Once again, Saddam Hussein kept out of sight as an announcer read a statement on Iraqi television last Saturday. It contained a grim threat to the well-being of 3,100 Americans and thousands of other Westerners trapped in Iraq and Kuwait. The spokesman alluded to a warning the previous day that citizens of “aggressive nations” would be held prisoner at Iraqi military bases and other potential targets for American bombers. And he warned that, because of the international embargo on trade with Baghdad, the foreigners would have to share whatever food was left over after Iraqi soldiers and essential workers had been fed. The austerity would apply, he said, even to “the babies of foreign families.”
As Iraq issued its threat, George Bush was out fishing off Kennebunkport, trying to pretend that a hostage crisis had not been added to his burdens. He had stressed all week that larger issues were involved, arguing in one speech that Saddam’s aggression in the oilfields of the Persian Gulf threatened “our jobs, our way of life, our own freedom and the freedom of friendly countries.” After receiving a briefing on the Iraqi statement, Bush responded temperately to the threats, saying through his own spokesman that he was “deeply troubled” by the “use of innocent civilians as pawns.” There was no mention of retaliation.
The administration’s plan was to wait Saddam out, hoping that the economic sanctions would start to bite soon. But contingency planning for a military operation was underway already, and if the Iraqis began to kill hostages, war seemed almost certain to follow. Even an effort to round up Americans in Kuwait for shipment to Baghdad could trigger a pre-emptive U.S. attack, not only on Saddam’s forces in Kuwait, but on Iraq itself. Any rescue mission was certain to be bloody, and quite possibly disastrous. But failure to act at a moment of dire peril for the prisoners would look like the kind of impotence that helped to drive Jimmy Carter from office.
While American forces poured into Saudi Arabia, the standoff in the gulf turned a lot nastier. Bush and Saddam called each other liars. The Iraqi dictator warned that thousands of American soldiers could “go home shrouded in sad coffins.” He abruptly offered to make peace with his archenemy, Iran, so that he could concentrate on his American foe in what he called “the great dueling arena.” Bush imposed an outright naval blockade on Iraq, without waiting for the United Nations or anyone else. The first shots in that operation were fired on Saturday when U.S. warships tried to stop Iraqi tankers at two separate locations. The tankers refused to stop, shots were fired across their bows, and the Iraqis sailed on. The Americans shadowed them and planned to board them, if necessary, I after daybreak on Sunday.
‘We can’t give him time’ Sustained fighting seemed more likely to arise from the situation on shore, including what one senior U.S. official referred to as “the hostage crisis, because that’s what it is.” Whether or not Saddam furnishes a suitable provocation, there will be growing pressure on Bush to use the force he has deployed. Military advisers will warn that the troops’, effectiveness can only deteriorate in the harsh heat of the desert (page 24). Diplomats may conclude that military action is the only way to achieve one of Bush’s main objectives: to get Saddam out of Kuwait and restore the emir who ruled there before the Iraqi invasion. Some Arab allies, out on a limb with Bush, are calling him to arms already. “Saddam is not going to back away without suffering a military blow,” says a senior Arab diplomat. “He has to be defeated. That’s the only way to break his image of invincibility. " Saddam’s smartest course might be to do nothing, to wait for the forces arrayed against him to splinter. “We have to provoke him,” the Arab diplomat tells an American. “We can’t give him time. As I soon as you are able to deal him a devastating blow, you should do it.”
By next month, the Americans will be as I ready as they’re ever going to be, with about 125,000 combat troops and support personnel in the theater. Bush ordered a fourth aircraft-carrier battle group to the region. With the airlift of ground combat troops running far behind schedule, he commandeered 38 wide-body jets from civilian airlines to serve as transports. The president also prepared to activate thousands of reservists, mostly for duty in the logistical “tail” of the expeditionary force. Privately, American officials conceded that it would be months, at least, before there could be any significant reduction of U.S. forces in the gulf region–and that a complete withdrawal from Saudi Arabia probably would take years.
