12. THE WORLD'S SOLE SUPERPOWER

THE ONE-TERM PRESIDENCY OF GEORGE H.W. BUSH (1989-1993)

The Lockerbie bombing (December 1988).  Perhaps as the result of an effort by Libyan dictator Gaddafi to see what the newly elected American President was made of (would he be tough like Reagan?) ... at the end of 1988 a Pan Am passenger jet (Flight 103) exploded in the sky over Lockerbie, Scotland – with everyone on board and 11 people on the ground killed.  Under the subsequent investigation of the explosion, the trail led back to Libya.  But nothing was done immediately to punish Gaddafi.

However long-standing (and already struggling because of earlier security concerns) Pan Am was sued for failing to take security precautions (but Pan Am reminded its opponents that it received hundreds of notices daily about security concerns and had no way to check out each and every one of them), bringing one of America's oldest and largest global airline companies to bankruptcy and extinction.

The breakup of the Soviet Empire in East Europe (1989).  Although President Bush had little to do with what was about to break out in the Soviet Empire, events there would form a huge part of America's political focus during the Bush years (January 1989 to January 1993).

Gorbachev's reforms – not surprisingly to those who understand these things – set off another "revolution of rising expectations," which once underway would get way out of Gorbachev's ability to control.  The well-announced new freedoms of glasnost and perestroika were also received in the European satellite countries as some kind of permission to move to the same freedoms in their own countries – first in Poland, then East Germany and Czechoslovakia, etc. – and finally the very repressive Romania.  1989 would be the banner year for this event.  Poland had actually been heading down this road since 1980 under what started out as a labor organization: Solidarność (Solidarity).  It had been suppressed by the Polish military (fearful that it would invite another Soviet invasion) but had survived nonetheless.  And now in the new Gorbachev era, it was an active participant in Poland's 1989 summer elections – in which Solidarity trounced the Polish Communist Party.  Gorbachev made no move to dismiss the election results.

Now began a mad dash of other East European countries to attempt the same kind of national elections – with virtually the same results:  the Communists were swept from power and replaced by new national parties.  The most dramatic was the event taking place in East Germany – when East Germans began to flood into newly free Czechoslovakia and Hungary ...embarrassing the East German Communist leader Honecker sufficiently so that he stepped down from power.  At this point, the East German government simply disintegrated.  In November East Germans found themselves free to leave the country – and by Christmas German youths had taken to smashing down (or trying anyway, because it was quite sturdy!) the Berlin Wall.

Only in Romania was the new order met by violence, when Romanian dictator Ceaucescu had his troops attack protesters – until the soldiers actually joined the protesters.  In late December he and his wife were arrested and rather immediately executed by a firing squad.  The last of the Soviet satellite nations had made their escape from the Soviet Empire.

The Disintegration of the Soviet Union itself (1989-1991).   But the momentum did not stop with East Europe.  At the same time, minority Soviet Republics (from Estonia, Latvia, etc., on the Baltic Sea, South to Moldova and Ukraine, and East across Asia to the Turkish "stans" of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, etc.) were demanding independence from the Soviet Union itself.  Even the Russian Federation (headed up by the Moscow Mayor Boris Yeltsin) was calling for independence from the Soviet Union.  Gorbachev was quickly losing control of political events over the country that he theoretically still presided over.

So angry were the old Communist hardliners in Gorbachev's own cabinet over his reforms that in August of 1991 they attempted a coup against Gorbachev, which did not go very well – when Yeltsin led angry Russian protesters to virtually imprison the plotters inside the Parliament Building.  Thus the coup failed.  But in the end, it also undercut Gorbachev's authority so badly that Russia's political leadership seemed simply to have passed on to Yeltsin.  And by the end of 1991, the Soviet Union was no more when all of the former Soviet Republics (including even Russia) had declared their national independence.

Tragedy at Tiananmen Square.  Chinese youth were watching closely developments in the Soviet Union ... and decided that they wanted to go down the same road to full political freedom.  In April of 1989 thousands, then tens of thousands, of youth gathered in Beijing's Tiananmen Square to demonstrate support for full release from the Chinese government's political restraints on Chinese society.

At first the Chinese government did nothing, while a bitter debate developed between the hardliners and the appeasers.  Finally Deng, seeing social disintegration as the possible result of appeasement, moved toward the side of the hardliners, and the decision was made at the beginning of June to forcibly clear the square of its (possibly a million by this time) youth gathered there.

