Iraq’s Mission Impossible : The Ambassador Is Having A Tough Time Selling the U.S. on the Positive Aspects of Hussein, Iraq and the Prospects for Peace in the Middle East

Mohamed Mashat has the hardest sell in Washington this week. It may be the hard est sell in America.

The Iraqi Ambassador to the United States is trying to tell the other side of the story: the charming side of his president, a man that American President George Bush has likened to Hitler; the positive aspects of Iraq, a country that many Americans now consider evil incarnate; and the bright prospects for peace in the Middle East, while the rest of the international community has drawn its swords for war.

After two weeks of shooing away reporters, Mashat decided, he said, “it was high time to inform the American public that Iraq is being misunderstood. I had to stop the avalanche of lies.”

So on Monday and Tuesday, he took to the media circuit, dashing between television studios in Washington in his chauffeur-driven limousine, with Middle Eastern music blaring on the radio and his son Farid, 30, by his side.

Within 24 hours, Mashat had told Ted, Bryant, Bernie, John and millions of viewers that he believes that Iraq has no intention of invading Saudi Arabia. He also asserted that Iraq is the “victim” of the Israeli-controlled media and that Iraqi Saddam Hussein should be praised for bringing the Arab world out of the Dark Ages by taking on Iran and enduring an eight-year war.

He also sought to reassure Americans that foreigners trapped in Kuwait and Iraq would be released--eventually.

Hard as he tried, no one seemed to buy his argument.

“Why should we believe you?” barked news talk-show moderator John McLaughlin during a 30-minute taping of his cable broadcast.

“The Saudis say they don’t trust you,” said CNN’s Bernard Shaw. “Why should they?”

Today’s Bryant Gumbel also bore down: “Have you any new proposals the White House can seriously consider?”

And on ABC’s Nightline, in the most combative exchange of the day, Mashat and Sheik Saud al Nasir al Sabah, the Kuwaiti Ambassador to the United States, were at each other’s throats.

“I have been interrupted so many times that I think it is not fair,” Mashat complained to host Ted Koppel.

“You deserve to be because you haven’t told the truth here!” Saud retorted.

Mashat, meticulously dressed in a checked suit with a polka-dotted silk hankie in his breast pocket, remained stiff and expressionless throughout this and other appearances. He bucked, protested, argued and complained. But his tone stayed even, cool.

During breaks, or in the limo, son Farid praised his father’s pluck, explaining that he is used to being besieged. “It goes with the territory,” said Farid, who is in the film business in Miami.

Mashat, 59, has found himself on the defensive since he arrived in Washington last September. Since then, U.S.-Iraqi relations have steadily soured, beginning with President Saddam Hussein complaining about America’s naval presence in the Persian Gulf, and, later with Americans angered after foiling an Iraqi attempt to import U.S. nuclear weapons technology.

But as Mashat views it, “I have never seen in my life, whether in my students in America or afterwards when I went to Iraq and was still following the American press, such untruths from this country and from the media.”

His accusations come in machete-like strokes: The media lie, he says. America hates the Arabs, he adds. His light green eyes narrow while he slowly, with care and control, pushes back wisps of shoe-polish black hair. He is polite always. He smiles occasionally.

“I have nothing against your country,” he says, recalling his love for the sea in Florida, where his former wife and two of his three children live; and for the lakes in California, where he had planned to spend August playing tennis and swimming.

Mashat lays out a conspiracy theory, insisting America is not only anti-Arab and anti-Iraqi but that these positions are inspired by the Israeli-controlled media. “We should be rewarded for saving the (Middle East) from the Dark Ages,” he said. “But yet what are we getting? A propaganda machine leveled against us. . . .”

In the time he has served in Washington and in his last post in the United Kingdom, the diplomatic community has not taken to Mashat’s claims.

In part, his problem in Washington has to do with his predecessors, hard acts to follow. Nizar Hamdoon, for example, is now Iraq’s deputy foreign minister and was a deft diplomat. In 1983, 16 years after Iraq broke off relations with the U.S. because of American support for Israel during the Six Day War, Hamdoon reopened the Iraqi Embassy. “Rather than lying, Nizar would defend his country’s positions by gently changing the subject,” said one U.S. diplomat who asked to not to be named. “He even reached out to the Jewish community.”

Mashat, in contrast, is known to deliver the party line defiantly.

Yet Abe Sofar, the U.S. State Department’s legal adviser until this summer, is sympathetic toward Mashat, saying, “He’s had a hell of a hard job. It’s hard to defend what’s happened. But all of us who had good will toward Iraq are hoping that Saddam finds a way out of this. And we have to be willing to negotiate. The Iraqis have very competent people in their diplomatic corps like Mashat to do the job.”

Mashat has been in and out of the Iraqi foreign service for almost 30 years. After earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in criminology at UC Berkeley and a doctorate in sociology at the University of Maryland, he returned to Kuwait in the 1960s and held government posts, including undersecretary of labor and social affairs and minister of education.

He left Iraq briefly in the 1960s to serve in its French Embassy but returned to teach sociology at Baghdad University, where he had earned a law degree. Later, he became president of one of Iraq’s largest universities. But Mashat came back to diplomacy, serving as envoy to France, Austria, the United Kingdom.

A few years before he resumed foreign service, he divorced his American wife and married a Muslim woman, with whom he has a son, 16; all his children are with him now in Washington, weathering this crisis.

Have there been threats against his life? Mashat gives a half-smile: “Of course, there have been. There have been threats to the embassy and to my home. But this is nothing. This is part of our work. This is part of our struggle.”