The Battlefront: Saddam's Endgame

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

This was a bombshell? At first glance it looked like a warmed-over version of an offer Saddam Hussein had made as early as Aug. 12, 10 days after his troops overran Kuwait -- but this time with even more conditions for an Iraqi pullout from the ravaged emirate. Iraq demanded not just an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza but also the removal of all allied troops from the Persian Gulf, including naval forces that have been on patrol there for decades. Plus forgiveness of all Iraqi debts. Plus reparations for the destruction caused by allied bombing. Plus . . .

But yes, it was a bombshell. Not because the offer has the remotest chance of being accepted. President Bush promptly called it a "cruel hoax," and British Prime Minister John Major redundantly labeled it a "bogus sham." But Iraq for once was pointedly not boasting about making American and other allied soldiers drown in their own blood, not spurning all talk of a cease- fire with contempt, not claiming that Kuwait is and always will be the country's 19th province.

Instead Saddam seemed to be exploring how he might get out of the war while there is something left of his army and regime, not to mention his skin. The statement, issued in the name of the five-man Revolutionary Command Council, declared Iraq's "readiness to deal" with U.N. Security Council Resolution No. 660. That resolution, adopted the very day of the invasion, is the basic document calling on Iraq to get out of Kuwait. And the long string of conditions attached to the withdrawal that the U.N. had insisted be unconditional might well be an initial bid designed to be taken little more seriously than a bazaar merchant's opening price quotation.

The timing seemed almost as significant as the wording. The offer, broadcast by Baghdad Radio last Friday, came just as allied correspondents in the Saudi desert were making book on how soon the long-awaited U.S.-led ground offensive would begin. Most were guessing a day or two; a week was about the longest wait anyone expected. The journalists were reading signs of an imminent attack that must have been just as obvious to Saddam's generals. Among them: American bombing was moving closer and closer to the Iraqi front lines; the allies were using new weapons, including fuel-air bombs, to blast paths through the minefields that soldiers and tanks would have to cross in an initial assault; and weather conditions were close to ideal. Late last week there began a period of dark nights with little or no moonlight (favorable to allied troops, whose night-fighting equipment and training are vastly superior to the Iraqis') and high tides (good for a possible amphibious assault by U.S. Marines on the Kuwaiti coast). Saddam met with his corps commanders last week, apparently to decide how to deal with the coming assault. Some allied commanders had expected diversionary Iraqi ground attacks, but they got what appeared to be a diversionary diplomatic offensive instead.

Saddam had long boasted of his eagerness to start "the mother of battles" on the ground. It offered him the chance of inflicting such heavy casualties on the allies that they would settle for a compromise peace. But the quickening pace of the allied air assault, and its increasing focus on the troops in Iraq, their weapons and fortifications, have changed the odds just in the last week or two. Marine Brigadier General Richard Neal, briefing journalists in Riyadh, estimated last week that bombing had destroyed roughly a third of the tanks, other armor and artillery once deployed in Kuwait: 1,300 of 4,280 tanks; 800 of 2,870 armored personnel carriers; 1,100 of 3,110 artillery pieces.

Extrapolating from those figures, and after consulting with military experts, TIME estimates the bombing might have killed or wounded anywhere from 50,000 to 100,000 soldiers, out of 546,000 the Pentagon estimates were deployed when the war began a month ago (the Pentagon count has fallen to an even 500,000, but it refuses to say why). Military authorities believe that a force suffering a loss of weapons and men on such a scale begins to lose cohesion and fighting efficiency as well. Morale too, maybe: the Iraqis are being hurt by a growing trickle of desertions across the Saudi lines, and defectors say that others are throwing down their weapons and going north toward home. Said one Iraqi soldier in a group of 12 who surrendered to Egyptian forces last week: "Every night it is bomb, bomb, bomb. When we fought Iran, we had breakfast, lunch and dinner every day. Here there is no water, hardly anything to eat."

The prospect thus arises that a coalition ground assault could put an end to Saddam's army, his government and his position in the Middle East more quickly and at less cost to the U.S. and its allies than had seemed likely even a short time ago. That prospect in turn prompts three main lines of speculation on Iraq's motives in making last week's withdrawal-but offer:

Saddam is trying for a breathing space. He hopes to hold off the ground war and possibly suspend or lessen the bombing as well. The idea: Bush and his allies would not want to lay themselves open to the charge that they greatly, and unnecessarily, accelerated the bloodshed by rushing into a major campaign just when peace seemed attainable. A delay -- better yet, a cease-fire -- would give the Iraqis a chance to regroup for more fighting while haggling over terms. In fact, reports circulated at week's end that Washington had agreed to a request by Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev that it hold off on the land offensive at least until Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz visits Moscow this Monday.

