Last Chance To Talk

By Lisa Beyer.

If quantity were any substitute for quality, the gulf crisis might have already been resolved by diplomatic means. Last week brought a flurry of summits, tete-a-tetes, initiatives and trial balloons, all aimed at averting a war over Kuwait that otherwise looked imminent. The European Community met in Luxembourg. Jordan's King Hussein shuttled around Europe. A former aide to French President Francois Mitterrand tried his luck in Baghdad, and Libya's Muammar Gaddafi convened his own Arab confab. Most significant, after weeks of ; petty dickering over when to get together, the U.S. and Iraq finally agreed to a high-level meeting in Geneva this week, their first since the confrontation erupted on Aug. 2.

For all that diplomatic movement, however, there was little forward progress. The bottom-line positions of the antagonists remained fixed at cross-purposes. Washington and its allies say flatly that Iraq must leave Kuwait without conditions. The Iraqis say Kuwait is theirs forever -- except, perhaps, if Israel gives up the occupied territories and Syria quits Lebanon. "I really hope we can find a peaceful and political solution," U.S. Secretary of State James Baker said in a TV interview last week. But, he added, "I'm frankly not as optimistic about that possibility now as I was before Christmas."

The military planners were hardly counting on the politicians for an eleventh-hour reprieve. Having already conscripted much of Iraq's able-bodied adult population into the armed forces, Baghdad last week began drafting all 17-year-old males. According to the Pentagon, Saddam Hussein poured an additional 20,000 troops into the Kuwaiti theater. That brought the total Iraqi force there to 530,000; the U.S. and its allies will have 630,000 troops in place by mid-February. Bracing for a battle that might reach all the way to Baghdad, the Iraqi government advised foreign diplomats to leave the capital and to set up temporary missions in the city of Ramadi, 60 miles to the west.

Meanwhile the anti-Saddam coalition continued to cover the Saudi sands with soldiers and bristling weaponry. The Saudi government belatedly distributed gas masks and evacuation maps to the country's citizens. NATO dispatched 42 jet fighters from Italy, Germany and Belgium to Turkey, which shares a 200- mile border with Iraq. Officially, the contingent's purpose is to help defend Turkey in the event of an Iraqi assault. But the airplanes could also reinforce the threat of a second front opening up in Iraq's north.

The booster for Turkey and other allied preparations were meant not only to ensure a successful war effort but also to try to avert the battle by frightening Saddam into retreat. Bush's brinkmanship strategy assumes three things: 1) Saddam wants to survive, 2) he can change his mind if he thinks his survival depends on it, and 3) he will not act until the gun is at his head, with the hammer cocked and the trigger finger already squeezing.

At the same time, Washington knows it must not appear overeager to fire the first round; hence the latest offer of talks. Originally, President Bush proposed that Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz meet with him in Washington, after which U.S. Secretary of State Baker would confer with Saddam in Baghdad. But Saddam cleverly offered to receive Baker on Jan. 12, just three days before the deadline the U.N. has established for Iraq to leave Kuwait or face eviction by force. Bush replied that Saddam was trying to stretch out the grace period and insisted on an appointment on or before Jan. 3. Baghdad complained in response that protocol demanded that Saddam choose the meeting time, since he is senior to Baker.

Once Jan. 3 came and went, both parties could be accused of rejecting what Bush called "the final step for peace" because of a trifling squabble over dates. Anxious not to be seen as the side that blinked, the Bush Administration offered what was supposed to look like a totally new idea: a Baker-Aziz meeting in Europe.

That plan, however, had its own handicap. Washington's rationale for the originally proposed Baker-Saddam meeting was that the Iraqi leader, counseled only by sycophants who were reluctant to bring him bad tidings, was not getting the message that the U.S. was dead serious about taking him on. The tough-talking Baker was to deliver that news. But now the Secretary is to meet only with one of the "sycophants." "You're talking to the monkey, you're not talking to the organ-grinder himself," lamented Les Aspin, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. The encounter with Saddam might yet come off. Bush last week ruled out such a meeting. But should the Iraqis, after a smooth Baker-Aziz get-together, invite Baker to Baghdad, Washington would find it difficult to decline.

