Center Warns Of Double Trouble In Helsinki: Paying For Moscow’s Double Game With Iraq

The Center for Security Policy today warned that the Bush Administration’s twin preoccupations with helping Mikhail Gorbachev and securing cosmetic Soviet support for the international campaign against Saddam Hussein is likely to spell double trouble for the United States.

In a paper released on the eve of the Helsinki summit, entitled Scorecard for Moscow’s "Double Game" in Iraq, the Center notes that Soviet behavior in the course of the Iraq crisis has been on balance more cynical than helpful, its cooperation more troublesome than "superb," as President Bush described it last week.

"The Bush Administration appears determined to ‘look the other way’ on a pattern of Soviet activities — from allowing Soviet advisers to maintain the lethal readiness of Iraqi weapons to advancing mischievous diplomatic gambits that serve to complicate, rather than simplify, the prospects for satisfactorily resolving this crisis," said Frank J. Gaffney, Jr., the Center’s director. "Unless Moscow’s ambitions are properly seen as inconsistent with U.S. and Western interests in important respects, President Bush may not only encourage such behavior at Helsinki — he may wind up agreeing, in effect, to pay for it."

In Scorecard, the Center addresses Moscow’s various military and diplomatic initiatives that gainsay the Bush Administration’s enthusiasm for a new "world order" based on "cooperative" U.S.-Soviet relations. It anticipates that one product of the convergence of such Soviet designs and American misconceptions will likely be the announcement at Helsinki that the Soviet Union is dispatching a contingent of naval units and/or ground troops to participate in the multinational force assembling in Saudi Arabia.

According to Gaffney, "If the Soviets want to be truly helpful, instead of sending forces to the Persian Gulf, they should be getting their uniformed and civilian ‘advisers’ out of Iraq. A new ‘world order’ — one in which the Soviet Union stands with feet in both camps, simultaneously maintaining its client relationship with Saddam Hussein while getting credit for being part of the community resisting him — is, in fact, a formula for dangerous disorder."

The Center’s Scorecard also identifies the significant economic, financial and technological concessions President Bush seems poised to offer Moscow as a de facto price for Soviet "contributions" to the Gulf crisis. These are likely to entail, among other things, strategically dubious assistance to the Soviet energy sector and considerably increased U.S. taxpayer exposure arising from a variety of direct and in-kind American subsidies and government grants to the USSR.