U.S. Gulf Policy Goals Met With No Calamities

Six months ago, when the Reagan Administration began its high-risk policy of escorting Kuwaiti oil tankers through the war-torn Persian Gulf, critics predicted a violent collision with Iran’s fundamentalist Muslim regime.

But so far, the U.S. policy has accomplished everything that its authors had hoped, with none of the threatened calamities.

In spite of predictions that the United States would have to go it alone, American allies have joined in the most impressive example ever of military cooperation by North Atlantic Treaty Organization members outside of NATO’s normal European region. Even the Soviet Union has sent warships to the gulf to protect Soviet-owned tankers.

Dire warnings to the contrary, the tanker escorts--which have the effect of supporting Iraq in its seven-year war with Iran--have not provoked a war with the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s government. Nor have they resulted in a sharp increase in Iranian-sponsored international terrorism.

Instead, Iran, which stepped up the tanker war for a while in an apparent effort to test U.S. resolve, recently has scaled back its attacks on merchant ships in the gulf. U.S. officials say the Tehran regime has also virtually ended its once-intensive campaign of mining the gulf sea lanes.

According to U.S. officials, the Iranian navy has shied away from challenging the vastly more powerful warships that the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, France, Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands have sent to the gulf and the nearby waters of the Arabian Sea. There have been no suicide attacks at sea to match the reckless zeal of Iranian human wave assaults against its Iraqi enemy on land.

It may be that Iranian naval commanders are simply more cautious. Yet there is also evidence of a new Iranian hesitancy on land.

In previous years, Iran took advantage of the brief break in the region’s furnace-like heat to launch winter offensives in which lightly armed and poorly trained Revolutionary Guards assaulted the machine guns of outnumbered but better-equipped Iraqi forces. But if there is another such offensive this year, it will be late starting.

“There are some indications, although the Iranians deny it, that they are having some trouble recruiting,” a senior Administration official said. “They have extended enlistments from 24 to 28 months, which probably shows that they are facing manpower problems.”

Less Bellicose Attitude

Moreover, Iranian officials, who earlier in the war openly tried to intimidate Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and the other small Arab states of the gulf region, have recently launched a diplomatic offensive aimed at persuading instead of intimidating the gulf Arabs. Although U.S. officials do not expect substantial results from the Iranian effort, which was mediated by Syria, it at least seems to reflect a less bellicose Iranian attitude.

When the Navy began escorting U.S.-registered Kuwaiti vessels in the gulf last July, the danger of the region had been brought home by an Iraqi attack two months earlier on the American frigate Stark, killing 37 sailors. Both Iraq and the United States agreed that the attack was a mistake caused by an Iraqi pilot who thought the Stark was a merchant ship in Iranian waters.

During the Navy’s first convoy of merchant ships six months ago, the re-registered Kuwaiti supertanker Bridgeton struck a mine near Iran’s Farsi Island in the northern Persian Gulf on July 21. That seemed to confirm the critics’ worst fears.

Incident Not Repeated

The Bridgeton incident has not been repeated, however, although a Chinese-made Silkworm missile struck the Sea Isle City, another Kuwaiti ship flying the American flag, while it was in port in Kuwait on Oct. 16.

“For all the infinite series of fears that people expressed a few months ago, the truth is that we have shown we can act with great control and great restraint,” said Anthony M. Cordesman, a Georgetown University expert in national security policy. “We have shown we could manage an escalation ladder better than I would have thought. When we showed that we would not leave after the Bridgeton, we did change Iranian thinking.”

It is much too early to tell if the change in Iranian tactics is permanent. Thomas L. McNaugher, a foreign policy analyst at the Brookings Institution in Washington, fears that even if it is, the consequences could backfire on the United States.

Long-Term Concerns

“I’m worried that precisely because the strategy has worked in the short run, it will fail in the long run,” McNaugher said. “If the Iranians are smart enough not to run an offensive, it’s likely that a lot of the international pressure that has been building up (against Iran) will begin to erode. It depends on Iranian misbehavior, which is what the Iranians gave us in 1987. If they get smart in 1988, it is going to be hard to preserve the consensus, let alone push it forward.”

To be sure, many critics of the gulf operation remain convinced that it is a dangerous folly, undertaken primarily to restore U.S. credibility in the Arab world, which was trashed by the sale of arms to Iran. The critics maintain that the plan grew to its present proportions as a result of a succession of blunders.

“Our forces are there protecting 11 Kuwaiti tankers,” said Richard Conlon, executive director of the Democratic Study Group, an organization of liberal members of the House of Representatives. “They have protected those Kuwaiti tankers, but I don’t know who else they have protected. They haven’t protected American-owned ships carrying oil to this country unless they were flying the American flag.

‘Minimal Return’

“We are spending an awful lot of money for a rather minimal return,” he said. “If anything, the hostilities in the gulf have increased in the past seven months over what they were during the previous six months. How that can be called any kind of a success, I don’t know.”

The Democratic Study Group and its leader, Rep. Mike Lowry (D-Wash.), sought without success to block the operation in Congress and the courts. It has appealed a U.S. District Court decision to dismiss its suit seeking to force Reagan to invoke the War Powers Resolution, which requires formal notification when U.S. troops are committed to potentially hostile action.

According to the independent Center for Defense Information, 1987 was the deadliest year of the tanker war. Iran attacked 85 ships last year while Iraq hit 80. But only five of the vessels were sunk, and only 23 were seriously damaged. U.S. officials say that tanker attacks by both sides have declined this month.

Limited Posture

Although both combatants have regularly attacked merchant shipping, the United States, its NATO allies and the Soviet Union have limited themselves almost exclusively to trying to protect neutral shipping from Iranian attacks.

A U.S. official explained that Iraq’s assaults have been by aircraft against ships in waters just off Iran’s coast. By contrast, Iran has used boats and mines to attack shipping in international waters. The foreign warships do not operate in Iranian waters.

U.S. policy has been to escort only ships that are registered in the United States and fly the American flag. Britain, Italy and the Soviet Union have similar policies of protecting only their own flag vessels. France recently expanded its rules of engagement to include third-country ships menaced by Iran. Belgium and the Netherlands have been engaged primarily in mine-sweeping.

Britain and France have maintained warships in the gulf region for years. But the participation of Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands is new and, in the view of U.S. officials, significant.

‘Stumbling Start’

Former Defense Secretary Harold Brown, a Democrat who has often criticized the Reagan Administration, said U.S. policy in the gulf was “skillfully applied after a stumbling start.” He said it was especially important that the Administration was able to enlist NATO nations for “concerted military and diplomatic policies outside their own immediate region.”

“Perhaps it is more because of Iran’s blunders than American diplomacy, but the whole effort has become multinationalized,” added Michael Sterner, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Arab Emirates. “Our allies have been drawn into support of our policy.”

George Carver, a former CIA official, said those who worried last summer that the United States would have to go it alone in the gulf were guilty of two basic fallacies.

“Many people were so opposed to the Administration that they felt naturally nobody would support an Administration initiative,” Carver said. “We also tend to be all or nothing--if Prime Minister So-and-So says he won’t participate, we become convinced that we will get stuck with all of it.

“European governments are big boys, and they have been around a long time,” he said. “They are certainly going to stick somebody else with the check if they can. After they see what other people are going to do, they pick up the slack themselves.”