SLAMMING SADDAM AGAIN

By Johanna McGeary

Before missiles started flying, letters were flying. On Aug. 22 the leader of a Kurdish faction penned a "Your Excellency" plea to Saddam Hussein, the man who gassed 5,000 Kurds to death eight years ago, inviting the Iraqi dictator's army to enter the Kurds' safe haven to knock out another Kurdish faction. On Aug. 28 Bill Clinton dispatched a stern diplomatic demarche to Baghdad warning Saddam not to try any such thing. Three days later he fired off another "don't go" advisory, and White House advisers faxed a four-page decision memo recommending military retaliation to the presidential campaign bus in Dyersburg, Tennessee. And last Wednesday, after setting off a sizable Mideast crisis, the very first Kurdish letter writer conveyed an all-is-forgiven missive to Washington, saying he did not want this to rupture his relations with the U.S.

Crises in the Gulf are always complicated, but this one has proved byzantine beyond the norm. The Kurds of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (K.D.P.) are fighting the Kurds of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (P.U.K.) with the help of Iraq and Iran respectively. At the same time, both factions are living under the protection of the U.S. Saddam's Republican Guard attacked Kurdish towns in northern Iraq, and high above the Persian Gulf, aging U.S. B-52s launched computer-guided cruise missiles at military installations far to the south. At what seemed to be the end of it all, Saddam improved his political position while the U.S. says it circumscribed his military capability. American critics grumbled that Clinton had not done enough; foreign friends complained that he had done too much.

In fact, what flared up last week was two rather separate wars, connected by the thuggish intentions of Saddam Hussein. War A, let's call it, is a nasty struggle for autonomy, power, money and influence among the fractious Kurds in northern Iraq and the sometime-friend, sometime-foe regional powers of Iraq, Iran and Turkey. An alphabet soup of rival Kurds locked in a cynical game of cooperation and betrayal want independence but fight each other more ferociously than anyone else. As the overseer of the Kurd safe haven established after the 1991 Gulf War, the U.S. is only tangentially involved, its main interest in the messy struggle being to provide a counterweight--or deliver a coup de grace--against Saddam. Handed an engraved invitation to regain some power in his own northern territory, Saddam saw his opportunity and took it.

That move simultaneously enabled him to score a delicious hit against his primary enemy, the U.S. This is War B, the one that preoccupies Washington, the five-year-old battle of attrition against Saddam. It has involved an unremitting test of wills in which the Iraqi leader, driven by powerful motives of survival and revenge, regularly seeks to frustrate or lash out at the U.S. while Washington strives to contain his disruptive ambitions. Whenever Saddam sends out his tanks, American planes and missiles are bound to respond: force must always be met with force under the unwritten rules of engagement heavily determined by American politics. This war will end only with the demise of Iraq's resilient bully-boy leader, and as last week's exchange of fire proved, it is far from over.

So there was Bill Clinton in the tricky position of juggling two conflicting conflicts. They intruded on him just as he was riding high aboard his campaign train and atop the popularity polls. He thought he had swept pesky foreign policy problems under the rug at least until Nov. 5, blocking his Republican challenger, World War II veteran Bob Dole, from laying claim to superior global leadership. Among other things, Saddam's irrepressible potential for disruption raised the old questions about Clinton as Commander in Chief.

While domestic pressures bore down on him to hit back hard at Saddam, much of the pressure from European and Middle Eastern allies who once formed part of the 32-nation anti-Saddam coalition was to lay off Iraq for conducting a distasteful action many nevertheless judged legal and properly sovereign. In that pinch, Clinton chose to launch 44 cruise missiles at Saddam's air-defense systems south of Baghdad and to extend the southern no-fly zone 70 miles to the very gates of his capital. Clinton hoped that would be strong enough to satisfy domestic demands but not tough enough to alienate America's allies altogether or plunge the U.S. into the Kurdish morass. No wonder the jury is out on who won.

KURD VS. KURD VS. IRAQ VS. IRAN

In this war, Saddam has to judge his lightning raid into the north a notable success. The actual fighting involved was quite brief and simple. On Saturday, Aug. 31, he responded to the Kurdish invitation by sending 40,000 troops to the town of Erbil, then controlled by the other Kurdish faction. Within hours, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan was routed and the town handed over to Iraq's new Kurd allies, the Kurdistan Democratic Party. Saddam's forces reportedly rounded up and killed dozens of Iraqi defectors, blew up the broadcasting facilities of the main opposition Iraqi National Congress and even destroyed its desktop-publishing equipment. By last Friday the invasion seemed to be over as most of Iraq's tanks rolled home toward their barracks. But Saddam left behind a powerful cadre of spies and goons to reassert his authority.

