Word: shielding
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What is happening in the gulf is not collective security but a coincidence of interests. And it is hardly collective. Without the U.S. leading, prodding, bribing and blackmailing, no one would have stirred. Nothing would have been done: no embargo, no Desert Shield. The world would have written off Kuwait the way the last body pledged to collective security, the League of Nations, wrote off Abyssinia...
...Iranian leadership's unease over the U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia is not assuaged by the heritage of Operation Desert Shield's commander, General H. Norman Schwarzkopf. The general's father, also named H. Norman, won fame for investigating the Lindbergh baby kidnapping, but some Iranians remember him for another accomplishment: the elder Schwarzkopf, with bags of cash and the blessings of CIA Director Allen Dulles, helped organize the 1953 coup against Prime Minister Mossadegh that led to the ascendancy of the Shah...
Even President Bush allowed that Israeli forces "need to act with greater restraint." At the U.N. Security Council, the U.S., which frequently uses its veto there to shield Israel from criticism, found itself in the odd position of sponsoring a resolution castigating its ally for using excessive force to quell the Palestinians, who were throwing rocks at Jewish worshipers gathered at Judaism's sacred Western Wall...
...does not help Washington's cause that Desert Shield aims to secure and restore monarchies that many Arabs consider anachronistic. Even in the gulf states, where the vast majority of citizens are grateful for protection from Saddam's hordes, there is some bitterness on this point. "What does the West think?" asks a retired Omani municipal worker living in Bahrain. "That we want to be servants to these corrupt ruling families forever...
...with Operation Desert Shield, our leaders are reduced to begging foreign powers for the means to support our warrior class. It does not seem to occur to us that the other great northern powers -- Japan, Germany, the Soviet Union -- might not have found the stakes so high or the crisis quite so threatening. It has not penetrated our imagination that in a world where the powerful, industrialized nation-states are at last at peace, there might be other ways to face down a pint-size Third World warrior state than with massive force of arms. Nor have we begun...