The Battleground: Marching to a Conclusion

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

The land war had already been under way for hours -- even days, if preliminary probing attacks were counted. But the final, massive and bloody phase of the conflict that began more than five weeks earlier had to be solemnized as only a President can do. So George Bush helicoptered from Camp David to the White House Saturday night for an appearance that was a kind of grim ritual.

Appearing before the cameras at 10 o'clock, the President looked somber, and his sentences were plain, devoid of any rhetorical flourish. Harking back to a Friday-morning appearance in the bright sunshine of the Rose Garden, he remarked that he had given Saddam Hussein "one last chance . . . to do what he should have done more than six months ago: withdraw from Kuwait without condition or further delay." Saddam, he said, had responded only with "a redoubling" of efforts "to destroy completely Kuwait and its people" -- a reference to the "scorched earth" torching of oil wells and systematic executions of Kuwaitis, some allegedly snatched at random off the streets of Kuwait City. So, he said, the war that began Jan. 16 with the start of history's most intense bombing campaign had "entered a final phase" that he hoped could be concluded "swiftly and decisively." The President asked all Americans to stop whatever they were doing for a moment to say a prayer -- and that was all.

It was enough, though. By the time the President spoke, the deadline he had set in the Rose Garden ultimatum had expired 10 hours earlier. The interval had been filled with diplomatic flopping around that looked increasingly like playacting -- or simple stalling. Iraq had accepted, that morning in Moscow, a Soviet-brokered proposal for withdrawal that Baghdad and the Kremlin both knew the U.S. and its allies would not take. Vague hints emerged from a U.N. Security Council meeting, in progress as the deadline passed, that maybe the Iraqis would respond "positively" to the U.S. ultimatum. The hints came from the Soviet representative; the Iraqi delegate claimed not to know what he was talking about.

When time ran out for diplomacy, the new phase of the war began with stunning swiftness. Less than 24 hours after the deadline, the entire allied ground campaign had taken shape. Among the elements were the predicted sweep by U.S. forces into western Kuwait to isolate the country from Iraq and a massive parachute drop into Kuwait City. By Sunday morning, Eastern U.S. time, the city was on the verge of being taken by allied forces. "So far we're delighted with the progress of the campaign," declared General Norman Schwarzkopf, the allied commander. Schwarzkopf said resistance had been light, with the exception of one Marine unit that ran into and repulsed an Iraqi counterattack. During the first 12 hours of the campaign, Schwarzkopf said, more than 5,500 Iraqi prisoners had been captured. But according to Kuwaiti sources, the actual number of Iraqis surrendering was at least 10 times greater than that.

Special-operations forces had been deep inside Kuwait for at least a week, harassing Iraqi forces and striking command-and-control centers; the U.S. had even set up a helicopter-refueling depot about 25 miles behind the Iraqi border fortifications. As the deadline approached, allied engineers cut wide passages through defensive sand berms that the Iraqis had erected along the borders, creating gaps that soldiers and tanks could pour through. Allied planes began using napalm for the first time in the war, dropping it on oil- filled trenches in front of Iraqi positions. The Iraqis had planned to set fire to the oil when allied troops tried to cross; the napalm was apparently intended to burn it off prematurely so that the fires would be out when the coalition troops arrived. The Iraqis, in a final nose-thumbing gesture, lobbed more Scud missiles at Israel only minutes before the deadline.

Bush gave Saddam the Saturday deadline after a frustrating week of Soviet efforts to broker a deal that would be acceptable to both Iraq and the allies. Moscow had secured Baghdad's commitment to a supposedly "unconditional" pullout from Kuwait, but the agreement was accompanied by a string of conditions. Washington and its major partners advanced a number of reasons for rejecting the Soviet-mediated offer, ranging from simple distrust of Saddam to news of the scorched-earth policy in Kuwait. But the predominant reason was a feeling that delay was beginning to work against the allies. They were being pulled into the very "bazaar bargaining," as one British official phrased it, that they had sworn to avoid. Worse, they were being maneuvered into a box. Had negotiations stayed on the course they were taking, the U.S. and friends would have had to either consent to a Soviet rescue of Saddam from certain defeat, and all too likely his resuscitation as an aggressive menace to Middle East and world peace, or risk being called warmongers.

Formally, the allies denied they were negotiating at all. But that was true only in the sense that diplomats and heads of government were exchanging views mostly by telephone and cable rather than face-to-face around a table. Otherwise, the pattern of offer and counterproposal, of demands advanced, accepted, modified or dropped, was pretty much what it might have been in a formal conference.