He could tick off a neat list of accomplishments. He had made at least a temporary alliance with a major Kurdish faction working against his rule and had probably squelched for good any united Kurdish opposition. He had countered Iran's attempts to gain influence in the north. In a fortuitous benefit he had also chased away a handful of clandestine cia operatives in the Kurdish zone overseeing a covert campaign, expanded in January, to overthrow him. Most important for himself, Saddam had flexed his supposedly atrophied military muscles, defied the West and reminded friend and foe alike that he was still a power to be reckoned with.

All it cost him was a delay in the start of a United Nations arrangement to let him, under strict international supervision, sell $2 billion worth of oil every six months to buy food and medicine for Iraq. The U.S. hopes to stop the oil-for-food swap for good, but almost no one else at the U.N. agrees and the freeze could prove temporary. Saddam may not really care. The deal forbade his government from involvement in the distribution of food and medical supplies without U.N. monitoring; he saw that as a galling infringement on his sovereignty.

As for the Kurds, it was back to normal: Kurds fighting Kurds. Their quest for independence is a depressing tale of disasters, deceit, betrayals, exploitation and missed opportunities going back centuries, but the part that matters here began in 1991. Buoyed by Saddam's humiliating defeat in Kuwait that year, they rebelled, hoping at last to gain the separate homeland that has perpetually eluded more than 20 million ethnic Kurds spread across Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Syria. The revolt failed when Saddam turned his surviving corps of helicopter gunships on them, and they fled in despair into the northern mountains.

There the Desert Storm coalition dispatched U.S., British and French air power to set up a virtually autonomous enclave for the Kurds, theirs to govern, by and large, themselves. For a couple of years it worked: the Kurds held their first ever democratic elections and set up a parliament in their nominative capital of Erbil. But just as predictably, it all fell apart when the old internecine feuds resumed.

On one side are the followers of Massoud Barzani in the K.D.P., strong in tribal tradition, who control the lucrative smuggling routes into Turkey. On the other are many urban intellectuals who follow Jalal Talabani and his P.U.K. The two men despise each other and disagree fundamentally on how to achieve self-rule: Barzani would accept autonomy within Iraq, while Talabani would settle only for full independence. Perhaps worse, Talabani, whose territory is squeezed between Iraq and Iran, is jealous of the rich "customs tax" Barzani collects from the truckers surreptitiously ferrying oil and goods between Turkey and Iraq in violation of U.N. economic sanctions.

Their disagreements regularly degenerate into warfare. As protector-in-chief over the past five years, the U.S. has exerted its diplomacy and spent at least $900 million to bring the Kurds together as an effective anti-Saddam force. But after every U.S.-brokered cease-fire, fighting resumed; 4,000 Kurds have died in such vicious brawls.

Then in late July a new player entered the picture. Iran--plagued by cross-border raids from a faction of Iranian Kurds in Talabani's territory--launched an incursion with the agreement of Talabani, who needed money and weapons for his campaign against Barzani. In exchange, Tehran left him a large cache of weapons. That, said Barzani, is what scared him into his unthinkable alliance with Saddam. Still, Kurdish alliances can change in minutes. Barzani has already passed a message to Secretary of State Warren Christopher, saying he threw in with the Kurds' old tormentor only to counterbalance Iranian military intervention on Talabani's side. Now he wants the U.S. to come back and make peace among the Kurds. That would be a fool's mission, since many Kurds were revolted by an alliance, however momentarily useful, with the Butcher of Baghdad.

U.S. interests, declared Secretary of Defense William Perry, "are not tied to which party prevails" in the Kurds' conflict. While a few pundits and rivals will blame Clinton for failing to unify the benighted Kurds or come to their direct aid last week, the Administration smartly opted to keep the U.S. out of that snake pit by refusing to engage Saddam militarily on Kurdish turf. Not only were the logistics of fighting there tough--no use of ground troops, high risk to pilots--the political implications with Turkey and Iran were even tougher. Having failed to mold the Kurds into an effective scourge against Saddam, the U.S. must now live with Iraq's newfound power in the north.

THE U.S. VS. SADDAM

For Americans this is the war that really counts, and Clinton was expected to react with firm skill. Despite his preoccupation with politics, the President ordered his foreign policy aides to get cracking on diplomacy to cool off the Kurds. As Iraqi forces moved north, Clinton fired off a strong warning to Saddam that military intervention in Kurd affairs was "not an action he could take without paying a price." To no avail. On the eve of the Iraqi attack, the Administration was issuing public denunciations of Saddam, and by the time his troops reached Erbil the next day the President had fixed on the U.S. response.

