Karen Elliott House

About the Author: Karen Elliott House is vice president, international, of Dow Jones & Company, the publisher of the Wall Street Journal, from which this viewpoint is taken. The article was written one week after Iraq invaded Kuwait.

The world changed last week. A grandiose Middle East dictator took control—not just of a neighboring sheikdom, but of the West's economic destiny in the 1990s.

Saddam Hussein, an insular leader who has had almost no contact with the Western world, nonetheless appears to have read the West's aversion to military involvement with unerring accuracy. Indeed, President Bush took four days even to suggest forcing the eviction of Iraqi invaders from Kuwait—and to dispatch his secretary of defense to Saudi Arabia to seek "permission" to protect that country. The...