The ballet began with a Baghdad announcement Friday, Feb. 15, indicating Iraq's "readiness to deal with" the basic U.N. resolution demanding withdrawal from Kuwait -- subject to farfetched conditions; one demanded reparations for allied bombing. But though Bush promptly denounced the proposal as a "cruel hoax," Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev proclaimed himself encouraged enough to invite Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz to Moscow for new talks. Aziz arrived on Sunday, Feb. 17, by a roundabout route that underscored the total air supremacy the allies have achieved over Iraq. He was driven across the Iranian border, then helicoptered to Tehran, and flew from there to the Soviet capital. If he had flown directly from Baghdad, his plane might have been shot down.

In Moscow, Gorbachev handed Aziz a Soviet proposal that was quickly communicated to the allies fighting Iraq. Basically, Iraq would withdraw, supposedly unconditionally, from Kuwait. In return, Moscow would undertake to preserve Saddam from any punitive actions -- a war-crimes trial, for instance -- guarantee Iraq's territorial integrity, try to get economic sanctions against Iraq lifted and work for an overall Middle East peace conference, which among other things would address the problem of the Palestinians and Arab-Israeli disputes.

That touched off a round of telephone consultations among Washington, London, Paris, Cairo, Riyadh and other allied capitals that continued pretty much all through the week. The predominant mood: apprehension.

The allies had several specific objections. The proposal did not set any timetable or procedures for withdrawal: What was to prevent Saddam from dragging it out for weeks or months, or from stopping on some pretext with most of Kuwait still occupied? The plan was also vague about the timing for any release of prisoners of war. (Saddam's regime is still holding some Iranian prisoners more than two years after a cease-fire between those two countries.) The proposal further was silent about restoring the preinvasion government of Kuwait, a prime requisite of United Nations resolutions.

The fundamental objection, though, was that the Soviets seemed to be aiming not just to save Saddam and his regime from defeat but also to put him in a position to claim a political victory. He could boast that he had taken the best shots of a coalition led by the reigning superpower and not only survived but also forced action on the Palestinian question. Formally, the allies' goal is the liberation of Kuwait, which is true in the sense that they are not prepared to march on Baghdad in order to depose the dictator. But they would be delighted if Saddam were removed by coup or assassination. Failing that, they want to destroy enough of his military power so that he cannot again threaten his neighbors.

Very little of this has ever been put on the record. But in private, allied officials are blunt in contending that Saddam must lose his face if not his skin. His armies must not only be beaten but beaten so thoroughly and unmistakably that there will be no way to disguise the loss. Says a member of Bush's unofficial war cabinet: "We want a clear understanding everywhere that Iraq's aggression was defeated and the aggressor was sent packing. There should be no conceivable way that Saddam Hussein or the Iraqi regime could say they were victorious or they had somehow remained intact in the face of this coalition onslaught. Everybody has to know they were defeated, including them." Still more bluntly, a senior British diplomat says Saddam must be seen not only to be "utterly defeated" but "humiliated" as well.

Why was Moscow apparently trying to save Saddam from exactly that fate? Though the U.S.S.R. never sent any troops to the Persian Gulf or made any financial contribution to the anti-Saddam alliance, its role in helping to buttress that alliance was crucial. Without Soviet assent, the U.N. Security Council could never have demanded that Iraq pull out of Kuwait, or organized the worldwide embargo against Iraq, or approved the use of force against Baghdad. Continued U.S.-Soviet cooperation is a cornerstone on which Bush hopes to build a new world order; conversely, nothing could destroy the alliance's hopes so totally as any Kremlin reversion to its old role as Iraq's ally, protector and principal arms supplier. Consequently, Washington has spared little effort to keep the Soviets aligned with, if not exactly members of, the anti-Iraq coalition.

$ Nonetheless, it has become increasingly obvious that Moscow will pursue its own interests, which are not necessarily the same as those of the U.S. and its allies. Domestically, Gorbachev must appease the military, KGB and Communist Party hard-liners he increasingly relies on to maintain his authority. They have been bitterly critical of his alleged kowtowing to Washington. At a time of seething separatism that threatens the very existence of the Soviet Union, Gorbachev also must avoid antagonizing the tens of millions of Muslims in the U.S.S.R.'s Central Asian and Transcaucasian republics, and they tend to sympathize with Saddam. Still more to the point, in strict power terms, a Middle East outcome that froze Soviet influence out of the region and left a triumphant U.S. as the dominant power in that strategic crossroads so close to the U.S.S.R.'s southern borders would make any Kremlin regime nervous.

Whatever Moscow's motives, the allies quickly concluded in a round of phone calls that the Soviets had not come up with anything they could accept. Bush, speaking for all of them, asserted that Gorbachev's plan "falls well short of what would be required" for peace.

