President Bush returned to the White House early Saturday with the coalition against Iraq`s Saddam Hussein as precarious as when he started his trip 16,000 miles and six nations ago.
Even as the wheels of Air Force One touched down at Andrews Air Force Base, the president faced problems as vexing as those when he left on his journey to drum up support for his Persian Gulf policies.
On the home front, Bush in the coming days must figure out how to contend with a lawsuit by 45 House Democrats that would bar him from ordering military action in the gulf without congressional approval.
Internationally, he must grapple with the impact of a hostile Yemen taking over the influential rotating presidency of the United Nations Security Council, where the U.S. is trying to win approval for a resolution to use force to oust Iraqi troops from Kuwait.
Indeed, even before he arrived home, Bush seemed to understand the task ahead.
”I will simply go home and talk,” he told reporters on Friday, ”(and)
continue the consultations . . . to make clear that we must remain determined and we must keep all options open.”
To the weary president it may have seemed that no matter how hard he pedals, the course of his gulf policy grows steeper.
On Friday, for example, Bush met for three hours with Syrian President Hafez Assad, pressing him to commit his troops, at least in principle, to an attack in Kuwait if a UN-approved economic embargo doesn`t work.
Although Syria has sent 7,500 commandos and has committed an armored division of 15,000 men and 420 tanks, Assad made it clear they were for the defense of Saudi Arabia and he would not countenance an assault on an Arab nation.
After the meeting, there was no announcement that Syria would approve a resolution to use force in the gulf. The White House merely announced that the ”two presidents agreed that Iraq`s occupation of Kuwait is unacceptable, as are any partial solutions.”
Meanwhile, the meeting with Assad also opened Bush to denunciations from Israel for consorting with terrorists and charges at home that he is aligning himself with the man purportedly behind the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Scotland in 1988 and the attack on the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983. Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Arens angrily thrust aside the notion that the meeting didn`t imply approval of Assad`s brutalities. ”In the Middle East, the meeting is the message,” Arens said.
The ambiguity flowing from Syria isn`t the only problem facing the president.
Even as Bush was trying to pull Assad into the boat, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher resigned as head of the Conservative Party in Britain and threw her country into political turmoil. Although the president carefully stressed that he did not think this would shake British resolve in the gulf, it was clear that no other Tory leader was likely to be as fiercely aggressive as Thatcher.
Then Secretary of State James A. Baker III was rebuffed by Yemen, the only Arab nation on the 15-member UN Security Council, when he asked it to support a resolution to use force to remove Hussein from Kuwait. The council is expected to convene later this week.
President Ali Abdallah Saleh told a joint news conference with Baker in Yemen`s capital of Sanaa: ”Of course we don`t support the presence of foreign forces in the region. We believe the presence of foreign forces has complicated the problem.”
Sanaa was the scene of pro-Iraqi and anti-American demonstrations, some of them violent, in the first weeks after Iraq invaded Kuwait on Aug. 2.
Of all the president`s stops last week, the Thanksgiving visits to American troops in Saudi Arabia remain the most important for the
administration. It is in those sandy camps that the line between domestic policy and foreign policy crosses.
The president left Washington on Nov. 15 faced with increasing anxiety in Congress about his gulf policy, and last Thursday`s visit was a crucial symbolic act for an American audience.
The president had invited Congress` Democratic leadership, House Speaker Tom Foley of Washington and Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell of Maine, to meet him in Saudi Arabia. The Republican leadership, Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole of Kansas and House Minority Leader Bob Michel of Illinois came as well.
But as the day of photo opportunities and turkey dinners wore on, the lawmakers seemed an uncomfortable backdrop for a policy that at least the Democrats may come to attack.
It was clear Friday at a news conference with Egypt`s President Hosni Mubarak in Cairo that Bush still has Congress and domestic support very much on his mind.
”The way to have Congress on board is to continue to explain what our principles are . . . to demonstrate to the American people and to the people of the world that what President Mubarak has said is true: We all want a peaceful solution.”
When Bush arrived in Saudi Arabia last Wednesday the news media concentrated on whether the GIs he would actually meet had been especially picked so the president wouldn`t face questions about his intentions as Baker had been forced to do a few weeks before.
But in a way this really missed the point. Few military officers there think that the desert army`s morale is in a bad way. It is a disciplined force of volunteer soldiers eager in the main to carry forth in a professional way. Soldier after soldier stressed that they can do what they are ordered to do.
But the soldiers also were eager for the president to tell them just what is expected of them, and when. Bush seemed aware he had to make his marching orders clearer. He stressed, as their own officers have, that this could be a long and determined commitment, that patience as well as combat skills might be needed.
The president also chose to up the ante by adding Hussein`s plans for nuclear weapons to the list of reasons he believes his coalition must use to compel the Iraqi leader to step back. He said Hussein could have nuclear arms in as soon as two years.
Along with this the president again said the U.S. cannot accept aggression and the persecution of the Kuwaiti people, or leave the economic power of oil in Hussein`s hands. He seemed to add the nuclear danger only after national polls showed this struck a chord with Americans.
What stymies Bush is that no single point of justification for combat in the gulf seems to sway the national resolve, and his list of reasons, growing longer, is weakened by requiring much repeating.
The president strained Thursday for varied forms of tough rhetoric, at one point using the metaphor of letting a bully kick sand in your face, drawn from the Charles Atlas body-building ads used at least a generation before many of the soldiers were born.