Already, some of the fighting men were beginning to chafe with impatience. Navy pilots searched the sky over the gulf for Iraqi warplanes, returning disappointed to the carrier Independence. Air Force pilots based in Saudi Arabia played games of dare and double-dare with Iraqi planes. The Iraqis flew their fighters toward the edge of Saudi airspace. The Americans scrambled their F-15s, the fire-control radar “locking on” to the potential intruders. So far, the Iraqis were shying away. “I sure would like to give Saddam Hussein a big kick in the ass,” an F-14 pilot on the Independence told NEWSWEEK’S Ray Wilkinson.
The Iraqis talked a good fight. An Iraqi newspaper boasted that U.S. planes “will fall down like dead sparrows,” and said that if any pilots try to parachute to safety, their “bodies will be torn into pieces wherever they fall, so that their souls will go to hell.” Fat chance. “When the Iraqi pilots see the Americans facing them in Saudi Arabia, their knees start shaking,” said Benny Peled, a former commander of the Israeli Air Force. “If given free rein, the American pilots will fly like cowboys and eat the Iraqi Air Force for breakfast.”
Without resorting to force, Bush hoped to knock Iraq out quickly by imposing his own naval blockade to enforce the U.N. economic sanctions. In addition, his military advisers feared that shipments of munitions might get through the net, or that some Iraqi-bound ship might scuttle itself in the Suez Canal, depriving U.S. warships of the vital waterway. The U.N. Security Council had not voted a blockade and was not likely to do so until it saw evidence of sanction-busting. But as one U.S. official put it, “If you set up an embargo and then don’t stop ships to look at what they’re carrying, what are you there for?”
Kuwait’s call for help Bush used a deft but debatable legal justification for his blockade. Article 61 of the U.N. Charter allows nations to act in self-defense when attacked and to seek help from others. Washington wrote a letter for the Kuwaiti emir to sign, in which he asked the United States to help him by blockading Iraq. The emir goofed when he sent a similar letter to other nations, inviting them to sign up. He left out the paragraph mentioning that the United States would be in charge of the operation. Sources said some nations–Australia was one–agreed to join the blockade and then were taken aback when they learned that the Yanks expected to be in overall command.
Bush’s unilateral action did not sit well with some nations, such as the Soviet Union and France, that had given crucial support to his original call for economic sanctions. “This problem will not be solved without U.N. involvement,” said another critic, Democratic Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York. “It has to be done under U.N. auspices and under a U.N. mandate.” The embargo had been holding up reasonably well before the blockade was imposed. Ships carrying cargoes for Iraq were turned back by many countries, including Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates.
One question mark was Jordan. Its ruler, King Hussein, said he would honor the U.N. embargo but complained about the economic damage to his country, which depends heavily on its trade with Iraq. When Hussein rushed off to Kennebunkport to explain, rumors circulated that he was carrying a message from Saddam. The king arrived in Maine with empty pockets. “I did not bring any message,” he told reporters. Bush sent him off with nothing to show for his visit. “The president was not going to give him the peace of mind he wanted,” said a senior administration official.
Where’s Saddam? Saddam Hussein may also be in low spirits. All week, there were no live appearances by the dictator on Iraqi TV. Even his most dramatic announcements were read for him by the same bland announcer. Was Saddam hiding out? The world could only speculate. The Egyptians, waging a war of words with Baghdad, did so with a vengeance, publishing on their official news service a thinly sourced article claiming that Saddam had survived a coup attempt by “a number of close associates.” U.S. officials thought Saddam had ample reason to fear for his personal safety, but they had no independent confirmation of the coup report, and no particular reason to think that the regime might be shaky.
Saddam displayed some strategic daring in the sudden rapprochement with Iran. In a “Dear Brother” letter to Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani, he offered to give back the 700 square miles of territory he had conquered in his eight-year war with Iran and to free all prisoners of war. Saddam thus gave up everything he had fought for, but he gained the freedom to concentrate on his new enemy to the south. He probably was hoping that the Iranians would help him break the sanctions. The outlook for that was uncertain. Iran showed no sudden love for Iraq; it still opposed the invasion of Kuwait. But Iran also bitterly resented the U.S. intervention.
Saddam’s intentions concerning the hostages were harder to read. “Things were getting very ominous there,” a middle-aged British woman said after her escape from Kuwait City to Saudi Arabia. “Eventually we were all going to be rounded up, so we decided to leave.” She and three relatives escaped across the desert in a four-wheeldrive vehicle, with Iraqi troops shooting at them on the border. She said some Westerners were now being hidden by Kuwaitis who had formed small underground groups to resist the Iraqis. “We never thought the Kuwaitis had it in them,” she said, “but they are prepared to fight back.”
