Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, February 23, 1991 TAG: 9102230284
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DOYLE McMANUS and ROBIN WRIGHT/ LOS ANGELES TIMES
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Long
On the surface, the issue is deceptively simple: Who owns Kuwait? Even as he offered to withdraw his army, Saddam Hussein said he had every right to seize the emirate. George Bush insists that Saddam admit he had no such right.
But the inflexibility on both sides reflects an underlying factor that has distinguished the gulf crisis from the beginning: For Saddam and Bush, the argument is really over much larger questions: Who will rule the Middle East, and what kind of power will count most in the post-Cold War world?
Those issues transcend immediate questions of how long Iraq's withdrawal should take and whether Baghdad should pay damages to the emir of Kuwait.
Perhaps more important, they are issues that touch the core ambitions of the two men who seem about to hurl their armies into battle.
For Saddam, the conquest of Kuwait was only part of a drive to become the paramount leader of the Arab world. That ambition appears to have driven him to risk martyrdom, for a humiliating retreat from Kuwait would mean the end of his historic dream.
For Bush, the struggle has become a vehicle not only for restoring a balance of power in the gulf, but for establishing a "new world order," a global framework for peace and stability. If the U.S.-led coalition does not win convincingly in Kuwait, administration officials say, it will send the wrong lesson to "other Saddams." It will also rob Bush of his most treasured foreign policy achievement - the assembly of a new kind of international alliance.
The result of those clashing ambitions is an irreconcilable conflict of principle between Baghdad and Washington that has resisted every attempt at compromise.
"There is no other course but the one we have chosen, except the course of humiliation and darkness, after which there will be no bright sign in the sky or brilliant light on Earth," Saddam proclaimed in his radio address Thursday. "They want us to surrender. Of course, they will be disappointed."
Bush laid out his view of the stakes three weeks ago, in a speech at Fort Stewart, Ga.: "When we win - and we will - we will have taught a dangerous dictator and any tyrant tempted to follow in his footsteps that the United States has a new credibility, and that what we say goes, and that there is no place for lawless aggression in the Persian Gulf and in this new world order that we seek to create."
"These are two equally stubborn men," observed G. Henry M. Schuler, a former diplomat at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "The reason diplomacy did not work is because they're both so sure they're right."
"Saddam is not as Machiavellian and devoid of reason as he's been painted," Schuler added. "He's clearly wrong, but he thinks he's got right and justice on his side. He sincerely believes that there was a conspiracy of the United States and Kuwait to destroy Iraq, and therefore he sees what he did as a response to provocation.
"And George Bush is every bit as certain" that the invasion of Kuwait "was unprovoked aggression."
Both men have maintained a clear-eyed view of their ultimate goals.
Even while offering to withdraw his troops, Saddam resisted any settlement that would explicitly recognize Kuwait's right to exist as an independent sovereign state - or force him to admit he had been wrong to invade.
"It's hard to understand why he's so obdurate given the fact that he has shown a great deal of flexibility in the past," said Christopher van Holland, a former U.S. ambassador in the Middle East. Saddam compromised with arch-rival Iran several times during the 1970s and 1980s, he noted.
But in those cases he was never forced to surrender on the uncompromising terms demanded by Bush and the coalition.
"It appears that he would prefer to go down to defeat, if necessary, than be seen to surrender," van Holland said. "He may well see his place in history now as standing up to the forces of the West, not only for the Iraqis but for the Arab masses."
By the same token, Bush's goal of establishing a new world order - and establishing its first set of precedents in the gulf - has driven him to reject any settlement that might "save face" for Hussein.
In the words of a senior administration official, "We want to humiliate him."
"There's got to be a way to put the Iraqis on the spot so that they will not be tempted in any way to restage the adventure they did last August," said Richard Murphy, a former assistant secretary of state for the Middle East. "There's got to be a way to politically humiliate Saddam in front of his people for what he did."
Moreover, the experience of war and a sudden U.S. interest in Saddam's depredations after years of inattention have strengthened Bush's resolve to cut the Iraqi leader down to size. The president has told aides, friends and the presiding bishop of his Episcopal Church of his revulsion at the human rights abuses reported by Amnesty International from occupied Kuwait, although they matched a long pattern of similar abuses inside Iraq itself.
As a result of the war, a Bush aide said, U.S. officials "have finally woken up to the danger a guy like this can pose. It's been an eye-opener to a lot of people, even in our own government, how big an army this guy had built."
Another result has been the gradual escalation of U.S. war aims, from forcing Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait to destroying Hussein's nuclear and chemical weapons plants to encouraging Iraqis to overthrow him.
Formally, however, the administration decided early in the war not to expand its declared aims beyond what the United Nations had demanded - the withdrawal of Iraqi troops from Kuwait, restoration of the emirate's government and payment of reparations - despite suggestions that Saddam's ouster should be added as a goal.
That tactic paid off Friday, for when Saddam offered to withdraw under an Iraqi-Soviet plan with six conditions, Bush could point to the U.N. resolutions as inviolable.
That unchanging position enabled Bush to bring the other members of the coalition, and even the Democratic leaders of Congress, along with him.
by CNB