What was the Kremlin up to? Was it preparing to repudiate the allied effort to force Iraq out of Kuwait? Or was the prospect of a savage ground war simply getting on its nerves? Either way, all roads led to Moscow last week. French Foreign Minister Roland Dumas discussed the gulf crisis with Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. Iran’s foreign minister, Ali Akbar Velayati, went to the Soviet capital on Friday after a tour of European capitals. The deputy Iraqi prime minister, Sadun Hammadi, was due on Saturday, to be followed the next day by Saddam’s foreign minister, Tariq Aziz. It was an impressive flurry. “We’ve found out [the Iraqis] want to have peace,” Velayati declared. “It just needs more effort. all of us should put pressure on both sides.”
Clearly, Moscow was looking to play the role of broker. While most key members of the anti-Iraq coalition unequivocally rejected Saddam’s offer, the Soviets hedged their bets. “It opens a new chapter in the history of the conflict,” Foreign Minister Aleksandr Bessmertnykh told Tass, the Soviet news agency. Vitaly Churkin, Foreign Ministry spokesman, was more circumspect: “Regrettably, this principled position is linked to numerous conditions which can make it meaningless.” This ambivalence mirrored Gorbachev’s own earlier attempts at impartiality: cutting off trade and arms shipments to Baghdad, but still maintaining diplomatic relations and pursuing a peaceful settlement up to the outbreak of hostilities. Later, he signaled his unhappiness by suggesting that allied military operations threatened to go “beyond the U.N. mandate.” But in trying to seize the moral high ground, the Kremlin was also serving interests of its own. Among them:
Weakened by economic dislocation and internal political unrest, Gorbachev needs to show that Soviet power still matters in foreign affairs, the arena in which the Soviet leader feels most comfortable. Sponsorship of a peace settlement would also give the Soviets a greater say in any postwar Mideast security structure, thus satisfying the Kremlin’s desire for a role in the region. As peacemongers, the Soviets will have considerable leverage in sponsoring regional arms-control talks and in pushing some sort of plan to resolve the Arab-Israeli and Palestinian conflicts. “Gorbachev is trying,” a senior U.S. official says, “to show that he’s not just passive, not just sitting on the sidelines waiting for the U.S.-led coalition to do the job.”
Gorbachev is under tremendous pressure from the Soviet armed forces either to end the gulf war - or Soviet complicity in it. Senior officers are worried about possible escalation to chemical or nuclear weapons in a region that is only 200 miles from the Soviet border. The Soviet Union itself contains a large Muslim population that might be inflamed by prolonged warfare against fellow Muslims. The military is also deeply distressed by a developing arms gap: the gulf war has given the United States opportunities to battle-test such new weapons as smart bombs, Stealth warplanes and Patriot missiles. “This is bound to give fresh impetus to the arms race,” Pravda, the Communist Party daily, warned last week.
By siding with the anti-Iraq coalition, Gorbachev alienated both Communist Party members at home and traditional clients in the Middle East, including the PLO. Hard-liners are still furious over what they view as Gorbachev’s abandonment of Iraq, a close ally for the last 20 years, and his allegiance to “imperialists.” One sign of the times: in language reminiscent of the Brezhnev era, conservative publications like Sovyetskaya Rossiya have accused the United States and its allies of waging a “neocolonial” war to put the region under permanent Western control. In its proposed settlement of the crisis, Moscow will likely try to repair some of the damage by preserving relations with Saddam, instead of insisting on his removal.
But there is only so far Gorbachev can swing in that direction. He can hardly afford to undo recently improved relations with countries like the United States and traditionally anticommunist Muslim regimes like Saudi Arabia. Too much is at stake. American capital, technology and free-market know-how are still vital to repairing the floundering Soviet economy. Saudi Arabia may become a critical strategic ally: while the Soviet Union is the world’s largest oil producer, output has been dropping for the last two years, an event that may force it to look elsewhere for imported oil as soon as 1994.