Privately, the coalition partners decided to go further and spell out what they would accept. Their proposals were sent by Bush to Gorbachev Tuesday night, presumably to be relayed to Aziz when he returned to Moscow after communicating the Soviet proposal to Saddam.

The allied proposition dealt almost entirely with when and how Iraq was to withdraw from Kuwait. Washington and its partners made a point of refusing even to discuss anything else -- Palestinians, regional disarmament, Middle East peace conference -- until the withdrawal was complete; if they did, the withdrawal would not be unconditional. Their key proposal at that point: the pullout had to be completed within 96 hours of Iraq's agreement. The idea was to make it impossible for Saddam's troops to take along their heavy armaments. The Iraqis have been using many tanks as a kind of stationary artillery, digging them deeply into sand berms and piling sandbags on them; one of Bush's advisers said they are no longer tanks but pillboxes. Digging them out, revving up their long-idled motors and driving them north to Iraq within 96 hours supposedly cannot be done. "A lot of this stuff might just not start," says an American officer. "A lot of it might start north and die on the way." Shorn of much heavy equipment, the Iraqi army might not be an offensive threat to the country's neighbors any time soon. Some other provisions: the Iraqis would have to withdraw along routes marked by the allies. Any units wandering outside those routes, or even staying in their fortifications, would continue to be attacked from the air. Also, the Iraqis would have to agree to an immediate exchange of prisoners, and an equally prompt reinstatement of the preinvasion Kuwaiti government headed by its Emir, Sheik Jaber al-Ahmad al- Sabah.

The message had no apparent effect on Saddam, who seemed for a while to have put an end to the bargaining. On Thursday morning he spoke publicly for only the third time since the war began. The circumstances of his address were another testimonial to the efficiency of American bombing. Because so much of its telecommunications have been knocked out, Baghdad was unable to supply a clear, live-TV picture of the boss; it showed a rather dark and blurry black- and-white still. CNN, carrying the address -- or at least its audio part -- live, mostly filled the screen with a picture of a radio.

Saddam's words were convoluted enough to confuse even native speakers of Arabic. For the most part, they seemed an angry diatribe against the U.S. and a vow to fight to the end. Some American, European and Arab diplomats greeted the address with relief. Saddam, they thought, was rejecting all peace feelers; now there would be no more pressure to accept some Soviet-brokered compromise.

Wrong. Saddam included some words, largely overlooked, about how Iraq still wanted peace, and Aziz was at that moment en route back to Moscow. He arrived late Thursday night, local time, and immediately went into a two hour and 20 minute meeting with Gorbachev. Ten minutes after it ended, Gorbachev's spokesman, Vitali Ignatenko, burst into an international crowd of journalists waiting at the Foreign Ministry press center and outlined an eight-point plan that he said could form the basis for a negotiated settlement of the war.

Allied statesmen found precious little to cheer about. The plan did show some improvements. Unlike all Iraqi statements since mid-August, it did not propose any form of linkage: no mention of Palestinians or Israeli withdrawal from the occupied West Bank, Gaza and Golan Heights; no talk of a Middle East peace conference. It did not demand any pullout of allied forces from the gulf area, a key point in Baghdad's proposals less than a week earlier. And this time Iraq did agree to a prompt exchange of prisoners. But the plan still conspicuously failed even to mention some key allied concerns, notably restoration of the preinvasion Kuwaiti emirate.

But the specifics that were in the plan angered the allies. The main proposals were that Iraq would begin a withdrawal two days after a cease-fire. The pullout would be completed within a fixed period, but no specific time was initially mentioned. The pullout would be supervised by countries, to be selected by the U.N. Security Council, that had taken no part in the fighting. When it was two-thirds complete, the economic embargo against Iraq would be lifted. When it was fully complete, all 12 U.N. Security Council resolutions condemning Iraq and initiating steps against it would cease to have any effect.

To the anti-Saddam coalition, this plan appeared to be compounded about equally of holes and snares. To begin with, the allies have consistently opposed any formal cease-fire before, or for that matter during, an Iraqi pullout (though they would not attack the withdrawing troops). Saddam, they fear, would use any respite to rest, regroup and resupply his badly battered troops in Kuwait. He might then renege on the withdrawal agreement and resume the war.

Even if the withdrawal did begin, the allies feared, Iraq might drag it out for weeks. (Their fears were confirmed a day later, when Iraq made the 21-day proposal.) Besides allowing Saddam to withdraw and save his tanks and artillery, one American official noted, the proposal amounted to saying, "Give me a couple more weeks so I can kill some more Kuwaitis."