Iraq is attempting once again to win by diplomacy what it cannot achieve on the battlefield. Saddam was already scoring some propaganda successes by playing up on world television screens the mangled bodies of civilians killed by American bombs in an air-raid shelter in Baghdad. The U.S. insisted it had evidence that the underground bunker had functioned as a military command-and- control center and that Washington had not known that civilians also used it. Nonetheless, growing revulsion against the bombing campaign had prompted some Arab nations and ostensible neutrals such as China to push for an immediate cease-fire. That probably would allow Iraq to stall endlessly on a more permanent settlement, figuring the allies would have a hard time justifying resumption of the war.

If that is in fact Saddam's game, it could backfire. Bush might actually start the ground offensive in a few days to head off pressure for a cease-fire that would leave Iraq in control of Kuwait. The Kuwaiti government in exile and, according to British sources, the Saudi and Egyptian governments -- plus London itself -- late last week were pressing the President to do exactly that. But Iraq had some prospects of winning diplomatic help from a far more powerful nation than any it had courted before: the Soviet Union.

Baghdad's Friday bombshell came two days after Yevgeny Primakov, Gorbachev's personal emissary, returned from a visit with Saddam, saying he had glimpsed a "ray of hope." The Revolutionary Command Council statement said Baghdad was offering withdrawal "in appreciation of the Soviet initiative," and Gorbachev, in turn, asserted that he was looking forward to a clarification from Aziz. A delegation of three foreign ministers from the European Community, led by Jacques Poos of Luxembourg, was due in Moscow over the weekend to get a firsthand Soviet report on the talks with Iraq. A Washington official sourly referred to the proceedings as a "mini peace conference."

The Soviets have repeatedly reassured the U.S. and its allies that they are loyal to U.N. resolutions demanding complete and unconditional Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait and have only been trying to persuade Baghdad that it must comply as the first step toward any kind of peace. But strong suspicions linger among the allies that Moscow, eager to preserve its superpower role and a strong part in the diplomacy of the Middle East, is trying to broker a settlement that would save a good deal more of the hide of its old client Saddam than the U.S. and its European and Arab allies would want.

Saddam knows he has been beaten and is casting about for the best terms he can get. A month of unrelenting aerial bombardment has so weakened his once menacing military machine that he no longer has any hope of stalemating an allied ground offensive; one way or another, he is going to have to get out of Kuwait. If he pulls out now, he can probably stay in power, save a good part of his army and even emerge an Arab hero for having held out so long against the battering of a superpower and its allies. If he can negotiate some terms to soften the sting -- a Middle East peace conference, for example, that would enable him to claim he had forced the West to do something about the Palestinian problem -- so much the better. If he tries to hold out even another month, however, he might well lose everything.

While this idea may seem to conflict with the extravagant conditions attached to Baghdad's offer, it rings true to many people mindful of Middle Eastern bargaining traditions (traditions, for that matter, that are scarcely unknown in the West, where many a labor negotiation begins with exorbitant union demands and a skinflint management offer that both sides know perfectly well are a charade). The Baghdad announcement marks "the beginning of the endgame," said William Quandt, a former chief Middle East analyst at the National Security Council. Georgia Democrat Sam Nunn, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, agreed: "In the Arab world, you always have to be prepared for bargaining, and this may be the opening gambit." And Saddam, for all his intense stubbornness, could reverse course overnight if that seems necessary or desirable. Witness his blithe return to Iran last summer of the pitifully little territory Iraq had gained during eight supremely bloody years of war between the two countries.

Wittingly or not, Saddam appeared to put greater pressure on himself to end the war too. The broadcast of the Revolutionary Command Council statement initially set off wild celebrations in Baghdad. Auto horns honked, people embraced each other in the streets and soldiers fired automatic weapons into the air, apparently in the belief that the war was as good as over. But as word of the long list of conditions circulated, the mood turned dejected, if not sullen. As an iron-fisted dictator who rules through fear, Saddam is immune to pressure from any Iraqi peace movement; there is none. But even he must be concerned with morale, and the crowd reactions indicate he might have difficulty rallying his people to endure still more bombing after having given them even a moment of hope for peace.

None of this means that peace is at hand. Even if Saddam tries to come up with a formula for withdrawal from Kuwait that would satisfy the allies, there is no assurance he can do so. Bush, Major and French President Francois Mitterrand all stressed last week that the U.N. demands for immediate and unconditional withdrawal mean exactly that, and they will settle for nothing less. Moreover, said all three, promises will not suffice; until Saddam actually begins a massive withdrawal, the war, and the bombing specifically, will continue as if nothing had happened.