On Thursday, Iraqi military authorities in Kuwait ordered American and British citizens to report to one of two hotels. Fearing deportation to Iraq, most of them refused to show up. Only five Americans assembled at the International Hotel, where there were no Iraqi officials on hand to receive them. In Baghdad, the omens were less benign. About three dozen American “restrictees” suddenly disappeared from the AlRashid Hotel, where they had been sequestered in relative comfort. U.S. intelligence received a report that they might have been taken by bus to another hotel, the Melia-Mansour, where British citizens were being held. When a U.S. official went to that hotel, he was denied entry.
Bargaining chips Last Saturday, the British Foreign Office said it had confirmed that 40 Britons, five Americans, four Germans and one French citizen had been moved from Kuwaiti hotels to undisclosed locations. Iraq’s ambassador to France said some foreigners had been “distributed in strategic installations in Iraq, starting all the way from the north of Iraq to the south.” Did Saddam mean to use the hostages as human shields? Some Western officials thought he was merely hanging on to the foreigners for possible use later on as bargaining chips in negotiation. In this view, Saddam would sit tight and try to wait out the embargo. Others sensed a more malign intention. An Arab diplomat who sympathizes with Iraq thought Saddam was using the hostages to bait Bush into attacking him. Then Saddam would counter by attacking Israel, hoping to unite the Arabs behind him against the Israelis and Americans. “Israel is Saddam’s way out of this,” argued the diplomat.
The next move was up to Bush. He could try to turn the tables on Saddam by waiting him out in hopes of a peaceful resolution. That would require the president to hold together somehow the broad but fragile coalition that produced the U.N. embargo and persuaded Egypt, Morocco and Syria to help defend Saudi Arabia. But after his meeting with King Hussein, Bush said he did not have “a feeling of hope” that Iraq would withdraw its troops from Kuwait or that a diplomatic solution would soon be found. Bush gave no ground on his original objectives, including restoration of Kuwait’s emir; many presidential advisers still hoped that the crisis would lead eventually to Saddam’s downfall. For that ambitious agenda, it may be that the only workable option is force–or the imminent threat of it. That left many Americans with the queasy feeling of a drift toward war, and the grim suspicion that even victory could come very dear.
THE BIOCKADE SQUEEZE AND . . . As a U.S.-led blockade tightens the economic screws on Iraq, Saddam Hussein has apparently played a time-honored diplomatic card: hostage-taking. A look at the blockade and how U.S. forces might attempt to rescue the captives:
IRAQI OIL: Petroleum is Iraq’s most significant revenue source, accounting for 99 percent of its foreign trade. With Iraq’s pipelines through Turkey and Saudi Arabia shut off, accessible oil ports blockaded and most Western nations participating in an embargo, Saddam will soon become desperate for cash.
PERSIAN GULF: Shipping traffic to Iraq and Kuwait on the Persian Gulf has come to a standstill since the blockade was announced. President Bush ordered the 22 U.S. warships in the region–eight in the Persian Gulf, the nine-ship aircraft carrier Independence group in the Gulf of Oman and a five-ship Red Sea flotilla led by the carrier Eisenhower–to use the “minimum force necessary” to intercept vessels bound for Iraq. If a ship fails to stop when asked, a U.S. commander can lob a warning shot across its bow or board the boat to disable its engines. By the weekend, the Navy had stopped at least four Iraqi ships, firing warnings at two that refused to be searched. Both gave way.
AQABA: Until the Pentagon placed the Jordanian Red Sea port under the blockade, it served as Iraq’s last trade link to the outside world. Although little Iraqi oil is trucked to Aqaba for export along the road from Baghdad, Saddam has counted on the port as an inlet for a more vital commodity: food. Iraq imports some 75 percent of its basic foodstuffs. Saddam may hope his overtures to Iran open a new route. A U.S. warship is also checking vessels entering the Suez Canal, perhaps in fear that Saddam will order an Iraqi ship to scuttle itself in the channel, making the passage unnavigable for months.
