Consequences: White Flags In the Desert

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Suddenly, there he was, the only major participant in this most televised war in history who had remained off-camera. For weeks, the world had watched the nightly pyrotechnics over Baghdad, the battered allied pilots on Iraqi TV, Patriots rising to meet Scuds, the nose-camera view of smart bombs at work, the artificial twilight above the burning oil fields, top guns catapulting into the mist, even Saddam Hussein presiding over his Revolutionary Command Council. Only the frontline Iraqi soldier had stayed out of sight.

But he was never out of mind. The briefers in Riyadh referred to him constantly in the anonymous yet curiously familiar third-person singular: "He's dug in along the border . . . He's taking quite a beating . . . If he heads north, we'll cut him off." As long as he was invisible, he was easy to imagine as one of half a million clones of Saddam himself, smug, defiant and murderous.

So it came as something of a shock when he scrambled out of his hole in the ground. He was thin, pitiable, and quivering with the fear that his captors were going to shoot him on the spot. He knew what execution squads attached to his unit were doing to others who tried to give up. Why should he expect better from the enemy? When he realized he was going to be fed and cared for, he fell to his knees and kissed the hands of a U.S. Marine.

They surrendered all along what was supposed to be the mighty "Saddam line," in squads, then platoons. Many waved tattered pieces of white cloth. Some held aloft the Koran.

These were the most telling images of the entire war. For one thing, they put faces to the staggering estimates of many tens of thousands of Iraqi casualties, making them less of a box-score abstraction.

At the same time, the gratitude with which many Iraqis turned themselves in hammered home the justification for this war, terrible as it was. They were not just relieved to be alive or trying to please their new masters. Several groups of prisoners even began chanting the name of George Bush. It was as though they sensed that their defeat was a necessary step toward the liberation not only of Kuwait but of Iraq as well.

Certainly that is how Bush has come to see this war. Time and again, he made clear that for him, the rationale was not merely geopolitical; there was more at stake than Persian Gulf oil or, as James Baker once put it, American jobs. The President's critics, from Mikhail Gorbachev to protesters on the home front, were right when they accused him of having an objective that went beyond the United Nations mandate of expelling Iraqi forces from Kuwait. For its Commander in Chief, Desert Storm became a moral crusade, targeted against a leader whose very regime was an abomination. "Saddam tried to cast this conflict as a religious war," said Bush in a speech in January, "but it has nothing to do with religion per se. It has, on the other hand, everything to do with what religion embodies: good vs. evil, right vs. wrong."

Even after he had inflicted on Iraq the mother of all defeats, Bush left no doubt, as he said Friday, that in his own mind, there would be no "definitive end" to the war so long as Saddam was "still there." For the next phase of the campaign, Bush needed only to revert to the advice that the doves were offering him before he ordered the bombers into action on Jan. 16: Give sanctions a chance.