The Tide Turns, Leaving Some Washington Lobbyists Out of the Water : Insiders: Once, Iraq had lots of friends in the capital. Now, arrangements are being ‘terminated.’

These are trying times for some Washington insiders who seem to be finding it uncomfortable to be known by the company they keep.

Take lobbyist Edward J. van Kloberg III, who jokingly used the nickname “the beast of Baghdad” to refer to his client, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, in an interview with the Washington Post last month. The flamboyant Van Kloberg was not so jocular Wednesday, saying: “Our arrangement terminated in July.”

Take Richard M. Fairbanks III, the former assistant secretary of state who was one of President Bush’s chief foreign policy advisers during the 1988 campaign. Also listed on the most recent roster of Iraq’s lobbyists, Fairbanks said that his relationship with Baghdad was limited to legal work and that he resigned in March. Attorney-client privilege prevents him from revealing his reasons, Fairbanks added, but “obviously if we had felt comfortable with the arrangement, we would have continued it.”

There’s also Mary E. King, the well-connected former Jimmy Carter Administration official known in days gone by as a stalwart of the U.S. civil rights movement. As executive director of the U.S.-Iraq Business Forum, King squired Iraqi officials around, making sure that they were introduced in the right social and political circles.

“I don’t make speeches and I don’t give interviews and I’m very busy,” King said in response to a request for comment.

It was not so long ago that Iraq had plenty of friends in Washington. Particularly during its eight-year war with Iran, when the United States took a decidedly pro-Iraqi tilt, many people were willing to knock on the doors of the powerful on Iraq’s behalf, acting either as representatives of the government itself or those who wanted to do business with it.

Since last week, it has been U.S. policy to strangle the Iraqi economy with an international embargo. But things looked pretty cozy as recently as January, when the Commerce Department, under pressure from business, was planning an aerospace trade mission that would include a stop in Iraq aimed at making sure U.S. companies got in on the action there.

In the Commerce Department’s news release announcing the trade mission, the department noted that Iraq is among the countries that will “offer numerous consulting opportunities in aviation service, maintenance and the avionics equipment market. . . . Iraq has ambitious plans for upgrading its civil aviation system, including new airports, air traffic control and related equipment.”

Weeks before the trade mission was supposed to take place, six Iraqi agents were caught in London engaging in another type of commerce--trying to smuggle 40 American-made nuclear bomb triggers into Iraq.

John L. Wolf, the trade mission coordinator, insists that the idea for including Baghdad in the trip never got past the planning stages. The proposed stop in Iraq was canceled because “we didn’t like some of the things (the Iraqis) said,” Wolf explained. “We were very prophetic and proper about it but we never get credit for it, do we?”

There are still some who--while not quite defending Hussein--contend that he is not a total villain.

“We’ve focused a little too much on his brutal side,” said Marshall W. Wiley, the former ambassador to Oman who founded and heads the U.S.-Iraq Business Forum. “In a personal meeting with him, he can be charming.”

The forum is an organization composed of about 70 companies that were doing business in Iraq, or wanted to. Wiley said that it was funded solely by its members’ dues and does not lobby Congress. Still, it regularly and publicly argued the other side against critics of Iraq.

Although Hussein wiped out thousands of his own people with chemical weapons, Wiley has often noted that he also fostered literacy and economic development. Wiley warns even now that the United States “has got to come to grips with the fact that Iraq is an emerging power” and should not back an unpopular and undemocratic monarchy in Kuwait, which was invaded Aug. 2 and annexed by Iraq.

Iraq’s social heyday in Washington was surely the mid-1980s, when Ambassador Nizar Hamdoon ran what the New York Times described as “one of the liveliest dinner tables in Washington.” Hamdoon drew notables, including American Jewish leaders--which seems particularly ironic in light of Hussein’s subsequent threat to wipe out half the population of Israel with poison gas.

Fairbanks insists that the U.S. position in the Iran-Iraq War was a sensible one, “based on U.S. national interests” of preventing a clear winner from emerging from the conflict.

But California Rep. Howard L. Berman (D-Panorama City), one of Iraq’s most dogged foes on Capitol Hill, says that the attitude persisted well past the war’s end in August, 1988.

“That continued until the day before the invasion,” he said. “They all thought that Hussein could be a force for moderation.”

He noted that the Administration and many in Congress opposed his bill banning arms and high-tech exports to Iraq, a bill that cleared the House Foreign Affairs Committee the day before the invasion. It quickly passed the House as Iraqi troops rolled into Kuwait.

Over the years, Iraq has mounted what Berman described as a sophisticated lobbying effort on Capitol Hill, involving State Department officials, defense contractors, agricultural interests and Iraqi-Americans.

Berman said that he was even telephoned on Iraq’s behalf by William P. Clark, after Clark retired in 1985 as President Reagan’s national security adviser and began working as a Washington attorney. Clark’s office said that he has never been engaged as a lobbyist by the government of Iraq. He is out of the country and unavailable for comment.

The invasion, Berman said, “was just to me a demonstration of the lesson I think we should have learned a long time ago--appeasing a bully doesn’t work. It’s not only a morally corrupt position but a politically stupid position.”