Bush suggested another way to end the war. If the Iraqi army and people were "to take matters into their own hands to force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside," he said, Iraq could quickly "rejoin the family of peace-loving nations." That finally put on the record something that had long been obvious: Washington would really like to get rid of Saddam and his regime altogether. It would settle for a complete pullout from Kuwait because it has no choice: the U.N. resolutions under which the allies are fighting specify that and nothing more as the aim. Achieving even that, however, might still take weeks of a hard-fought ground campaign.

On the other hand, Saddam's hopes of winning the war politically -- even his megalomania never foresaw anything better militarily than a bloody stalemate -- have steadily eroded. His Scud attacks have failed to provoke Israel into retaliation and are a declining menace. Two missiles fired last week at Saudi Arabia broke apart in the sky; two more that landed in southern Israel Saturday caused no reported injuries. His Persian Gulf oil spills have incited more world condemnation than fear, and his threats of triggering worldwide terrorism remain unrealized so far. Well before last week's withdrawal statement, the tone of Baghdad's propaganda had changed from swaggering bluster about blood and death to pleas for sympathy for Iraq as the victim of a savage bombing campaign.

That line had some effect. For Saddam, the U.S. hit on the air-raid shelter that, Baghdad said, killed several hundred civilians was manna from propaganda heaven. For millions of people around the world, pictures of the broken bodies dug out of the rubble drove home the horror of a war that until then had seemed, at least on the TV screens, to be rather tame. One of the minor mysteries of the statement about potential withdrawal, in fact, was why Iraq diverted attention away from the civilian deaths before the reaction to them had quite built to a climax.

That reaction would not have saved Saddam in any case, though. Strong as the Arab anger was, it was not quite sufficient to shake the governments (Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Syria) that have made major troop commitments to the coalition. The U.S. and its European allies suffered little if any public backlash against the war. In retrospect, generals played down too much the inevitability of civilian deaths in any bombing campaign. But Westerners, while shocked, seemed to accept the explanations that the U.S. was not directly targeting civilians; that Saddam in contrast was deliberately putting them in harm's way by placing military installations in schools, homes and residential areas; and that much of the tragedy resulted because civilian and military targets are often one and the same. An obvious example: knocking out a country's electric grid cuts off the power to army bases, airports and military computers, but also to schools, homes and hospitals, and the engineers killed in the bombing of generating plants are likely to be civilians.

The imperfect success of the propaganda campaign leaves Iraq with one big hope for a face-saving way out of the war: Soviet diplomacy. Moscow has not only gone along with the U.S. demand that Iraq get out of Kuwait completely and unconditionally but also helped draft the U.N. resolution authorizing the use of force if Saddam did not comply by Jan. 15. That, however, was when glasnost and democratization were in full flower, and Eduard Shevardnadze, a professed friend of the U.S., was Foreign Minister.

Since Gorbachev turned sharply back toward authoritarianism and Shevardnadze resigned, the Kremlin has seemed to be playing a double game. In the past two weeks, Gorbachev has complained that the U.S. bombing of Iraq was going beyond the U.N. mandate to liberate Kuwait and threatening a wider, out-of-control war -- but simultaneously that Iraq had brought the bombs down on its own head by refusing to get out of Kuwait. His dispatch of Primakov to Baghdad has stirred considerable unease in the West, where the envoy is widely regarded as a Saddam sympathizer.

Gorbachev is feeling heavy pressure at home to help Iraq. He is under intense fire from hard-liners who accuse him of giving away Eastern Europe for nothing and kowtowing to Washington in other ways. The Soviet military, which is gaining greatly in influence, is still nostalgic for the old alliance with Iraq; more than a few generals have built careers managing the Iraqi account. Most of Saddam's weapons and military equipment are Soviet designed and built; Kremlin generals are not at all happy about the well-publicized destruction of so much of it by what appear to be superior American weapons. They are even less charmed by the thought of a triumphant American Army perched almost on the U.S.S.R.'s southern doorstep.

Most important of all, Gorbachev has been rather plaintively contending lately that the Soviet Union is so still a superpower. One way to prove it would be to broker a settlement in the Middle East that would guarantee Moscow a major postwar role in the diplomacy of that vital region.

It is not impossible that Saddam Hussein could pull out of Kuwait if he accepted a Soviet proposal, without suffering the humiliation of bowing to American demands, in order to avert a total defeat. It has long been obvious to just about the entire world that Saddam had no hope of beating, or in the long run even holding out against, the full military might of a grand coalition led by the reigning superpower. It has taken a month of the most intense and destructive bombing in history, and may yet take some savage and bloody ground fighting, to accomplish. But maybe, just maybe, that same idea is at last being hammered into the head of the one person who has stubbornly refused to accept it: Saddam Hussein.

With reporting by James Carney/Moscow, William Dowell/Dhahran and Christopher Ogden/Washington