Thus on the night of June 3-4 the Chinese military was ordered to clear the square, by whatever means necessary.  Guns and even tanks were brought into use, resulting in the clearing of the square – but also the death of countless youth in the process.  And thus the political movement such as it was (not always clear what exactly it hoped to achieve) came to an end in China.

Bush, in company with the rest of Western leaders, was outraged at the Chinese government's actions.  But Bush soon backed off, trying to keep a positive attitude toward Deng's China and its efforts to Westernize, without disintegrating socially like Russia in the process.

The Gulf War or "Desert Storm" (1990-1991).   In the meantime, a very big problem had developed in the Middle East when Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had his Iraqi army invade and occupy the tiny (but oil rich) neighbor, Kuwait.  The whole thing ended up as a huge political miscalculation by Saddam – one that threatened to start up another Arab oil crisis.  But Bush was determined to prevent that from happening.

Saddam had been long involved in an Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988) which started up when Saddam attempted to grab ethnically Arab lands located just across the Iraqi border in ethnically Persian Iran (Persian Iran is not Arab in language or culture – though certainly Muslim, although of the dissenting Shi'ite variety, as are most of the Arabs in that part of the Muslim world).  But this merely bogged the two countries down in a campaign of vast mutual destruction ...until in 1988 when the United Nations was able to work out a truce between the two countries.  At the end of this war Iraq found itself hugely in debt due to the fact that its oil industry had been mostly shut down during that long war.

Then tensions had grown between Iraq and Kuwait, when Iraq accused Kuwait of not only overproducing oil sales (thus keeping prices very low) but also slant-drilling below ground – right into Iraqi oil fields near their border.  There was also Iraqi resentment over the very existence of Kuwait in the first place – carved out of former Mesopotamia (Iraq) after World War One – simply to give the British oil company, British Petroleum, an oil source it could continue to control.  Also Saddam had the usual Arab desire to play the part of grand leader of the larger Arab world.

On top of this, Saddam thought he had the go-ahead from America via the American Ambassador who seemed to offer only an indifferent response when Saddam told her of his plans to grab Kuwait.  Besides, Iraq was something of an American ally – being the third-largest recipient of American foreign aid (especially during the Iran-Iraq War).

Thus when Saddam invaded Kuwait in August of 1990, he was stunned to find himself in trouble with Bush, who demanded that he get his troops out of Kuwait.  But at that point Saddam felt he could not do that – for such a retreat would deeply undermine his ever-shaky position as Iraqi dictator.

This was importantly due to the fact that he was a Sunni Arab, supported by the smaller Sunni Arab portion of the Iraqi population, holding tight control over the majority Shi'ite Arab portion of the population, the latter group resenting deeply Saddam and his Sunni Ba'athist Party's dominance in Iraqi political affairs.  Thus it was that his position in Iraq was very fragile.

Negotiations between Saddam and Bush dragged on ... going nowhere in the process.  But in the meantime, Bush was putting together a grand coalition of European and Arab countries (other Arab countries were also afraid of Saddam's ambitions), including Saudi Arabia, which let America use its land as a base to build up a large coalition force there.  By mid-January the coalition army was ready to move.

The Iraqi Army and Air Force proved to be no match to the coalition forces which quickly downed and blasted everything Saddam could muster.   In the matter of simply a few days, the Iraqi Army was chased from Kuwait.

Of course at the first gun shots, the "anti-imperialist" voices of the American Left waxed indignant – but soon were silenced by the stunning success of Bush and his coalition forces.

Then Bush halted his attack on the retreating Iraqis.  He had no interest in going any further after Saddam.  He had kicked him out of Kuwait.  That was as far as he was going to go.  Furthermore, he had no desire whatsoever to find himself having to take responsibility for a shattered country of conflicting ethnic groups (60% Shi'ite Arabs, 20% Sunni Arabs, and 20% Sunni Kurds) groups that hated each other and were held together as a society only by the tight grip of the Ba'athist organization that Saddam headed up in Baghdad.  No, America was not going to get itself caught up in nation-building.  Vietnam had taught President Bush the dangers of such arrogance.  America would not be fixing Iraq.  To try to do so would be for America to fall into a "quagmire," as Bush's Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney would later (1994) explain the decision.