The Waiting Game

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

"When you assemble a number of men, to have the advantage of their joint wisdom, you inevitably assemble with those men all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interests and their selfish views. From such an assembly, can a perfect production be expected?"

-- Benjamin Franklin, addressing the American Constitutional Convention

The old sage's question could apply equally well to the global coalition that the U.S. has put together to oppose Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. And the answer is the same: perfection cannot be expected, but its absence is an acceptable price to pay for the strength that comes from the support of a wildly diverse alliance.

Nonetheless the price is high. American and allied officials sometimes seem to spend more energy soothing one another than plotting strategy against Saddam Hussein. "There is no end to this coalition politics," sighs an American policymaker. "It's like a marriage; you have to constantly work at it." As in a marriage, too, unity can sometimes be preserved only by tortured compromises that may be storing up danger for the future.

Standout illustration: George Bush's speech to the United Nations General Assembly last week. The President tried to send contrasting messages to two groups of allies. To relative soft-liners (France, the Soviet Union, several Arab states), he wanted to demonstrate that he was trying his best to offer Saddam Hussein a face-saving way to withdraw from Kuwait. That might also serve eventually to win more support for future military action against Iraq; the President would be able to argue that he had first exhausted all possibilities for a peaceful solution. Simultaneously, though, Bush wanted to tell hard-liners (Britain, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, many members of the U.S. Congress) that Saddam would not be rewarded for his aggression.

Bush repeated the core demand of nine U.N. resolutions passed over the past two months: Iraq must withdraw from Kuwait, totally and unconditionally. But "in the aftermath," said the President, "there may be opportunities for Iraq and Kuwait to settle their differences permanently . . . and for all the states and the peoples of the region to settle the conflict that divides the Arabs from Israel." The hint of future Iraqi-Kuwaiti negotiations on such points as border disputes, ownership of oil fields and Iraqi access to the Persian Gulf was not new. But the mention of Israel seemed to contradict two months of indignant refusals from Bush to consider any link between Iraq's occupation of Kuwait and Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.

Although Bush blandly denied that he had made any such link, the denials contradicted the plain sense of his words. "There was a new pitch and nuance to the U.N. speech," acknowledged a well-placed Administration official. "If our coalition succeeds in getting Iraq out of Kuwait, there may be just the nucleus of something we can work with on the Arab-Israeli issue."

While Israeli officials said they accepted Bush's assurance that there was no linkage, some are worried that if Iraq is defeated, the U.S. will try to compensate its Arab allies at Israel's expense. Since Israel is most unlikely to pull out of the West Bank and Gaza, the U.S. is in danger of implicitly promising something that it will be unable to deliver. Alternatively, Washington risks enabling Saddam Hussein to pose as an Arab hero who finally forced action on behalf of the Palestinians.

For the moment, however, Bush's speech did serve to strengthen the anti- Saddam alliance. Arab governments were delighted by a chance to counter Saddam's incessant propaganda that by lining up with the U.S. they are also siding with Israel. From the U.N. rostrum, Saudi Arabian Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal argued that it was America's allies who were now making progress on the Palestinian problem while Iraq was obstructing such progress by dividing the Arab world.

Bush's words moved the U.S. position a bit closer to that of France, helping to heal what had briefly looked like an ugly split. In his own U.N. speech two weeks ago, President Francois Mitterrand had hinted that Iraq might only have to promise to pull out of Kuwait -- not actually do it -- in order to gain negotiations with Kuwait and progress toward an Arab-Israeli settlement. That spurred a prompt bid from Saddam Hussein for separate French-Iraqi negotiations, which Mitterrand righteously spurned. His government, meanwhile, hastened to assure allies that France still supported the U.N. resolutions calling for an unconditional Iraqi pullout.

Mitterrand became the first Western leader to tour the gulf since the crisis broke. He dropped in on Saudi King Fahd (who was quoted by a French spokesman as saying of economic sanctions, "All is very well, but when do we strike?") and leaders of the United Arab Emirates, and spent a night on a French destroyer on embargo-enforcement duty in the gulf. The French press predicted that Mitterrand would soon order another 7,000 ground troops to Saudi Arabia, reinforcing an initial detachment of 4,000.

Another diplomatic tourist in the Middle East stirred more apprehension in Washington. Yevgeni Primakov, a Soviet expert on the Middle East, visited Baghdad and the Jordanian capital of Amman as a personal representative of President Mikhail Gorbachev. Ostensibly his main purpose in Iraq was to arrange for the departure of 5,174 Soviet citizens, presumably including some military advisers, whose continued presence has been an irritant to the U.S. But Gorbachev's press secretary Vitali Ignatenko, visiting the U.S., spoke to TIME about a possible Middle East conference in which "all the problems of the region could be resolved as a package, including the Palestinian problem." That is definitely not a message the U.S. wants Saddam to hear.

On the other hand, Ignatenko said the dispatch of Soviet troops to join the international force confronting Iraq "is not ruled out." He and other Soviet spokesmen, however, have laid down tough conditions: there must be a U.N. resolution authorizing the use of force; the troops must be designated U.N. troops serving under a U.N. flag. Finally, says Ignatenko, "the commander of the U.N. troops should not necessarily be American." That would be an extremely difficult condition for the U.S. to grant, since it has contributed the great bulk of the international force, but putting Soviet troops under an American commander would be at least an equally bitter pill for the Soviet military.

A U.N. resolution authorizing the use of force, however, is something the ) U.S. is exploring, though for the moment not pushing. It would further turn up the heat on Saddam and might spur him either to withdraw from Kuwait or to launch a pre-emptive strike that would justify an allied counterattack. But dovish allies want other options pursued first. In addition, the U.S. and its allies would need ironclad assurances that China would not veto the resolution in the Security Council, and they have yet to begin seriously exploring conditions for Beijing's approval. The U.S. is counting on other U.N. resolutions to help cement the coalition and build momentum against Iraq and is likely with its allies to propose several of them: to condemn Iraq's looting and destruction of Kuwait; to demand that Iraq not only withdraw but also pay reparations; and to make countries that help Iraq evade the economic embargo subject to sanctions themselves.

On the whole, American officials contend that the coalition so far has held together remarkably well. They note, for example, that sanctions usually begin to break down rather quickly but that the current alliance has drawn the embargo against Iraq ever tighter. The job, however, is far from done. The U.S. may have to hold the coalition together for months or even years, either to wage effective war against Iraq or to contain a Saddam Hussein who would remain a menace even after a withdrawal from Kuwait. That is a job that will guarantee continuing headaches. But there is no alternative if the confrontation with Iraq is indeed to become, as Washington hopes, the model for the workings of a New World Order of law and peace.

With reporting by Dan Goodgame/Washington and Frederick Ungeheuer/Paris