Saddam might think his troops can leave Kuwait proclaiming victory like the PLO guerrillas who left Lebanon after the 1982 Israeli invasion. But Bush administration strategists have plotted ways to erase any tint of triumph in Saddam’s retreat. NEWSWEEK has learned that if Saddam does offer an unconditional withdrawal, the president will immediately and publicly state allied terms for the Iraqi pullout. Key elements of the plan:
Saddam will have to pull out his troops with maximum speed. Before hostilities began, the Pentagon estimated that Saddam would need four to six weeks to remove his forces from Kuwait under peaceful conditions. Now about one third of his heavy weapons have been destroyed. By U.S. estimate, that still leaves 2,980 Iraqi tanks, 800 armored personnel carriers and 2,010 artillery pieces in the Kuwait theater, along with as many as 500,000 troops. Even with armor left behind, the journey home through an obstacle course of bombed roads and bridges could still take a month or more. “Presumably, something like 200,000 of the men down there won’t have their own transport,” says Col. Andrew Duncan of London’s International Institute for Strategic Studies. “That’s 20 men to a lorry, or 10,000 lorries. You’d shuttle them, but it would take time.”
Since the withdrawal will be prolonged, the Pentagon wants to dictate the order of the Iraqi retreat. The more threatening armored and mechanized infantry divisions in the rear are to go first, leaving some of their heaviest weapons behind pending negotiations on whether the armor ultimately will be returned to Iraq. The more poorly trained light infantry units and border guards at the front will leave later.
The Pentagon also intends to specify key regions of Kuwait that the Iraqis must evacuate promptly. In particular, its forces are not to linger in such disputed areas as the Kuwaiti side of the Rumaila oilfield of the Kuwaiti islands of Bubiyan and Warba. Ultimately, a United Nations resolution requires that the Iraqis pull back to their positions of last Aug. 1, the day before Saddam invaded Kuwait. At some point, U.S. Army engineers want Iraqi briefings on where to find some 500,000 mines planted along the Saudi-Kuwaiti border, along the Kuwaiti coast and in the country’s oilfields - not to mention the system of booby traps in Kuwait City.
If Saddam wants a cease-fire, this retreat will be only his first concession. He must account for the 13 allied prisoners of war he has displayed on Iraqi TV as well as more than 30 allied troops listed as missing in action. He must come to terms with the Kuwaitis, Saudis and Israelis, who likely will demand reparations for war damage. And he must submit to U.N. or Arab peacekeepers who will be monitoring his neighborly behavior from posts in Kuwait and possibly in southern Iraq. The process will be complicated - and for Saddam a painful exercise in giving ground.
The U.S. plan is to keep pressure on Saddam throughout the final stages. Recalling past cease-fires that favored the enemy, such as the deal in Vietnam (1973), the Bush team refuses to guarantee Saddam so much as a bombing pause in return for his promise to pull out. Yet even Bush’s hard-line position assumes that the allies will not attack Iraqi troops who are actually retreating. If Iraq announces, for example, that specific units are to pull out at a specific time, the allies will hold their fire. “We’d be suspicious, of course,” says a senior State Department official, “but as a practical matter there’s no way the president could bomb those men as they left.”
There is always reason to be suspicious of Saddam. Bush’s plan to manage the endgame in Kuwait effectively requires Iraq’s surrender, a gesture Saddam has yet to offer. Should Iraqi forces survive the first blow of an allied ground assault, Saddam could still take the diplomatic initiative. One nightmare scenario at the Pentagon envisions Saddam inviting an Arab or U.N. force to monitor his withdrawal - and then stalling. “The last thing we want is a peacekeeping force between us and the Iraqis and then have the withdrawal drag on,” says a Pentagon officer. “Then what would we do?”
Bush brushed aside Saddam’s heavily conditioned peace offer last week. But even if Americans remain staunchly behind the president’s war strategy, international pressure would make it harder to turn down a marginally more generous Iraqi withdrawal proposal during the carnage of a land war. Saddam also is trying to work a better deal for himself through his old friends in Moscow. But he has never relied on an outside power to rescue him, as Egypt relied on the United States to hold back Israel in 1956 and 1973.
In the end, Saddam can expect to be at least a specter at the table during postwar negotiations. At some point, Iraq and the allied coalition will have to agree to a mutual drawdown of forces. The allies will put pressure on Saddam to demobilize most of his 1 million-man Army; Pentagon analysts hope it will revert to its troop strength before the Iran-Iraq War - at most 300,000 soldiers. That would be big enough to defend against encroachments by Iran, Syria or Turkey, but not powerful enough to threaten them. Saddam might begin this negotiation in a strong position. The U.N. resolution requiring his Army to withdraw to its Aug. 1 deployment could leave a mighty force poised, as it was at the time, at Kuwait’s border.
Saddam is nothing if not an opportunist. During the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988), he announced a unilateral withdrawal from Iranian soil in 1982 but held on to some territory nonetheless. He also broke a U.N.-sponsored ban on attacks against civilian targets in 1985. Even so, Saddam, not the Iranians, promoted a cease-fire, probably because he was more often on the defensive. But in July 1988, after Iran joined him in accepting a U.N. cease-fire resolution, Saddam launched new offensives that pushed 40 miles into Iranian territory before they were repelled. In the present conflict, the allies got a taste of the Saddam style when Iraqi tanks approached the Saudi town of Khafji with their turrets pointing backward - indicating surrender - then started shooting. “This is a guy who has deceived us,” said a senior State Department official. “He doesn’t have any of the benefit of the doubt left with us.”
In Washington, the brightest scenario for a cease-fire and Iraqi withdrawal begins with Saddam’s overthrow or death. That would narrow the credibility gap between adversaries, with the hope that the new Iraqi leaders would be willing to negotiate away Saddam’s disastrous legacy. Of course, Saddam has heard that sort of talk before. In his conflict with Iran, he offered to stop the war within a week after his first assault bogged down. But Ayatollah Khomeini quickly turned the campaign into a personal vendetta, vowing to overthrow Saddam and bring him to trial as a war criminal. Now George Bush, at the head of a much greater allied coalition, is bearing down - determined to give Saddam Hussein nowhere to turn.
Would you support or oppose the following allied force’s response to the Iraqi offer? (Those saying support)
Continue current military plans until Saddam agrees to withdraw unconditionally
Continue current military plans until Saddam’s government is removed from power
Step up air attacks before cease-fire and withdrawal bring the war to an end
Order cease-fire now to see if an Iraqi withdrawal actually begins
From the NEWSWEEK Poll of Feb. 15, 1991
