I remember that it was summer when Iraq invaded Kuwait. I was in the basement mid-morning, working on my model railroad, and I heard the news on public radio. I suggested to my stepfather that he might want to fill the tank because if there was a war in the middle east that must mean gas prices will go up.
Which they did. And George Bush was remarkably irritated about the whole instability thing, and we had a big deployment, and the UN, and this and that, and people wondering when the war would start, and what provocation would be used. I figured that by Thanksgiving we'd have started something, a la sinking of the Maine or Gulf of Tonkin, but the holidays came and went with lots of folks sitting out in the sand playing war games and placing bets.
There was a lot of debate as to whether we should bother with a little middle east pissing contest, and a prevailing anti-war sentiment was that all we really cared about was not some little sovereign principality, but that a certain balance of power be maintained so as to keep the oil flowing at a reasonable price. Opponents of the war talked about shedding blood for oil.
I thought it was a big foreign policy thing - George Bush, the ineffectual and uninspiring successor to Ronald Reagan, needed to impress us. I'm not sure if the recession had been going yet, but anyway, the man was lame, and it seemed like he'd found a good opportunity to impress on the world the idea that he did have some sort of talent, even if it was merely making war on a bad guy who had formerly been our ally.
I remember arguing with Kevin Kabumoto about the war a lot. He was a Republican, and thus pro-war. I was a liberal, my parents had been hippies, I thought George Bush sucked and was wasting our time, aiming to waste our lives. One day on the ride home from school we had a long argument about the war. More of a debate, really, because that was Kevin's thing. I remember him asking me if I would take a baby out of its incubator and throw it on the floor, because that is what Iraqi soldiers did in Kuwait, and I remember arguing that sanctions would work, and that even Saddam's people were turning against him, we shouldn't send people to die if we didn't have to. I remember also some of the folks on the train hearing our debate with varying amounts of amusement and sympathy. One lady looked pleased that two high school sophomores would have enough wits about them to argue things out so passionately.
I remember mom saying that if we ended up in a protracted war, and I turned draft age, and worse came to worse, that I was going to Canada. The scenario seemed pretty unlikely to me, but I argued that it is one thing to disagree with the government, but if our nation was sending me to war, I'd go, and we could work all the harder to stop the damn thing while I was still alive. It was a weird thing to think about, and the irony of it all is that I actually enlisted in the Army after I graduated.
And the months dragged on. At some point, after a night of great debate, Congress gave President Bush the authorization to go to war if necessary. My feeling was that if I had been there, I might give him the authority with the understanding that he should use it only if we had no other recourse.
One brisk January morning, around the time of another UN deadline, we got to school and little pieces of paper were being passed out. They said that we should walk out during division to oppose the war. (Division came between third and fourth period, and was a relaxing 15 minute window where the school took attendance, by division. You might call it "home room.") Well, the morning classes were kind of energetic - are you going to skip division? I remember that when the bell rang I checked out the mall on our campus ... very few people about. I headed up to my division room on the third floor. A crowd was starting to gather outside. After watching it grow, I headed downstairs with some mates. The feeling was a little anarchic.
I got down there, there were over 500 students with me. We were pretty much milling about, we must have chanted slogans. The time passed and people were edgily wondering what was going to happen next; division was winding down ... we go back to class, eh? Or is something special supposed to happen?
People started walking out on to Halsted, heading toward the zoo. A cop in a little parking enforcement go-kart tried to zoom around through the crowd to disperse the group. Someone hit it with a snowball, and we saw our first arrest. Things were getting exciting! We walked down Halsted toward the Lake, past Lincoln, to the Zoo. I and my long legs had migrated toward the front of the crowd. At Lincoln Park Zoo, we stepped to the on-ramp of Lake Shore Drive.
We walked down Lake Shore Drive. We had two lanes. Chicago's Finest escorted us on the third lane, and traffic flowed by on the fourth, inside lane. The cars who were riding South around us kept honking - it was either a convention for signaling your support for roadside protestors, or in our case it may have been a way to voice displeasure at having traffic blocked. We had a big banner, a couple signs, a police escort, and a few slogans to chant, the only one which I remember being "One two three four, we don't want your fucking war!" A couple miles later we got off Lake Shore Drive, down State Street, down Dearborn, to join the larger protest at the Daley Center. I remember talking to a reporter, and standing at the base of the Picasso, helping to hold up our banner, which was a white bed sheet with I don't remember what painted on it. It was like a fair, people were just running around feeling kind of energized and happy on a mild winter day. After a few hours, we hopped back on the El, some of us stopping by school on the way home.
The next day was 17 January. We came back to a normal school day, talked things over, settled concerns over attendance records and cut classes. It sounded like our crowd had gotten cut in half on Halsted - many of us had made it to LSD, many others had returned to a relaxed afternoon of classes, and the Science Fair was looming. I went home that afternoon to work on it. That evening though, it was hard to concentrate on the science fair because the air war had just started. We watched CNN, I listened to NPR. Mom got really upset when one reporter was standing outside in Saudi Arabia with the air raid sirens going off while soldiers in gas masks were hustling by telling him to get inside. The transmission suddenly went grey, and mom turned from uncomfortable with the reporter acting a fool to upset with people she had just been watching possibly being dead. It was unreal. My science fair project, whatever it was, sucked worse than it usually did. I'm a history buff.
I opposed the war before it started, and our walk out had perfect timing. Once the thing started though, I figured the debate over war was pretty much moot - let's end this thing quickly. Things went astoundingly well. After raining bombs on the Iraqis for about a month, we started pushing in with our tanks, and they started surrendering in droves. Iraqi dissident groups helped us push the Army back, things were going well. To see what happened next, I think the movie Three Kings provides some great context - George Bush ostensibly saw pictures of the "highway of death" leading to Baghdad - we were crushing Iraqi civilians too hard, and we didn't want to destroy the country and leave a power vacuum in the middle east, so we signed a cease fire with Saddam Hussein.
Now, my history teacher was big on World War II - her main thesis was that World War II happened in large part because World War I was pretty much left unsettled. If you're going to bother with a war, you bother with absolute victory. We landed our men on the shores of France, and took one Pacific island after another, dropping nuclear weapons on Japan, and went in a rebuilt those countries from the ground up in to the peaceful economic powerhouses that they are today. In Iraq, we signed an armistice, the country is in ruins, and Saddam Hussein still thumbs his nose at us. The Kurds and the Shiites are more fucked than when they joined our cause, and gas still costs nearly $2 a gallon.
And President Bush? He "won" the Gulf War and rested on his laurels. Bill Clinton came along and said "it's the economy, stupid" and has since served as the Democrat's version of Ronald Reagan. I've tended to figure that George Bush might be a swell grandpa, but he sure was an inept president.