Iraq Bids for Peace With Iran : Gulf crisis: Hussein's surprise move would free his troops to fully confront multinational forces. Plan accepts all of Tehran's terms.

By NICK B. WILLIAMS Jr

Aug. 16, 1990 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates —

In a bold diplomatic move, President Saddam Hussein on Wednesday offered peace to Iran--on all of Iran’s terms--to free his troops for the confrontation with multinational forces along the Persian Gulf.

The embattled Hussein, foreseeing a “great duel” touched off by his invasion of Kuwait, declared that his troops will withdraw from occupied Iranian territory beginning Friday and that he will begin releasing Iranian prisoners of war the same day.

More important, Iraq agreed to Iranian terms for control of the vital Shatt al Arab, the waterway that defines the two nations’ southern frontier.

The surprise maneuver was immediately welcomed by Iran, which had denounced Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and blamed Baghdad for opening the door to Western intervention in the gulf region.

“Praise to God,” Iran’s Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Velayati declared on Tehran Radio after hearing the news. A spokesman for Iran’s Foreign Ministry, Morteza Sarmadi, said in a Tehran Radio broadcast that Hussein’s offer would lead to a “lasting and just peace” after the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War, which left hundreds of thousands dead on both sides.

But Iran’s official news agency said that no official position would be taken until the proposal can be carefully studied. Hard-line Iranians were strongly opposed to the 1988 truce that ended the war--Iran and Iraq have yet to sign a formal peace treaty--and sharp debate among Iranian politicians is likely on any important proposal from Hussein.

Iranian officials said an Iraqi delegation was arriving in Tehran on Wednesday night to present the proposal.

Hussein’s offer of peace was set out in a letter to Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani, whom he addressed as “Dear Brother.” The letter was quoted as saying that “serious interaction” is needed “to confront the evil-doers who want harm to befall the Muslims and the Arab nation.”

The letter’s wording made it plain that Iraq wishes to relieve pressure on its eastern flank. Hussein offered peace “in order not to keep any of Iraq’s potential out of action outside the arena of the great duel.”

“Perhaps we could cooperate,” he said, “in preserving the gulf as a lake of peace and stability free from foreign cliques and powers lurking there.”

The sudden move indicated growing pressure on the Iraqi strongman, hemmed in by mounting Western military forces and his inability to obtain Arab acquiescence to his Aug. 2 invasion of Kuwait.

As Hussein made the offer, U.S. forces continued to dig in at undisclosed locations in Saudi Arabia after being sent there to help ease the Saudi monarchy’s fears of an invasion from Iraqi-occupied Kuwait, just to the north. And the many nations taking part in the U.N.-ordered economic sanctions against Iraq continued to tighten the screws. Iraq’s oil exports have been virtually shut off, and much of its imports have been curbed.

“Saddam has got himself into a situation where fences have closed around him,” said Don Kerr, an analyst with London’s International Institute for Strategic Studies. “I’d say he was taken aback by the United Nations sanctions and the speed of the American deployments.

“He’s sitting in essentially a landlocked country, with no friend in Syria on his western border, the Soviets disapproving of the invasion, and Iran, an old enemy, in the east. He has to mend fences.”

Hussein might be hoping that peace with Iran will give him access to trade routes blocked by Western enforcement of the U.N. sanctions. Iran controls one side of the gulf and could present difficult political problems for the Western powers if it opened its ports to Iraq.

But peace with Iran, perhaps supplemented by a nonaggression pact, would not assure Hussein of Iranian approval of the Kuwaiti invasion. Immediately after Hussein’s tanks rolled southward, Tehran moved to assure Syria and Arab oil states of its opposition to the blitzkrieg invasion, sending Foreign Minister Velayati on a whirlwind tour of regional capitals.

In Washington, White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater termed the Iraqi offer a “diversion” intended to distract attention from Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait. The overture “doesn’t deal with Kuwait,” he said. “It doesn’t deal with the invasion. It doesn’t deal with any of the objectives that we have.”

State Department spokeswoman Margaret Tutwiler expressed similar skepticism about the Iraqi offer.

“Let’s wait and see if this is followed through on,” she said. “Our experience over the last 13 days has been that their statements, both publicly and privately, do not always follow through.”

In any case, Tutwiler said, “if Saddam means to divert world attention from his aggression, it will not work. The world, including Iran, remains united in opposition to his invasion and occupation of Kuwait.”

