BACKGROUND
C/77 June 27 '90
HELEN DAVIS
Foreign Correspondent
I
raq's uncompromising
insistence this week that
it would "never kneel" to
sanctions and threats or ever
return any part of Kuwait
has come as a hammer-blow
to Soviet hopes for a non-
military resolution of the
crisis.
Only last week, Egypt's
President Hosni Mubarak
peremptorily rejected a
Soviet-inspired proposal to
convene an Arab League
summit aimed at defusing
the gathering crisis.
Residents of Baghdad were
virtually tripping over the
profusion of foreign leaders,
past and present, who have
been beating a path to
Saddam Hussein's lair in re-
cent weeks in search of the
key that would release the
hostages and bend the Iraqi
leader in the direction of
some sort of compromise.
Among the more high-
profile purveyors of sweet
reason were Britain's Ed-
ward Heath, Germany's Wil-
ly Brandt, Japan's Yasuhiro
Nakasone and, most poig-
nant of all, Austria's Kurt
Waldheim.
Apart from Jordan's King
Hussein and the PLO's
Yassir Arafat, who stand to
be the major Arab losers in
the coming military
showdown which Secretary
of State James Baker was
reported to be planning with
his Arab allies this week,
the most persistent visitor to
the Iraqi capital has been
Yevgeny Primakov, special
envoy of Soviet leader
Mikhail Gorbachev.
Mr. Primakov may be a
tyro on the diplomatic cir-
cuit, but he has notched up
an impressive academic
reputation as the director of
Moscow's Institute of Orien-
tal Studies, where, in one
guise or another, he has
spent the past 25 years ap-
plying the academic fruits of
his institute's learning and
research to his country's po-
Gorby's Strip Poker
Moscow's
Double Game
While the Soviet Union wants to appear
to be America's ally, it would also like
to secure the survival of Saddam Hussein
and be friends with Israel.
litical interests in the re-
gion.
Iraq's tough stand and
Egypt's instant rebuff of
Yevgeny Primakov's pro-
posal for an Arab League
summit to resolve the crisis
is unlikely to deter Mr.
Primakov in his efforts to
broker a peaceful settlement
of the crisis.
Indeed, on his return to
Moscow, the academic-
turned-diplomat went on
television to present a
totally unsupported, but
bravely upbeat, assessment
of the Iraqi leader's inten-
tions.
While Mr. Primakov ap-
pears to be the instrument of
Soviet determination to keep
up the pace and follow the
direction set by the United
States, some Western
Kremlin-watchers are
regarding his efforts with
increasing suspicion, detec-
ting in his frenetic efforts
the first disturbing signs
that the Soviet heart may
not, after all, be beating as
one with its former super-
power rival.
Amid the post-Cold War
euphoria, this cynical, wet-
blanket school of
Sovietologists is not sug-
gesting that Moscow is seek-
ing to continue its military
competition with Washing-
ton.
Equally, however, it is also
not convinced, as the world
hopes and believes, that the
Soviet Union is animated
solely by the spirit of
glasnost and goodwill.
The interests of the two
sides — a peaceful resolution
of the Gulf crisis — might
appear to be identical, say
adherents of this school, but
their interests diverge at
certain critical points and
Moscow is marching to a
quite different drum beat.
Behind the veil of perceiv-
ed mutuality with the West,
they assert, the Soviet
Union is pursuing its own
narrow self- interests with a
determination and an
astuteness which belies the
notion that it is a spent
force.
According to Dr. James
Sherr, a specialist in Soviet
affairs at Oxford University,
Moscow is currently engaged
in a campaign to trade its
diminishing geo-strategic
interests for political and
economic gain. To that end,
it is vigorously working both
sides of the fence in the Gulf
crisis.
The Oxford professor cau-
tions that Moscow is playing
a high- stakes double game:
It is appearing to be a part-
ner of the United States in
seeking a non-military
resolution of the crisis while
simultaneously pursuing a
hidden agenda, the central
element of which is to secure
the survival of Moscow's
longstanding Iraqi ally,
Saddam Hussein.
"If Saddam is overthrown
and his elite is crushed, the
Soviets fear they will be
forced out of the picture. If
they can persuade him to
withdraw from Kuwait and
accept a Soviet-brokered
peace, they know that they
are likely to retain their in-
fluence in Iraq and beyond."
Dr. Sherr asserts that the
Iraqi intelligence apparatus,
which was created by the
KGB, has been deeply
penetrated by the Soviet in-
telligence agency and that
while Moscow opposes the
invasion of Kuwait, it must
have had prior knowledge of
the Iraqi plans.
At the time of the inva-
sion, however, a do-
mestically weakened
Mikhail Gorbachev was too
preoccupied with his own
internal crises to effectively
deter Saddam Hussein.
The Soviet leader, says Dr.
Sherr, refrained from aler-
ting the United States to the
proposed aggression — a
step that would have been
an unprecedented betrayal
of patron-client relations
—because he feared that
such a leak would have been
inevitably traced back to the
Kremlin.
This might have had far-
reaching implications. Not
least, it would have jeopar-
THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS
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