RETURN OF THE ‘GREAT GLASPIE’: WILL THE SENATE FINALLY ASK HER THE HARD QUESTIONS?

(Washington, D.C.): Ranking members of
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
are raising hell in response to a State
Department cable sent last July by
then-U.S. Ambassador to Iraq April
Glaspie. The cable, portions of which
have now been leaked in the press, offers
an official report on her notorious
conversation with Saddam Hussein on the
eve of his invasion of Kuwait. Senatorial
anger over Amb. Glaspie’s performance
prior to and after the Gulf war is
understandable; a fair measure of it,
ironically, should be directed at the
senators themselves, however.

Committee chairman Claiborne Pell
(D-RI) and ranking member Sen. Alan
Cranston (D-CA) profess to be exercised
over the inconsistency between the
cable’s description of Amb. Glaspie’s
fawning behavior toward the Iraqi despot
on the one hand and her subsequent
representations to the Committee about
that exchange on the other. When she
testified in March 1991, Ms. Glaspie
asserted that — in light of the direct
and unmistakable warnings she
conveyed in that meeting — only Saddam’s
“stupidity” could account for
his failure to be deterred from his folly
in Kuwait.

What was remarkable about this
statement was not that a Foreign Service
Officer who had been so dreadfully wrong
about Saddam Hussein and other Arab
strongmen for years could have
misconstrued her fateful encounter with
him. Neither was it that members
responsible to the Senate for oversight
of U.S. foreign policy could have given
such a patently revisionist and
self-serving account any credence
whatsoever. What was
truly extraordinary was the demeaning
public apologia tendered to Ms. Glaspie
by Sens. Pell and Cranston, among others,
for the widespread and accurate
speculation that her conciliatory tone
and comments in their meeting were
interpreted by Saddam Hussein as a green
light from Washington for aggression
against Kuwait.

Had the Senators followed the advice
offered by the Center for Security Policy
immediately prior to that hearing, they
could at the very least have spared
themselves considerable embarrassment;
they might even have been able to
concentrate on learning the appropriate
lessons from the Glaspie affair. On 20
March, the Center issued a press release
entitled Questions
for April Glaspie: No More Illusions
About Mideast ‘Opportunities.’
This paper identified an egregiously
flawed policy precept that has
traditionally animated U.S. policy in the
region, was clearly at work in Amb.
Glaspie’s conduct in Baghdad and appears
to continue to be a guiding force in
present day views of Hafez el Assad of
Syria and the Palestinian leadership: “No
matter how despotic, how ruthless or how
anti-Western Arab strongmen may be, there
are ‘opportunities’ for making common
cause with them that will advance U.S.
interests in the region.”

In the hope that a line of questioning
that illuminates this dangerously
defective tenet is finally put
to Amb. Glaspie, Deputy Secretary of
State Lawrence Eagleburger and any other
administration witnesses called to
testify on this matter in the near
future, the Center is re-releasing its
earlier paper, a copy of which is
attached.