IRON LADY VS. WOBBLY MAN:

Tea with Mrs. Thatcher (YEHUDA AVNER, Jan. 26, 2004, Jerusalem Post)

THE FIRST Gulf War had just about ended, and between sips of tea and cucumber sandwiches Thatcher resorted to salvos of reminiscences about how she had first heard of Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait the August before.

"I was still prime minister last summer, of course," she recalled wistfully, "and was attending a conference in Aspen, Colorado, with president Bush. When I heard about the invasion of Kuwait I went to see him in his suite. He asked me, 'Now, Margaret, what's your view?' I told him I had experienced aggression in the Falklands, so I had no doubt how to deal with an aggressor.

"Aggressors had to be stopped, thrown out, destroyed. And when he began to chew this over, I said, 'Look George, this is no time to be wobbly. No half-measures. Liberate Kuwait. Go into Iraq. Destroy Saddam Hussein and his National Guard utterly. Britain will be by your side.'"

Her voice suddenly acquired a serrated edge: "George Bush promised me two things," she said grimly. "He promised to destroy the Iraqi forces, and he promised to capture Saddam Hussein and have him tried as a war criminal. Well, as far as I am concerned, what happened in fact "

She was interrupted in mid-sentence by the little servant's cough of her maid, who had obsequiously entered the room to hand her a note. Thatcher shot her a sharp glance, read the note with ferocious concentration and, rising, said, "You'll have to excuse me a moment. I have to take a call in the study."

She strode to the door, opened it, paused, turned, and glowered back, "So yes, what happened in fact is that George Bush failed on both counts. He neither destroyed the National Guard, nor did he capture Saddam Hussein."

She said this with an emphatic lifting of the head and a lowering of the eyelids for added veracity. Then, with a cold, hard stare, she walked back into the room, laid a confiding finger on my arm, and said, "I've telephoned Number 10 only once since leaving, and that's when I saw what savagery Saddam Hussein was inflicting on the Kurds and the Shi'ites.

"I simply could not hold my tongue. They were doing exactly what George Bush had asked them to do – rise up against Saddam Hussein – and then he left them hanging in the lurch."

It's hard to think of a stronger indictment of multilateralism than that it required that Saddam be left in power in 1991.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 27, 2004 11:44 AM