Privately, Bush Administration officials said the Iraqi strongman’s willingness to give up so much to his regime’s oldest enemy seemed to indicate that the U.S. military buildup in Saudi Arabia and the international sanctions against Iraq have begun to bite.

Hussein’s proposal came on a day when the economic sanctions were being further tightened. An official at the southern Turkish port of Mersin said two ships carrying meat for Iraq were turned away.

Meanwhile, the arrival of the first Syrian troops for the multinational force assembling in Saudi Arabia was delayed by logistical problems. Additional Egyptian forces faced the same problem.

“It’s a problem of absorption,” an Egyptian military officer said in Cairo, explaining the difficulties encountered in rushing troops to Saudi Arabia. He said the delay was expected to last 24 to 48 hours.

Iraq’s eagerness to make peace with Iran has been evident since April, when Hussein sent out feelers that led to subsequent talks between the Iraqi and Iranian foreign ministers. The Kuwaiti invasion appeared to torpedo that initiative, but despite the long war, Arab Iraq and non-Arab Iran have common interests.

For instance, they are partners in oil strategy in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. Both support high prices that in the first half of this year were subverted by overproduction by Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates.

Nevertheless, they are rivals in their ambition to control events in the gulf region and have stretched their influence to Saudi Arabia and the oil sheikdoms on the Arab shore. As recently as Sunday, Rafsanjani said Iranian forces were capable of policing the strategic waters.

The rivalry for power has made them enemies. In 1975, the late Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, who ruled Iran and policed the gulf with American backing, struck a deal at an Algiers conference that gave Tehran sovereignty over the eastern half of the Shatt al Arab, which is formed by the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and which links Iraq’s main port of Basra to the gulf. Iran has an enormous shoreline on the east side of the Persian Gulf, but Iraq, all but landlocked, has depended heavily on the Shatt al Arab for access to the gulf.

In September of 1980, the year after the Iranian revolution deposed the shah and installed a Muslim fundamentalist, clergy-led government, Hussein ordered his army across the Shatt and into Iran’s Arab-populated southwestern provinces.

The invasion began a grueling eight-year war with an estimated combined casualty toll of 1 million. In August, 1988, his army spent, the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Iran’s supreme leader, accepted a U.N.-brokered truce, although he termed it “worse than poison.”

Since then the frontier has been patrolled by U.N. observers and marked by hostility.

Iraqi soldiers have held on to 1,000 square miles of Iranian territory near the border’s midpoint. This territory was seized in the final stage of the conflict with the support of paramilitary troops of the Moujahedeen, the main Iranian exile force.

In Wednesday’s peace offer, Hussein said the Iraqi occupying forces would be removed beginning Friday.

“We will pull back our forces facing you along the border,” he told Rafsanjani, “keeping a symbolic force together with border guards and police merely to undertake daily duties in normal circumstances.”

Hussein’s letter said he was accepting an earlier Iranian proposal for an exchange of prisoners of war. This is a highly emotional issue in Iran and has frustrated U.N.-mediated contacts between the two countries. U.N. officials estimate that Iraq holds about 30,000 Iranian POWs and that Iran has about 60,000 Iraqis.

On the subject of control of the Shatt al Arab, Hussein pledged to adopt the 1975 Algiers agreement, which would divide the waterway down the middle. The division of the waterway was considered a principal cause of Hussein’s 1980 invasion, underlining his demand for total control of the passage.

The waterway was a questionable prize. By late in the war, it had become so filled with damaged and sunken ships that it was impassable. Some of the heaviest fighting of the war took place in the area, around the Iranian cities of Abadan and Khorramshahr and the Iraqi port of Basra.

Iranian demands for a return to the Algiers formula became another sticking point in tentative peace suggestions, with Iraq refusing until Wednesday to consider the compromise.

With Basra blocked, Iraq developed Umm Qasr to the west as a port to ship its oil out of the gulf, but two Kuwaiti islands--Bubiyan and Warba--shielded the access, and both Iraq and Iran pressured the Kuwaitis during the war for military use of the islands.

Baghdad kept up the pressure after the truce, and since its invasion of Kuwait it now controls the islands, as well as the Kuwaiti oil ports.

Staff writer David Lauter in Washington contributed to this article.