Barzani's March Toward Abyss
stk at schism.antenna.nl
stk at schism.antenna.nl
Fri Sep 30 23:23:00 BST 1994
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akin at kurdish.org (AKIN) writes:
Saddam Prevailed
By Jim Hoagland
Sunday, September 29 1996; Page C07
The Washington Post
The two pillars of the Clinton administration's
Middle East policy are crumbling at nearly the
same time, and for many of the same reasons.
Chief among them is the administration's growing
inability to tell the world -- and itself -- the
truth about inconvenient change in that volatile
region.
The horrific explosion of Israeli-Pal\estinian
violence last week is not directly linked to
Saddam Hussein's armed conquest of northern Iraq
30 days ago. But the moral and intellectual
lameness the administration demonstrated in
responding to unexpected events in Iraq is
mirrored in its initial response to the eruption
of new hatred and killing in Jerusalem, on the
West Bank and in the Gaza strip.
In Iraq, the administration claimed an imaginary
success after a strategically senseless missile
raid against Saddam. U.S. initiatives on the
north, once a protected haven for opposition to
Saddam, have been confined to pretending that
Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani is an independent
agent who can be wooed back from his alliance
with Saddam.
The Kurds are not important, the White House in
effect says. Neither are the past U.S. policy
(and promises) and the existing U.N. resolutions
that Saddam's invasion of the north violated.
Worse, the renewed wooing of Barzani shows an
almost Carteresque belief by the Clintonites that
men of good intentions can always talk things
out.
In Israel, the administration is similarly
pressing Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and
Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to sit down as
partners in peace and talk. There is scant
recognition that confrontation and violence have
overtaken partnership for these two and that a
much more active U.S. role is now needed.
Part of the lust for proclaiming success and
ignoring inconvenient truths is campaign-driven,
of course. But a strategic U.S. blindness
preceded both Middle East upheavals as the White
House failed to adjust means and goals at vital
turning points.
Last March, as a Saddam-penetrated CIA operation
based in Amman was coming apart and the Kurdish
factions were moving again to war footing --
events reported at the time in this column -- the
State Department's Northern Gulf Affairs bureau
was concluding in a classified internal analysis
that its policy toward Iraq was "an unqualified
success."
A major part of the success, poli\cymakers at
State and the National Security Council told each
other, was that Iraq had been kept off the
president's desk in an election year. Their
definition of success was for them to keep Saddam
"in his box" and let the president concentrate on
more important matters, like reelection.
But without presidential involvement the lower
levels lost control over policy toward Iraq by
the end of August. They were unable to get $2
million freed to pay for cease-fire monitors to
defuse the Kurdish struggles and to bolster the
sagging Iraqi National Congress, a group Vice
President Gore and national security adviser
Anthony Lake met with -- and promised to support
-- in April 1993.
Saddam, who had been dealing secretly with
Barzani for months and probably receiving reports
through him on Washington's complacency, struck
with a boldness that a distracted and
inadequately briefed Clinton could not begin to
match.
The most damaging part of Clinton's too-little,
too-soon response in Iraq may well be the way in
which he reached it.
Strategy briefings were conducted on the campaign
trail in harried circumstances, usually by
telephone or fax. Clinton did not return to
Washington for a face-to-face meeting in the
White House with his principal Cabinet officers
to discuss the use of force or the difficult
strategic problems of keeping the multinational
coalition on Iraq solidly together. A
Cabinet-level group met without him four times as
the crisis escalated. Clinton left the impression
of a partially engaged president who checked off
the least ambitious, least risky option box on a
decision list prepared by Lake.
Clinton's well-known preference to conciliate
rather than confront now finds an echo in the
soft approach he is taking to violence and force
on two fronts in the Middle East. Weeks after he
betrayed U.S. interests, Barzani is being treated
as a wayward ward to be forgiven if he will now
betray Saddam. Assistant Secretary of State
Robert Pelletreau met with the Kurdish leader in
Turkey last week. But Saddam's half brother and
chief representative in Europe, Bar\zan
al-Takriti said in an interview with the London
based Al Hayat newspaper last week that the
Barzani Kurds had returned irrevocably "to their
mother's lap" and Barzani met Pelletreau as part
of an effort by Saddam "to normalize relations
with America."
He linked that normalization effort with new
veiled threates against Kuwait, threats the
United States has let pass without response.
The United States now saw that "its interests lie
with Iraq," Barzan continued. "The Americans will
turn 180 degrees away from Kuwait," which he
accused of being drunk with "power and
arrogance." He added that "danger lies ahead for
Kuwait" at the hands of Iraq "if it persists in
ignoring the facts."
The launching of 44 cruise missiles into the
southern Iraqi desert has not deterred Saddam
from renewing his war of nerves with Kuwait and
Saudi Arabia.
Self-induced blindness has made U.S. policy on
Iraq a mess, not an "unqualified success." The
White House's denial of this -- even to itself --
disgusts middle-level officials within the
government who know what has happened.
The crisis in Israel again found Clinton on the
campaign trail, being briefed by fax and phone
while his aides clung desperately to policy
levers of the past that no longer worked. Instead
of being able to rely on a Labor government
commited to reaching a long-term peace settlement
with the Arabs, Washington must now react to an
Israeli prime minister who disdains the peace
process but has nothing to put in its place to
prevent new violence, except brute force. That
requires a leadership that Clinton fell woefully
short of in Iraq.
----
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Tel: (202) 483-6444
Fax: (202) 483-6476
E-mail: akin at kurdish.org
Home Page: http://burn.ucsd.edu/~akin
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