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                                                                                DIPLOMACY, Page 57

The Lessons of Iraq


Though Bush never invited Saddam to take a chunk of Kuwait,
he badly miscalculated by misreading the dictator's goals and
by trying to be nice to a bully.

By J.F.O. MCALLISTER/WASHINGTON -- With reporting by Dean
Fischer/Cairo, William Mader/London and Elaine Shannon/Washington


    "Hey, George Bush, Saddam Hussein still has a job. Do
you?"

    -- Campaign bumper sticker


    Thus has the tremendous political momentum bestowed on
George Bush by Desert Storm dissipated like so many grains of
sand. Few Bush opponents would have anticipated that he might
be vulnerable on his handling of Iraq in the aftermath of Desert
Storm, when 91% of the U.S. public applauded his leadership. But
now the issue appeals to Clinton and Perot as they look for ways
to undermine the one area where Bush's reputation remained
strong. In the final debate, Perot lobbed a bombshell -- with
no supporting evidence -- claiming Bush had given Saddam a
secret green light to seize the northern part of Kuwait. Al Gore
charges that Bush's inept policy before the invasion "not only
struck the match" that ignited the war but also "poured gasoline
on the flames."

    Stripped of politics, how fair is all that? Did Bush
really bungle Iraq, or did he make a decent job of an inherently
tortuous situation? Desert Shield and Desert Storm -- the
diplomacy of building an anti-Saddam coalition and then routing
the Iraqi dictator on the battlefield -- are an acknowledged
triumph. The smart bombs of hindsight are aimed instead at
prewar diplomacy, where Bush is accused of coddling Saddam
despite mounting evidence of his aggressive intentions.

    Prudence or Pandering? It is clear that Saddam expected to
get away with seizing Kuwait and that Washington was startled
by his decision to embark on this wild course. Both
miscalculations were serious failures of U.S. policy: it was a
tactical error not to lay down Day-Glo markers around Kuwait and
a strategic one to misread Saddam's expansionist goals.

    While the Administration's pro-Iraq tilt in 1989 and 1990
failed spectacularly in the end -- Bush himself admits it "was
not successful" -- it had logic at the time. The original
impetus was fear of the Aya tullah Khomeini's Iran. Even though
Sad dam had provoked the Iran-Iraq war in 1980, Washington
began helping Iraq to stave off an Iranian victory. The Reagan
Administration removed Baghdad from its list of terrorist
countries, exchanged ambassadors, overlooked purchases of
weapons from U.S. allies and secretly handed over intelligence
about Iran's capabilities and intentions.

    When the war ended in 1988, Iraq was the strongest power
in the Persian Gulf. Some State Department officials thought
tilting back from Baghdad would be prudent. There was ample
evidence of brutality by Saddam, including use of poison gas
against Iranians during the war and on his own people in the
Kurdish city of Halabja, where at least 5,000 civilians were
killed. Iraq was also considered a regional bully.

    But Bush reaffirmed the pro-Baghdad approach, signing a
directive in October 1989 calling for closer ties to Saddam and
the continued supply of guaranteed credits to buy U.S. grain
($500 million worth were extended the next month) and
technology. His rationale: Iraq had the region's largest army,
second largest oil reserves, ties to Moscow that would be nice
to weaken and big ambitions to be a local power. The U.S. wanted
some influence -- and some export sales.

    Saddam's behavior only got worse. In late 1989 and early
1990, U.S. officials saw signs that he was harboring Palestinian
terrorists and building a "super gun" and nuclear bombs. Saddam
called for the U.S. to vacate the gulf and threatened "to burn
half of Israel" with chemical weapons if attacked.

    The U.S. responded by publicly calling Iraq's human rights
practices "abysmal." Some officials wanted to do more and
proposed putting Iraq back on the terrorist list. Officials
prepared to tighten export controls and canceled another $500
million in commodity export credits because the Iraqi program
was tainted by fraud. But Baghdad was still repaying its loans,
and senior officials figured any harsh sanctions would only
intensify Saddam's paranoia about U.S. intentions. Just days
before the invasion, Bush continued to oppose restrictions
proposed by Congress.