On and on the questions went: Who would be the supposed "neutrals" supervising the pullout? Cuba, Libya, Yemen, perhaps other bitterly anti- Western and pro-Saddam states? Would their presence mean allied forces would be barred from entering Kuwait in the wake of the retreating Iraqis? And what if Saddam invented some pretext to stop or reverse the withdrawal? Having agreed to a cease-fire, would the allies have to go back to the U.N. Security Council for fresh authority to attack the Iraqi troops, a move subject to Soviet or Chinese veto? The common element in all these suspicions is that, as a senior White House official put it, "nobody believes anything he ((Saddam)) says."

The proposal to lift the embargo while one-third of the Iraqi troops remained in Kuwait was a particularly sore point for Washington and friendly capitals. The coalition has counted on an embargo continuing even after full withdrawal to keep Saddam's aggressive ambitions in check. Otherwise, they worry, he could use a renewed flow of oil revenues to buy weapons to replace those destroyed by American bombers and emerge in a few years a greater menace than ever. Annulment of all U.N. resolutions after withdrawal would relieve Iraq of any pressure to pay reparations for ravishing Kuwait. Whether such reparations can ever be collected from an Iraqi economy knocked practically flat by bombing is uncertain. But Washington has some hope of using the threat of them -- perhaps to be collected by attaching future oil revenues -- as another club to hold over a postwar Baghdad regime.

Bush shaped the U.S. response in a meeting with his top advisers late Thursday night, and they checked it out with the allies in another round of phone calls beginning just after midnight. Everyone agreed that the latest proposals amounted to little more than stalling by Saddam in hopes of indefinitely delaying the ground offensive that they believe (and that, Arab diplomats close to Baghdad confide, Saddam also believes) will lead to a decisive military victory. As British Prime Minister John Major put it Friday afternoon, "It's time for ((Saddam)) to stop fooling about. We are not prepared to be strung along."

Originally the allies planned to have Bush, Major and French President Francois Mitterrand deliver a new allied ultimatum in simultaneous announcements in Washington, London and Paris. They decided, however, to let Bush speak for the alliance. Only minutes after one final phone call, to President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, Bush stepped into the Rose Garden and in measured, determined tones set the Saturday noon deadline by which Saddam had to declare "publicly and authoritatively" that he accepted the allied terms, which spokesman Marlin Fitzwater spelled out shortly after. The time for a pullout was lengthened to a week because some allies thought the original 96 hours was simply impossible; Washington hoped seven days still was not enough time for Saddam to pull out all his tanks, other armor and artillery. Rather astonishingly, the allied firmness set off sympathetic reverberations in Moscow. Gorbachev spoke with Bush by phone for 33 minutes Thursday and with both the President and Secretary of State James Baker for 72 minutes before the allied ultimatum on Friday. Possibly Gorbachev realized saving Saddam was a lost cause, hardly worth alienating the Western allies. In any case, even . before Bush appeared in the Rose Garden, Moscow began backing away from what had seemed to be its own proposals. While Ignatenko's presentation Thursday night had implied that the eight-point plan announced then was a joint Baghdad-Moscow production, Foreign Ministry spokesman Vitali Churkin Friday morning coolly labeled it an Iraqi plan that the Soviets were still discussing and not exactly endorsing. Later on, after the Bush ultimatum, a senior Soviet diplomat said not only that Moscow knew that the allies would reject the eight-point plan but also that "they were right not to accept it." Sergei Grigoriev, deputy spokesman for Gorbachev, went further yet to state in interviews on Western TV that the allies' suspicions of Saddam might well be justified: "The Iraqis are impossible. How can Washington trust Saddam without any guarantees?"

Several Soviet spokesmen said Moscow had been trying to see on the allies' behalf how far Iraq could be persuaded to moderate its demands. Moscow made another effort Friday afternoon and produced a six-point plan that set the 21- day timetable for withdrawal. It was too little too late. Gorbachev kept trying Saturday, phoning Bush and asking for a Security Council meeting in a futile effort to merge the U.S. ultimatum and the last Moscow proposal. But on Saturday afternoon Ignatenko, at a press conference, agreed with a questioner that Iraq had lost its chance to negotiate a peaceful settlement, and Soviet spokesmen appeared far more interested in soothing allied annoyance with Moscow's earlier efforts than in making any further attempts to save Saddam.

Bush was taking a giant gamble. If the ground offensive stalls, or succeeds only at the price of heavy allied casualties, he could be pilloried around the world and at home for shedding rivers of blood to win the Iraqi withdrawal that Moscow had given him a chance to achieve by diplomacy. But Saddam's prospects were far bleaker. He launched the last-second diplomacy out of desperation that he was about to lose everything in the final allied offensive. Now he is about to suffer that fate anyway, sooner or later and at whatever cost in casualties on both sides. And by stalling and haggling until and beyond the final deadline, he brought it himself.

With reporting by William Dowell/Dhahran, William Mader/London and Christopher Ogden/Washington