The Lessons of Iraq

By J.F.O. MCALLISTER 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 Ayatullah Khomeini's Iran. Even though Saddam 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.

With reporting by Dean Fischer/Cairo, William Mader/London and Elaine Shannon/Washington