The Middle East Saddam's Lucky Break

By Lisa Beyer

For once Saddam Hussein must be delighted to share the limelight. Eager to divert attention from his rape of Kuwait, the Iraqi leader has tried repeatedly to drag Israel onto center stage in order to convince his fellow Arabs that the enemy is not Iraq but the Zionists and their American backers. Israeli security forces played right into his hands last week when they fired into an angry Palestinian mob on Jerusalem's Temple Mount, killing 19 Palestinians and wounding 140. The deaths, said Boutros Boutros Ghali, Egypt's Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, were "Israel's great gift to Saddam Hussein."

Thus ended the low profile Israel had maintained in the gulf crisis at the request of the Bush Administration, which had persuaded Jerusalem that its silence was essential to keeping most of the Arab world united against Saddam. The tragedy on the Temple Mount, one of the most sacred sites in Islam, put Israel under diplomatic siege. Saudi Arabia decried the "brutal and savage attack," and Jordan denounced it as "racist and criminal." Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak accused Israel of "brutal repression," while Syria . alleged that Israel actually orchestrated the clashes to force Arabs out of the occupied territories.

Even President Bush allowed that Israeli forces "need to act with greater restraint." At the U.N. Security Council, the U.S., which frequently uses its veto there to shield Israel from criticism, found itself in the odd position of sponsoring a resolution castigating its ally for using excessive force to quell the Palestinians, who were throwing rocks at Jewish worshipers gathered at Judaism's sacred Western Wall.

Washington's uncharacteristic behavior arose from its desperate need to placate the Arab members of the anti-Saddam coalition. Certainly Saddam was doing his best to pull them into his orbit by exploiting the calamity in Jerusalem. The Iraqi President threatened to avenge the Palestinian deaths with powerful missiles he claimed to have added to his arsenal. Calling his new device the "Stone" (after the weapon of preference in the intifadeh), Saddam boasted that it had a range of hundreds of miles and could therefore hit "the targets of evil when the day of reckoning comes."

At the same time the U.S. was wary of putting too much pressure on Israel, for fear of lending credibility to Saddam's effort to link his annexation of Kuwait with the Israelis' occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. A direct linkage would be disastrous, but given the depth of Arab fury over the carnage in Jerusalem, a strong connection already exists whether Washington likes it or not. Said a senior British diplomat: "The Arab-Israeli problem is now openly a part of the gulf crisis."

In the end, Washington's balancing act produced a compromise resolution in the Security Council. After two all-night sessions of wrangling, the 15 members agreed unanimously to a British suggestion to marry the U.S.-drafted text with a watered-down version of a proposal made by Yemen on behalf of the Palestine Liberation Organization and backed by the seven other nonaligned Council members. The Yemeni faction had wanted the resolution to blast only Israel but, faced with the threat of a U.S. veto, the group relented in the end. The approved draft "expresses alarm" at the violence in general, thus indirectly criticizing the rock-throwing Palestinians, and "condemns especially" the behavior of the Israeli security forces.

The U.S. and the nonaligned group agreed that the U.N. Secretary-General should dispatch a team of envoys on a fact-finding mission to the occupied territories. The Yemeni draft had called for the team also to recommend ways of ensuring the protection of Palestinians there, a proposal the U.S. successfully fought off. Washington does not want the U.N. directly involved in the management of the Palestinian problem.

The P.L.O. objected bitterly to the final wording of the resolution, but for the moment the compromise had spared the alliance against Saddam from a major rift. Even Washington's Western allies on the Council were prepared to accept Yemen's original draft and were concerned by the prospect of an American veto. As the Arab states saw it, the issue was whether there was one international law for Arab governments and another for non-Arabs. "This time the world community must prove that principles (such as those used to justify collective action against the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait) are indivisible," editorialized the Egyptian Gazette.

For the Arab states aligned against Iraq, getting the U.S. to damn Israel's latest belligerency was a matter of politics as well as principle. That these governments are now in a military alliance with the U.S., Israel's principal supporter, is a source of embarrassment -- and potentially of instability -- at home. The assassination last week of Egypt's speaker of parliament Rifaat el-Mahgoub was a blunt reminder of just how vulnerable these governments have become. While no one claimed responsibility for killing el- Mahgoub, who was shot in his car by four gunmen who escaped on motorcycles, authorities said the murder probably was carried out either by a foreign hit squad, most likely Palestinians, or by Egyptian Muslim fundamentalists.

With the Desert Shield coalition so subject to upheaval, patience in the gulf waiting game is wearing thin. In a BBC interview last week, British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd said the anti-Saddam forces would need to decide "in a matter of weeks" whether the economic sanctions against Iraq were sufficient or whether to prepare to go to war to liberate Kuwait.

In the meantime, to make the center hold, several governments are stressing the need for an international conference to address the Arab-Israeli conflict, a proposal the U.S. supports but only if it follows an Iraqi withdrawal. French President Francois Mitterrand said last week that events had given a "new actuality" to the notion of a conference. Meeting with Saddam in Baghdad two weeks ago, Soviet envoy Yevgeni Primakov dangled the possibility of a Middle East conference -- with both Soviet and U.S. participation -- if the Iraqi leader left Kuwait. Though there was no evidence whatsoever that Moscow's offer had Washington's blessing, Primakov is a trusted confidant of Mikhail Gorbachev's and planned last week to brief Bush on his Iraqi visit.

As the crisis stretches on, it becomes increasingly clear that members of the anti-Saddam alliance have their own goals to pursue. Last week, for example, Lebanese President Elias Hrawi asked Syria to help him rout his rival, General Michel Aoun, from his stronghold in Beirut's Christian enclave, thus giving Damascus the opportunity to complete its control of Lebanon at a moment when the world is distracted by other events in the Middle East. Syrian President Hafez Assad ordered thousands of troops to Beirut to beef up the 10,000 Syrian soldiers already there. On Friday a lone gunman shot twice at Aoun, missing the general and wounding an aide instead.

Last Saturday at dawn Syrian forces opened a devastating air and artillery bombardment of Aoun's headquarters. But Aoun apparently had advance knowledge of the attack, and had already taken refuge in the French embassy. By noon, Lebanese forces loyal to Hrawi had taken over Aoun's fiefdom and the French were negotiating safe passage out of the country for the general. Aoun's defeat not only offered Assad unprecedented control over Lebanon but also gave him the satisfaction of defeating a man who had once got his weapons from the Syrian leader's most implacable foe: Saddam Hussein. All of which served as a reminder that while the occupation of Kuwait may be the most pressing issue in the region, it is hardly the only one that occupies the players in the Middle East.

With reporting by Jon D. Hull/Jerusalem, William Mader/London and James Wilde/Cairo