has gone on an offensive to prove how multilateral this coalition is. It's No. 1 in the administration's talking points. But they may have gone too far. On Thursday, when Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told reporters that the coalition behind Operation Iraqi Freedom is even bigger than the one behind Operation Desert Storm, even some military leaders and veterans of Republican administrations disagreed and were dismayed at the disingenuousness. Meanwhile, some countries the U.S. counts as among the "willing" are continuing to criticize the U.S. military moves against Iraq, raising questions about how willing they really are.
Operation Inflate the Coalition began on Tuesday, when Secretary of State Colin Powell said that the Coalition of the Willing "includes some 30 nations who have publicly said they could be included in such a listing" as well as "15 other nations, who, for one reason or another do not wish to be publicly named but will be supporting the coalition."
The 30 original countries in the Coalition of the Willing, as listed on the State Department Web site, include Afghanistan, Albania, Australia, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Colombia, Czech Republic, Denmark, El Salvador, Eritrea, Estonia, Ethiopia, Georgia, Hungary, Italy, Japan (post conflict), Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Netherlands, Nicaragua, Philippines, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, South Korea, Spain, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and Uzbekistan.
On Thursday Rumsfeld escalated the rhetoric. The defense secretary said that the Operation Iraq Freedom coalition is "large and growing" and "not unilateral action as is being characterized in the media."
"Indeed, the coalition in this activity is larger than the coalition that existed during the Gulf War in 1991," Rumsfeld said.
Many countries have committed combat and combat support forces, Rumsfeld said, while others are contributing other things -- "access, basing, refueling, force protection, intelligence sharing, and the use of airspace. Still others have pledged to participate in stability operations and post-Saddam reconstruction efforts."
Throughout the Pentagon, eyes no doubt rolled.
"I think it's a little disingenuous to compare the number of countries willing to send soldiers into battle in 1991 with the number of countries who are willing to put their names on a list in 2003," a retired senior military officer who served in Operation Desert Storm told Salon, declining to be named. Some 32 countries provided troops in 1991, compared with three this time around.
On Thursday, Fleischer, as is his wont, offered some intriguingly applied numbers to back the argument that the multilateralism of Operation Iraqi Freedom is much like the multilateralism of the previous Gulf War.
Recalling nothing so much as his Florida recount-era claim that "Palm Beach County is a Pat Buchanan stronghold," a claim that Buchanan and all his campaign staffers laughed at, Fleischer engaged in a some crafty comparative mathematics. The percentage of the total military force that the U.S. provided in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, where the international coalition was much heralded, was in the mid-70s. "This a little higher but not much higher," Fleischer said. "It's comparable: in the mid-80s. The numbers are not all that far off from where they were before."
That claim was met with some skepticism. "I find that hard to believe," Lawrence J. Korb -- a former assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration and now director of national security studies for the Council on Foreign Relations -- told Salon. "In terms of combat capability it's not even close."
In the 1991 Gulf War, Korb says, "take a look at what the Middle East countries provided not only in terms of troops but planes and fighter aircraft." Countries in the region "provided 295,000 troops the last time."
Of course, the buildup to the first Gulf War was very different. In November 1990, the U.S. won its war resolution against Iraq by a U.N. Security Council vote of 12-to-2, with China abstaining. Iraq was given a six-week deadline, which it failed to meet, after which the world united and ousted Iraq from Kuwait. In "A World Transformed," the former President Bush attributed this all to "a lot of very effective diplomacy by the whole team -- particularly [former Secretary of State James] Baker and Tom Pickering," the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
In an interview with NPR, Pickering recently said that the current coalition was so small because the current Bush team "began the effort saying we really didn't need anybody else's help, and I think that that became the self-fulfilling prophecy, almost as if we didn't want anybody else's help, and that's certainly where we have ended up.
"They played the unilateral card too hot, too heavy, too fast and too early," Pickering said, "and then shifted to having a multilateral strategy." Even after that, he said, the current Bush administration "continued to do a unilateral shtick on the issue at every occasion that it found possible to do so."
