Mirabile Dictu: The New York Times Breaks The Code On Moscow’s Double Game In Iraq

The Center for Security Policy today welcomed the insightful — albeit astonishingly belated — assessment of the state of U.S.-Soviet cooperation on the Persian Gulf crisis published on the front page of yesterday’s New York Times by reporter Thomas L. Friedman.

Headlined "A Restraint on Bush: Gorbachev’s Hesitancy on the Use of Force Dilutes the American Threat Against Iraq," the Friedman analysis notes that:

As long as the use of force was not considered imminent, the differences between the Soviet Union and the United States were easily glossed over or obscured by the novelty of those points on which they were in agreement….Now that the main issue is whether to use force, the nuances can no longer be hidden. The difference may be, as Mr. Bush said [Wednesday], "extraordinarily minor," but when a minor difference holds up a strategy at a critical juncture, even for a few days, it can assume major importance. (Emphasis added.)

 

The Center believes that the New York Times has provided powerful evidence of two phenomena about which the Center has been warning since the first days of the crisis:

First, Mikhail Gorbachev is playing a double game on Iraq. The Kremlin is simultaneously adopting the rhetoric and diplomatic stance of a "team player" in opposing Iraqi aggression — in the correct expectation that doing so will increase pressure on Washington to reward Moscow with financial, political and, most recently food assistance — and striving to maintain good relations with one of its most important clients, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

As Friedman put it:

Possibly President Gorbachev has been so alarmed by Mr. Bush’s sudden troop buildup that he feels the only way to slow down the momentum for war is by holding up Security Council endorsement. He may also want to make sure that any resolution that is adopted will guarantee Moscow a say on when and how force is used.

 

Second, the Bush Administration is trying to conceal the extent to which the Soviet Union is not, as advertized, playing a genuinely supportive role in the Gulf crisis — perhaps to allay mounting concerns about the President’s enormous over-investment in Gorbachev. Again, in Friedman’s words:

When the Soviets refused to commit any troops or ships to the international force isolating Iraq, Administration officials explained that it was because of their "Afghanistan complex" or the preoccupation of the Soviet military with the withdrawal of its forces from Eastern Europe.

 

When Mr. Bush and Mr. Gorbachev met in Helsinki in September and the Soviet leader seemed to rule out the use of force at a news conference after the meeting, Administration officials referred reporters to the joint communique, which said the two sides would consider "additional steps" if Iraq refused to withdraw.

 

"From the outset of this crisis, the Soviets have been stringing the Bush Administration along," said, Frank J. Gaffney, Jr., the Center’s director. "Gorbachev has refused to provide the full-fledged support for the Administration’s offensive strategy repeatedly sought by President Bush and Secretary of State Baker. Instead, Soviet leaders have come up with increasingly creative policy pronouncements — typically involving seemingly forward-leaning but always imprecise formulations of their position."

Gaffney added, "Whether Moscow’s temporizing is malevolently motivated or not, there can only be one beneficiary from it — Saddam Hussein. In tolerating Gorbachev’s demands for delay, in misrepresenting them publicly as evidence of Soviet solidarity and, most appalling of all, in rewarding the Kremlin with taxpayer subsidies and aid for its ‘assistance in the Gulf,’ the Bush Administration is not only imperilling the success of its handling of the present crisis. It is also sowing the seeds of the future failure of the vaunted new world order it hopes to create built upon U.S.-Soviet cooperation."

As it has repeatedly done since Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, the Center for Security Policy calls on the Bush Administration:

• to be candid about the true (i.e., less than constructive) nature of Soviet policy in the Gulf;

 

• to eschew its misguided notions about the desirability of enhancing Moscow’s stature and influence in the region; and

 

• to end the practice of making Gorbachev’s — or any other foreign leader’s — acquiescence the determinant of whether and when the United States will use force to end Saddam’s reign of terror and to neutralize his power projection capabilities.