‘Pause for peace’ or cat’s-paws?

BY: Frank Gaffney Jr.
The Washington Times, February 14, 1991

The nation is understandably preoccupied at the moment with the prospect of eventual ground action in the war with Iraq — and the American casualties it will entail. A far greater danger to U.S. long-term interests, however, is that the war will be stopped before the necessary objectives have been realized.

These objectives are, simply put, the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s regime and the complete neutralization of its offensive power-projection capabilities. The good news is that the Bush administration appears to have embraced these as its de facto — if not formally stated — war aims.

The bad news is that the administration is dangerously exposed to the mounting pressure for an immediate cease-fire that would prevent the accomplishing of these war aims.

This pressure has been manifested within the past week in appeals by King Hussein of Jordan, Iranian President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and the Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, appeals demanding a "pause for peace." A more appropriate characterization of the machinations of these self-appointed intermediaries might be "cats-paws for peace." For even the Iranians, whose cease-fire proposal has for the moment been rebuffed by Saddam, are serving the Iraqi tyrant’s cause. After all, they — like Saddam — are determined to deny the United States a decisive political, as well as military, victory. To accomplish this, they understand that it is necessary to preserve Saddam’s hold on power. A cease-fire under present circumstances — with or without the liberation of Kuwait — would almost certainly realize both of these goals.

It is against this backdrop that the ever more assertive peace initiatives from Moscow, Tehran and Amman must be considered, particularly the associated contention that the allies are exceeding the U.N. mandate in their attacks against Iraq. By so doing, Iraq’s proxies hope to deny President Bush what he believes to be his trump card: the international community’s seal of approval for the campaign against Saddam.

Incredibly, new Soviet Foreign Minister Alexander Bessmertnykh recently snookered Secretary of State James Baker into making a joint statement that plays directly into the hands of those hoping for a stalemate in the Gulf. It expressly committed the U.S. government to accept such a cease-fire with Iraq.

This communique was an unmitigated disaster on both substantive and procedural grounds. Substantively, it directly undercut Mr. Bush’s sensible post-Jan. 16 policy of "no negotiations." Under the terms of this joint statement, all Saddam needs to do to qualify for a cease-fire is to make an "unequivocal commitment to withdraw from Kuwait" and take unspecified "immediate, concrete steps leading to full compliance" with U.N. Security Council resolutions. In other words, the United States would be obliged to suspend hostilities even before Kuwait is completely liberated.

In terms of process, the joint statement was equally deplorable. No one at the White House or any other agency was given advance warning of the contents of Mr. Baker’s deal with his Soviet counterpart. As a result, there was no opportunity for sanity-checks or course-corrections. The president only learned of the joint statement after it had been quietly posted on a State Department press room bulletin board, crowed over publicly by Mr. Bessmertnykh and handed as a fait accomplis to him in his limousine on the way to the State of the Union address. It is a vivid example of Mr. Baker’s high-handed and overreaching approach to foreign policy.

In the aftermath of the Baker-Bessmertnykh communique, two key points should be kept in mind: First, the deal now being offered to Saddam is a trap — the same one from which we were only delivered prior to Jan. 16 by the Iraqi dictator’s sheer recalcitrance. Had he simply relented on Kuwait, he could have written his own ticket: no war crimes trials, no reparations, the effective end of the embargo against his country, negotiations with Kuwait sure to produce territorial and oil concessions and an international peace conference designed to coerce Israel into making risky territorial concessions of its own.

Such generous terms are not the stuff of idle speculation; they are what Saddam was offered by Mr. Baker and other interlocutors before the U.N.-imposed deadline expired on Jan. 15. Fortunately for all of us — whether out of arrogance, miscalculation or sheer contempt for the West only history will explain — Saddam refused to accept the opportunity these terms afforded to enhance his stature, redouble his military capabilities and expand his hegemony far beyond Kuwait.

It would be a tragedy of epic proportions if, in deference to Soviet — or others’ — demands, the United States were now to re-extend to Saddam essentially the same opportunity. Presumably, the punishment inflicted by tens of thousands of allied bombing missions has markedly reduced Iraq’s arsenal of weapons of mass destruction (chemical, biological and nuclear arms) and the threat posed by its other offensive forces. Still, if Saddam can survive this conflict and reasonably claim to have dictated satisfactory conditions for its termination, there is little doubt that his larger-than-life position in the Arab world, the enormous oil resources of his country and the residual capabilities of the Iraqi military will make him a formidable threat down the road.

The second worrisome upshot of the joint communique is the further evidence it offers that Moscow is actively promoting such an undesirable outcome. Evidently, the Bush administration has invested so much in Mr. Gorbachev — and so trumpeted the Soviet role in this crisis as a prototype for the much ballyhooed "New World Order" — that it cannot bring itself to come to grips with the true, and rather sinister, thrust of Soviet policy.

To make matters worse, Moscow has successfully parlayed its double-dealing policy on the Gulf into Western acquiescence to the Soviet central authorities’ repression at home. The fact that we are being had by the Soviet Union on Iraq makes all the more reprehensible the U.S. willingness to look the other way on the crackdown in the Baltics.

The bottom line is this: The Bush administration, having staked as much as it has on multilateralism and Soviet cooperativeness in dealing with the Iraqi crisis, is dangerously vulnerable to having the rug pulled out from under it. Before the trap of a "pause for peace" springs closed, the United States had best make it clear that it will not be a party to any cease-fire so long as Saddam remains in power and capable of shattering the peace at will in the future.

Frank J. Gaffney Jr. is the director of the Center for Security Policy.