Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, March 16, 1991 TAG: 9103160285
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DAN BALZ THE WASHINGTON POST
DATELINE: HAMILTON, BERMUDA LENGTH: Medium
The stick has been on display this week, with Bush warn ing Iraq that the use of combat helicopters to put down anti-government insurgencies could slow progress toward a permanent cease-fire, and with U.S. officials talking about possible military action if Saddam uses chemical weapons against the rebels.
This saber-rattling is one element of an overall administration strategy designed to convince Iraqi military and political leaders to take matters into their own hands and remove Saddam.
The carrot, which officials said will become more explicit as terms of a permanent cease-fire are discussed, is the prospect of significantly more generous treatment for Iraq without Saddam than with him.
Saddam's continuing hold on power has left Bush's mission in the Persian Gulf incomplete, despite the stunning success of the allied air and ground campaign in fulfilling U.N. Security Council resolutions that Iraq must withdraw from Kuwait and the Kuwaiti government be restored to power.
At the same time, administration officials recognize that they have no international mandate to intervene now to help topple Saddam, unless he used chemical weapons against his own people.
As a result, their policy - while failing to rule out military options - is aimed more at persuading the Iraqis that the rest of the world will never believe Iraq wants to live peacefully with its neighbors until Saddam is gone, and that Iraq will be treated as an international pariah until they do something about it.
That does not mean there can be no permanent cease-fire agreement as long as Saddam is in power. But, with Saddam in power, such an agreement would include far tougher sanctions and significantly greater demands for reparations than if he were gone.
"There's some flexibility there that could be adjusted," the official said.
Administration officials anticipate another U.N. resolution that will spell out the treatment of Iraq with and without Saddam in power.
This was part of the agenda that Secretary of State James Baker carried to the Middle East and Soviet Union this week and that Bush discussed in his meetings with Canadian Minister Brian Mulroney and French President Francois Mitterrand. Bush will meet here today with British Prime Minister John Major.
U.S. officials traveling with Bush said they had no information to confirm reports that Iraq was using fixed-wing aircraft to suppress the rebellion, but were watching the situation closely.
"That would complicate things a lot," one official said. "That would be considerably more of an issue than the helicopters."
The president must balance several potentially conflicting forces as he applies pressure on Saddam and the Iraqi leadership.
One is the sticky issue of intervening in the domestic affairs of Iraq, or even suggesting that Saddam does not have the right to attempt to restore order in his country in the aftermath of the war. Administration officials know they can go only so far in this direction, and Mitterrand said flatly the problem is Iraq's to solve.
A second factor is Bush's desire to withdraw U.S. forces from the gulf as quickly as possible, in part to fulfill his pledge to Arab states and others that the United States seeks no permanent foothold there, and also to head off political fallout at home from a prolonged stay by American troops.
Still another goal is to prevent the kind of instability inside Iraq that would allow others in the region - Iran, for example - to threaten Iraq's territorial integrity. Those concerns affected decisions on how to prosecute the war, with the goal of the allied coalition to remove Iraq's offensive threat without destroying its ability to defend itself. And that was the motivation behind Bush's warning this week that any effort by Iran to seize territory in Iraq "would be the worst thing they could do."
by CNB