    A Cover-Up? Bush critics dub the most controversial parts
of prewar Iraq policy "Iraqgate": claims, still unproved, that
the Administration has tried to hide the full extent of its tilt
toward Iraq by interfering with the prosecution of the Atlanta
branch of Italy's Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, which extended
more than $4 billion in illegal loans that helped finance
Baghdad's purchase of equipment with potential military
applications. Officials at the Departments of State, Commerce,
Defense and Energy who monitored "dual use" sales, which
amounted to $500 million between 1985 and 1990, knew they were
helping Saddam's military buildup but grew uneasy at signs that
some U.S. devices were making their way into Saddam's nuclear
and missile programs. Bush's policy of favoring Iraq persuaded
them to resolve some cases in Baghdad's favor.

    To all this, Bush aides say: the policy didn't work, but
we were right to try it. Says a senior Bush adviser: "We asked
ourselves not whether Saddam was a wonderful human being but
whether by sticks and carrots we could encourage him to take a
more moderate course." The pro-Baghdad stance, the aides
insist, "was a very limited exploration" strongly advocated by
other Arab states and U.S. allies.

    Administration officials say there was little they would
have done differently. The U.S. was giving Iraq agricultural
export credits that helped American farmers. Saddam's Arab
neighbors and many European countries were advising Washington
to be nice to Iraq and would have resisted, out of fear or Arab
solidarity, any drive toward containment. The U.S. did not sell
arms directly to Iraq. The dual-use equipment sold by the U.S.
was not cutting-edge technology but rather more generic items
and processes that could have been bought in 10 other countries.

    Responding to Perot's broadside in the debate, Bush
declared that "there hasn't been one single scintilla of
evidence that there's any U.S. technology involved" in Saddam's
nuclear program. In fact, as Bush later admitted, U.N.
inspectors found advanced American products in Iraqi
nuclear-weapons labs, purchased with proper export licenses.
"Our own records show U.S. computers went to virtually every
known nuclear and ballistic missile site," says Gary Milhollin,
director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control in
Washington. But it is also true that much more dual-use
equipment -- and military weapons -- came from France, Germany,
the Soviet Union and other countries.

    Any kind of "constructive engagement" policy with a man
like Saddam had to assume his behavior could be affected by
U.S. sticks and carrots. It is understandable that Bush would
want to bring Iraq into the community of nations, but some
government experts now think Saddam never had any interest in
Washington's blandishments. U.S. policy was based on the belief
that he wanted to reconstruct his country after the exhausting
war with Iran and would need access to the West to do so.
Instead Saddam resumed an interrupted march toward domination
of the Arab world and figured raiding the Kuwaiti piggy bank
would be a surer path to riches than borrowing from the West.

    So exactly what the U.S. signaled to him just before the
invasion -- the question raised by Perot -- may have been
irrelevant. As it was, the U.S. watched the buildup of Iraqi
troops on the Kuwaiti border without any strong reaction. When
U.S. Ambassador April Glaspie was abruptly summoned to a meeting
with Saddam in late July as he threatened war, she told him that
the U.S. "took no position" on the substance of his border
dispute with Kuwait but also "that we can never excuse
settlement of disputes by other than peaceful means." The same
cautious message was conveyed to Saddam in a letter from the
President and in public statements. Officials maintain the
signal was meant to stop any aggression, but by then Saddam
needed a stick with the heft of a two-by-four: a direct warning
of U.S. military intervention. Even so bald a threat might not
have deterred him, but it was never issued. American, European
and Arab leaders just did not believe he would invade and had
not begun to contemplate what they would do in response.

    Bush's basic error was to leave his prewar Iraq policy on
autopilot. The Administration had a big investment in its belief
that Saddam -- whom Bush called "worse than Hitler" after the
invasion -- could be cajoled into better behavior. So the U.S.
pulled its diplomatic punches in a way that not only seems like
appeasement in retrospect but also struck some as such at the
time. If the U.S. had few tools to influence Saddam's prewar
behavior, as Bush aides now acknowledge, then perhaps little
would have been lost had they just written Iraq off, but Bush
did not even debate the question.

    It will be a strange irony if the sociopath Saddam
outlasts Bush, who attempted to sketch the outlines of a new
world order in defeating him. That new world will present future
Presidents with more dilemmas like prewar Iraq -- Syria and
China are current examples -- where the moral costs of engaging
with a thuggish regime must be weighed against the practical
chances of coaxing it into the concert of nations -- and making
a buck in the meantime. Bush's Iraq policy is not a perfect
model for future action, but neither is it a perfect example of
what to avoid.