Some counterstrike was practically a political reflex: Clinton would have to do something militarily or suffer damaging charges that he was too weak to stand up to the Iraqi tyrant. In this, the electoral imperative meshed perfectly with the opinions of his policy advisers. Whatever the legal niceties, it was clear to everyone in Washington that Saddam had violated Iraq's postwar rules of the road and had to be slapped down.

The specific actions Clinton selected required more subtle calibration. He rejected more robust but riskier attacks on Baghdad installations or the invading Iraqi forces. The U.S. would strike, as Perry explained, on ground of its own choosing in the south. Washington would be able to expand its longer-term strategic advantage by taking control of a larger share of Iraq's airspace, a move that would also humiliate Saddam in front of his own military. Thus, the decisions to fire two volleys of high-tech, low-casualty cruise missiles against 15 air-defense sites south of Baghdad.

In truth, the Administration had its fingers crossed that its admittedly off-kilter response would suffice. On Wednesday Clinton proclaimed that "our mission has been achieved," while avoiding defining either the mission or the achievement. Officials warned that further reckless acts from Saddam would provoke more reprisals, but the main purpose had been accomplished: "to make Saddam pay a price" for every "act of violence and aggression."

Just how high a price is a different matter. The Pentagon acknowledged that the cruise missiles homed in on only 40% of Iraq's fixed air defenses. But that equipment wasn't of much use to the grounded Iraqi air force anyway. The point of the expanded no-fly area is to make it even harder for Saddam to venture south against the crucial oil lands of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. "Iraq," gloats a senior Air Force officer, "is the incredible shrinking country" now that allied planes rule the skies over the critical mass of its terrain. And, says Geoffrey Kemp, a former Reagan National Security staff member, they're going to be "buzzing bloody Baghdad every day. It's like a psychological noose tightening around Saddam."

Well, maybe. Clinton defined his success by claiming that Iraq's leader was now "strategically worse off." Most analysts say the practical impact on Saddam is minimal and any longer-term effect hard to gauge. More important is how Clinton scored in the ongoing U.S. vs. Iraq psychodrama. At home the President did just fine. He shut off carping about "fecklessness" from the Dole camp and forced his rival to declare support for the military operation. A TIME/CNN poll gave Clinton a 69% approval rating for his missile reprisal.

But Clinton's Gulf diplomacy is in trouble. By conducting the raid inside Iraq's sovereign territory, Saddam engineered discomfiting divisions in the allied coalition, where cohesion has already been dissolving as many member nations lose their anti-Saddam resolve. Secretary of State Warren Christopher could not persuade France to join in patrolling the expanded no-fly zone, and the U.N. Security Council, blocked by Russia, could not agree on a resolution condemning the Iraqi attack.

In the fuzzier category of credibility, the U.S. may have lost more than it gained. Those eager to remove Saddam dismissed the U.S. strikes as mere pinpricks. Most countries considered them an unwarranted example of U.S. globo-copping, self-serving unilateral military action dictated by election-year politics. The suffering of ordinary Iraqis after five years of embargo has recast the U.S. as the bully and Iraq as the victim.

The crisis has turned the spotlight unflatteringly on Clinton's whole policy of dual containment, intended to isolate both Iraq and the other rogue state of Iran. It requires a costly and highly visible concentration of U.S. military might ($40 billion a year by one estimate) that is no longer so welcome in conservative and often xenophobic Gulf states. Meanwhile, Saddam remains uncowed and free to mount new disruptions, to defy the U.S. wherever he can. While Washington has curbed his appetite for external adventures, it has failed to control his misbehavior at home. He has buffed up his tough-guy image and maintains an unabated fever for revenge. His hold on power seems as durable as ever.

The limitations on U.S. policy are the direct legacy of the Gulf War, when the Bush Administration allowed Saddam to survive with his military machine intact, hoping some other force would providentially get rid of the meddlesome beast. None did. Yet if containment doesn't work very well, no one has come up with a better idea. Europeans advise a "critical dialogue" that would somehow persuade the renegade to mend his ways. Republicans laid out a five-point plan that was meant more to raise the bar on the President for decisive action than it was to offer substantial policy prescriptions.

Logic says Saddam will strike out again and again, requiring further and further retaliation from the U.S. "We know he's going to knock on that door from time to time to see if there's anybody out there who still cares," says a senior White House official. "He's got to recognize that we're still here and we ain't going away." For the moment, the U.S. still holds the balance of power in the Gulf and has proved it will use that power alone if necessary. That is making a virtue of necessity; anything closer to stability may be out of reach.

--Reported by Dean Fischer, J.F.O. McAllister and Mark Thompson/Washington and Scott MacLeod/Amman

With reporting by DEAN FISCHER, J.F.O. MCALLISTER AND MARK THOMPSON/WASHINGTON AND SCOTT MACLEOD/AMMAN