TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/101590/1015015.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 8.6 KB | 186 lines

                                                                                THE GULF, Page 50

The Waiting Game


To hold together the coalition against Saddam, George Bush and
his many allies are discovering that they must bend a little
here and there

By GEORGE J. CHURCH -- Reported by Dan Goodgame/Washington and
Frederick Ungeheuer/Paris


    "When you assemble a number of men, to have the advantage
of their joint wisdom, you inevitably assemble with those men
all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion,
their local interests and their selfish views. From such an
assembly, can a perfect production be expected?"

    -- Benjamin Franklin, addressing the American Constitutional
Convention


    The old sage's question could apply equally well to the
global coalition that the U.S. has put together to oppose
Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. And the answer is the same:
perfection cannot be expected, but its absence is an acceptable
price to pay for the strength that comes from the support of
a wildly diverse alliance.

    Nonetheless the price is high. American and allied officials
sometimes seem to spend more energy soothing one another than
plotting strategy against Saddam Hussein. "There is no end to
this coalition politics," sighs an American policymaker. "It's
like a marriage; you have to constantly work at it." As in a
marriage, too, unity can sometimes be preserved only by
tortured compromises that may be storing up danger for the
future.

    Standout illustration: George Bush's speech to the United
Nations General Assembly last week. The President tried to send
contrasting messages to two groups of allies. To relative
soft-liners (France, the Soviet Union, several Arab states),
he wanted to demonstrate that he was trying his best to offer
Saddam Hussein a face-saving way to withdraw from Kuwait. That
might also serve eventually to win more support for future
military action against Iraq; the President would be able to
argue that he had first exhausted all possibilities for a
peaceful solution. Simultaneously, though, Bush wanted to tell
hard-liners (Britain, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, many members of the
U.S. Congress) that Saddam would not be rewarded for his
aggression.

    Bush repeated the core demand of nine U.N. resolutions
passed over the past two months: Iraq must withdraw from
Kuwait, totally and unconditionally. But "in the aftermath,"
said the President, "there may be opportunities for Iraq and
Kuwait to settle their differences permanently . . . and for
all the states and the peoples of the region to settle the
conflict that divides the Arabs from Israel." The hint of
future Iraqi-Kuwaiti negotiations on such points as border
disputes, ownership of oil fields and Iraqi access to the
Persian Gulf was not new. But the mention of Israel seemed to
contradict two months of indignant refusals from Bush to
consider any link between Iraq's occupation of Kuwait and
Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.

    Although Bush blandly denied that he had made any such link,
the denials contradicted the plain sense of his words. "There
was a new pitch and nuance to the U.N. speech," acknowledged
a well-placed Administration official. "If our coalition
succeeds in getting Iraq out of Kuwait, there may be just the
nucleus of something we can work with on the Arab-Israeli
issue."

    While Israeli officials said they accepted Bush's assurance
that there was no linkage, some are worried that if Iraq is
defeated, the U.S. will try to compensate its Arab allies at
Israel's expense. Since Israel is most unlikely to pull out of
the West Bank and Gaza, the U.S. is in danger of implicitly
promising something that it will be unable to deliver.
Alternatively, Washington risks enabling Saddam Hussein to pose
as an Arab hero who finally forced action on behalf of the
Palestinians.

    For the moment, however, Bush's speech did serve to
strengthen the anti-Saddam alliance. Arab governments were
delighted by a chance to counter Saddam's incessant propaganda
that by lining up with the U.S. they are also siding with
Israel. From the U.N. rostrum, Saudi Arabian Foreign Minister
Prince Saud al-Faisal argued that it was America's allies who
were now making progress on the Palestinian problem while Iraq
was obstructing such progress by dividing the Arab world.

    Bush's words moved the U.S. position a bit closer to that
of France, helping to heal what had briefly looked like an ugly
split. In his own U.N. speech two weeks ago, President Francois
Mitterrand had hinted that Iraq might only have to promise to
pull out of Kuwait -- not actually do it -- in order to gain
negotiations with Kuwait and progress toward an Arab-Israeli
settlement. That spurred a prompt bid from Saddam Hussein for
separate French-Iraqi negotiations, which Mitterrand
righteously spurned. His government, meanwhile, hastened to
assure allies that France still supported the U.N. resolutions
calling for an unconditional Iraqi pullout.

    Mitterrand became the first Western leader to tour the gulf
since the crisis broke. He dropped in on Saudi King Fahd (who
was quoted by a French spokesman as saying of economic
sanctions, "All is very well, but when do we strike?") and
leaders of the United Arab Emirates, and spent a night on a
French destroyer on embargo-enforcement duty in the gulf. The
French press predicted that Mitterrand would soon order another
7,000 ground troops to Saudi Arabia, reinforcing an initial
detachment of 4,000.

    Another diplomatic tourist in the Middle East stirred more
apprehension in Washington. Yevgeni Primakov, a Soviet expert
on the Middle East, visited Baghdad and the Jordanian capital
of Amman as a personal representative of President Mikhail
Gorbachev. Ostensibly his main purpose in Iraq was to arrange
for the departure of 5,174 Soviet citizens, presumably
including some military advisers, whose continued presence has
been an irritant to the U.S. But Gorbachev's press secretary
Vitali Ignatenko, visiting the U.S., spoke to TIME about a
possible Middle East conference in which "all the problems of
the region could be resolved as a package, including the
Palestinian problem." That is definitely not a message the U.S.
wants Saddam to hear.

    On the other hand, Ignatenko said the dispatch of Soviet
troops to join the international force confronting Iraq "is not
ruled out." He and other Soviet spokesmen, however, have laid
down tough conditions: there must be a U.N. resolution
authorizing the use of force; the troops must be designated
U.N. troops serving under a U.N. flag. Finally, says Ignatenko,
"the commander of the U.N. troops should not necessarily be
American." That would be an extremely difficult condition for
the U.S. to grant, since it has contributed the great bulk of
the international force, but putting Soviet troops under an
American commander would be at least an equally bitter pill for
the Soviet military.

    A U.N. resolution authorizing the use of force, however, is
something the U.S. is exploring, though for the moment not
pushing. It would further turn up the heat on Saddam and might
spur him either to withdraw from Kuwait or to launch a
pre-emptive strike that would justify an allied counterattack.
But dovish allies want other options pursued first. In
addition, the U.S. and its allies would need ironclad assurances
that China would not veto the resolution in the Security
Council, and they have yet to begin seriously exploring
conditions for Beijing's approval. The U.S. is counting on
other U.N. resolutions to help cement the coalition and build
momentum against Iraq and is likely with its allies to propose
several of them: to condemn Iraq's looting and destruction of
Kuwait; to demand that Iraq not only withdraw but also pay
reparations; and to make countries that help Iraq evade the
economic embargo subject to sanctions themselves.

    On the whole, American officials contend that the coalition
so far has held together remarkably well. They note, for
example, that sanctions usually begin to break down rather
quickly but that the current alliance has drawn the embargo
against Iraq ever tighter. The job, however, is far from done.
The U.S. may have to hold the coalition together for months or
even years, either to wage effective war against Iraq or to
contain a Saddam Hussein who would remain a menace even after
a withdrawal from Kuwait. That is a job that will guarantee
continuing headaches. But there is no alternative if the
confrontation with Iraq is indeed to become, as Washington
hopes, the model for the workings of a New World Order of law
and peace.