TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/010791/0107100.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 10KB | 196 lines

                                                                                NATION, Page 54

Tick, Tick, Tick


As the U.N. deadline for Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait nears,
George Bush seeks to convince Saddam Hussein that his time is
running out

By RICHARD LACAYO -- With reporting by Dean Fischer/Cairo,
William Mader/London and Bruce van Voorst/Washington


    Whatever the prospects for a shooting war, the war of
nerves in the Persian Gulf intensified last week. "The clock
ticks toward war or peace," observes Robert Hunter, a Middle
East expert at the Center for Strategic and International
Studies. "But nobody knows what time it is." With only two
weeks remaining before the United Nations' Jan. 15 deadline for
Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait, George Bush seemed determined to
convince Saddam Hussein that his time is running out. But with
questions of U.S. military readiness and resolve still
unanswered, Saddam appeared to be pondering a last-minute
maneuver that would make it harder to dislodge him peacefully
from Kuwait -- and more difficult to use force to oust him.

    As the first of several signals that the U.S. is preparing
for combat, Bush dispatched 17 more warships to the gulf, which
will bring the total to 64. The formidable armada includes the
giant aircraft carriers America and Theodore Roosevelt; all
told, six American carriers, with as many as 300 attack planes,
will be within striking distance of Iraq on Jan. 15. The State
Department ordered the evacuation of all nonessential staff and
dependents from U.S. embassies in Jordan and Sudan, where
pro-Iraqi sentiment runs high.

    In an especially ominous move, officials said the Pentagon
would soon start to vaccinate American troops against the
potential threat of Iraqi germ warfare. The CIA has been warning
that Iraq, despite its denials, has developed biological
weapons. But even inoculations are no guarantee against germ
warfare, which can be conducted through dozens of different
strains of various organisms, each requiring a separate vaccine.
Saddam's arsenal is believed to include anthrax as well as
botulism, a form of stomach poisoning for which there is no
vaccine.

    For its part, Iraq added to the jitters by conducting two
test firings of surface-to-surface missiles within its
territory. Saddam also made a series of bellicose statements,
telling a Spanish television channel that if war broke out,
Israel would suffer the first retaliatory blow. "We consider
that the responsibility for the Arab conflicts falls on Israel
and the Zionists," he warned. "It is they who have pushed Bush
into the dead-end street in which he now finds himself." To a
Mexican television interviewer, Saddam vowed that the al-Sabah
family, deposed by the Iraqi invasion, will "never again rule"
Kuwait.

    Meanwhile, diplomatic efforts to find a peaceful solution
continued to stall. Both the U.S. and Iraq denied reports
published in an Israeli newspaper, Ma'ariv, that the two nations
had secretly agreed on Jan. 9 as the date for Secretary of State
James Baker to meet with Saddam in Baghdad. Arab sources close
to Baghdad claimed that the U.S. and Iraq have agreed in
principle to go ahead with the Baker meeting as well as a
meeting between Bush and Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz,
although the deal is not final and no dates have been set. The
tentative agreement, they say, stems from secret contacts
between Washington and Baghdad conducted via messages carried by
Arab and European diplomats and even American businessmen. But
when the highest-ranking American diplomat still in Baghdad,
deputy chief of mission Joseph C. Wilson, met last week with
Nizar Hamdoon, Under Secretary of the Iraqi Foreign Ministry,
in another attempt to arrange a mutually acceptable date, no
progress was reported.

    Though the Jan. 15 deadline was meant to put pressure on
Saddam, it has also created a gnawing problem for Bush. The date
was never intended to specify when military action would begin,
but it inevitably came to be widely understood that way. That
was one reason for the uproar that Lieut. General Calvin A.H.
Waller, deputy commander of Operation Desert Shield, touched off
when he said that American forces would not be ready for battle
until mid-February. Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and General
Colin Powell, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, delivered
similar assessments to Bush last week after they paid a five-day
visit to Saudi Arabia. The principal reason for wanting more
time is logistics: the need to build up stocks of sophisticated
munitions.