If Baker and Aziz stick to their publicly stated agendas, it is difficult to imagine how their meeting will achieve anything. Aziz said last week he would use the talks to press the cause of the Palestinians, a subject Washington refuses to link formally to the gulf crisis. Washington meanwhile continued to insist that Baker would offer Aziz nothing more than an ultimatum: Leave Kuwait, or lose it in war. "There will be nothing in our message indicating that we are ready to float any kind of deal," said a senior Bush Administration official. If that is the case, said an Iraqi official, "the meeting will last only five minutes."

Diplomatic probes were also coming from the Europeans. At an emergency * session in Luxembourg late last week, the E.C. foreign ministers signaled their own interest in talking with Iraq. That meeting had been proposed by Germany and seconded by France, both of which are particularly worried that options for peace have been neglected in the effort to gird for battle. "War in the gulf," said German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, "is by no means unavoidable."

The emergence of a separate E.C. initiative inevitably raised concerns about a rift developing within the anti-Saddam coalition. Such a split might leave the hard-line U.S. and Britain, which acts as the brakes on the E.C.'s free- lance tendencies, heading up one side and France and Germany, which have shown an impulse to dangle rewards as a means of enticing Iraq's withdrawal, leading the other. Both U.S. and E.C. officials deny that there is any divergence of opinion, and indeed the coalition does look solid for now.

The E.C. foreign ministers underscored that point in their communique last week, rejecting "any initiative tending to promote partial solutions," a reference to a less than complete withdrawal by Iraq. They also disapproved of attempts to link an Iraqi pullout to "other problems," meaning the Israeli- occupied territories and Lebanon. The foreign ministers stressed, however, that the E.C. is committed to contributing "actively to a settlement" of those issues once the current crisis has unraveled. That was merely a bolder version of the Bush Administration's own doublespeak on the topic of linkage.

To some extent, France's push for a separate E.C. effort reflects its penchant for pursuing a separate path, whatever the destination. That tendency was evident in the trip to Baghdad last week of Michel Vauzelle, a former spokesman for Mitterrand and head of the French Parliament's foreign affairs committee. Vauzelle insisted he was not representing Mitterrand, but the President did publicly approve of the mission. In any case, according to an official Iraqi report, Vauzelle's session with Aziz came to nothing.

The French fondness for la difference was also manifest in a peace plan Paris unveiled in Luxembourg. It contained two elements that are offensive to Washington: 1) the implication that Baghdad need only promise to leave Kuwait to forestall an attack, and 2) an implied linkage of the kind Saddam seeks -- that is, a guarantee that once the pullout is complete, all outstanding issues of the region will be addressed in an international forum. Apparently, however, Iraq did not see a rift that was exploitable; at week's end Aziz turned down an invitation from the E.C. ministers for a separate meeting.

Other recent diplomatic efforts are still more objectionable to the Bush Administration and are thus unlikely to bring meaningful results. King Hussein peddled his proposed solution during his spin through Europe. He offered a face-saving plan that might, for instance, allow Saddam to retain the strategically placed Bubiyan and Warbah islands, as well as the tip of the banana-shaped Rumaila oilfield that dips slightly into Kuwait from Iraq. Washington says a liberated Kuwait could make these and any other concessions to Baghdad it chooses but vehemently opposes rewarding Iraq's aggression with such promises before a pullout.

The oddest assemblage of would-be peacemakers gathered last week in the Libyan seaside town of Misurata. Voicing fears of a Third World War, Libyan leader Gaddafi persuaded Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Syrian President Hafez Assad to meet with him and the military ruler of the Sudan, Lieut. General Omar Hassan Bashir. While Egypt and Syria are firmly in the anti- Saddam camp, Libya and the Sudan have tended to sympathize with Baghdad. According to a Mubarak confidant, nothing was accomplished at Misurata, but the Egyptian and Syrian Presidents may have convinced their counterparts to adopt a more critical line on Iraq's behavior in Kuwait. Still, it is unlikely to affect peace prospects, since neither the Libyan leader nor the Sudanese holds any sway over Saddam.

Nor does anyone else, apparently. The problem remains what it was when Bush first proposed a Baker-Saddam meeting: the Iraqi leader is just not getting the message that the U.S. is serious about sending in its formidable Desert Shield battalions to enforce the U.N. ultimatum. According to a source close to Saddam, it isn't that the Iraqi President doesn't understand Washington but that even at this late date he strongly doubts that Bush will actually resort to force. "He doesn't feel he is in a weak position," said the source. In that case, the meeting in Geneva may be short indeed.

With reporting by Dean Fischer/Cairo, J.F.O. McAllister/Washington and Adam Zagorin/Luxembourg