    The growing impression that the U.S. would not be prepared
to attack on the morning of Jan. 16 seemed to undercut the
pressure on Saddam to comply quickly with U.N. demands. To keep
up the heat, Bush tried last week to dispel doubts about
American military readiness. After interrupting his Christmas
vacation in Camp David for a six-hour working stint at the White
House, the President declared that the confidential briefings
he had received from his top military advisers had left him with
a "quite different" feeling about U.S. war preparations than
press accounts indicated. "I'm not going to tell you what they
said, but don't believe these reports you've been reading,"
insisted Bush. "It's under control. Don't be misled by these
rabbit tracks running through the snow."

    Even within the Administration, there was concern that
Washington was sending a muddled message. "Looking at the way
things have gone," mused a State Department official, "Saddam
must be saying to himself, `Maybe I can ride this out.'" In
London aides to Prime Minister John Major, just back from an
official visit to Washington, reported that their boss had found
Bush and Baker deeply pessimistic. "They thought Saddam was not
convinced that the allies were ready to go to war," said a
senior adviser to Major. "They saw little chance of U.S.-Iraqi
talks getting under way before the U.N. deadline."

    Saddam began the week by summoning to Baghdad 20 of his
ambassadors, many to nations that have contributed troops to the
U.S.-led alliance. He sent them back to their posts carrying the
message that he was ready for "serious and constructive
dialogue" to avert war. But whatever optimism those words might
have engendered was quickly undercut by Saddam's reiterated
demand that any diplomatic settlement would have to link an
Iraqi pullout from Kuwait with an Israeli withdrawal from the
West Bank and Gaza Strip.

    Though the U.S. has flatly rejected such a linkage,
Saddam's continuing effort to tie a resolution of the crisis to
other intractable regional disputes is just one of the
potential ploys that give American policymakers sleepless
nights. They are concerned that Baghdad will try to split the
alliance by proposing to withdraw only in return for a promise
to call a prompt international conference on the Arab-Israeli
dispute. Though the governments of Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Syria
have shown no interest in such ideas so far, they could be
under pressure from their own people if Saddam chose to press
the point. But the U.S. is not likely to accept the idea under
those conditions.

    Then there is what State Department officials call "the
nightmare scenario" in which Saddam would withdraw partly from
Kuwait, retaining the Warbah and Bubiyan islands, which control
Iraq's access to the gulf, as well as the sliver of northern
Kuwait that includes the Rumaila oil field. President Bush has
made a pre-emptive strike against that possibility by insisting
-- with backing from the other 14 members of the U.N. Security
Council -- that only a complete withdrawal would be acceptable.

    Nonetheless, a partial pullout would present the White
House with a thorny political dilemma. Persuading an
increasingly restive Congress -- not to mention American allies
-- to fight for the liberation of Kuwait is one thing. But to
fight for the liberation of the Warbah and Bubiyan islands? U.S.
officials reluctantly conclude that such a move by Saddam would
defang the coalition, leaving Bush with no choice but to hope
that sanctions would eventually force Iraq into a complete
pullback.

    Or Saddam could choose war, betting that his dug-in forces
in Kuwait and southern Iraq could inflict so many U.S casualties
that the American public would lose its stomach for the battle.
Least likely of all is that he will opt to comply fully with the
U.N.'s demands and withdraw entirely from Kuwait. The French
newspaper Le Figaro reported last week that Iraqi secret-service
agents have been going door to door in Baghdad urging people to
assemble next week for a "spontaneous" rally in favor of
withdrawing from Kuwait. If true, the report would suggest that
Saddam is trying to arrange a face-saving way to back down.
Asked to comment on Le Figaro's story, the Deputy Speaker of
Iraq's parliament gave a tantalizing reply: "We entered Kuwait
because the people demanded it. In Iraq it is the people who
decide."

    Welcome as such a step would be, most U.S. policy experts
are convinced no such move is forthcoming. They believe that
Saddam has concluded he can drag out the fighting long enough to
force a diplomatic solution that leaves him in power in Baghdad
and with a plausible claim to partial victory. If so, they say,
he still does not understand the awesome power of the military
forces arrayed against him. "The U.S. attack will be something
entirely outside Saddam's realm of experience," says former Army
Chief of Staff General John Wickham. "It's not clear he can even
imagine what will happen." With the clock ticking, many people
hoped the Iraqi leader would still show the sense not to put
Bush's determination to the ultimate test.