Soviet Aide Visiting Iraq Is Optimistic

A ranking Soviet official left Baghdad on Saturday with words of cautious optimism that the Kuwait crisis can be solved short of war.

“I’m not pessimistic any longer towards the prospects of a political solution of the crisis,” Yevgeny M. Primakov told Soviet reporters.

Primakov, a Middle East specialist and a member of President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s policy-making Presidential Council, said that he was “greatly satisfied” with his two days of talks with President Saddam Hussein and other top Iraqi leaders.

He did not disclose the details of the talks, but his upbeat tone continued a recent pattern of Soviet comments on the confrontation over the Aug. 2 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. In Washington on Friday, Gen. Mikhail Moiseyev, head of the Soviet general staff, told reporters, “I really exclude the possibility that Saddam Hussein would take on a fight with the rest of the world.”

Nevertheless, Iraqi officials are publicly holding to a hard line, declaring themselves prepared to talk with any party but ready for war and determined to hold on to annexed Kuwait and its oil riches.

For instance, the Iraqi speech to the U.N. General Assembly on Friday, delivered by Sabah Talat Kadrat, deputy head of Baghdad’s U.N. mission, stuck firmly to Hussein’s Aug. 12 proposals for a political solution, which called for a Western withdrawal from the Persian Gulf, international talks on the longstanding Palestinian and Lebanese problems and leaving the status of Kuwait for intra-Arab consultations.

Primakov delivered a letter from Gorbachev to Hussein on Friday, but its contents were not disclosed and the reason for Soviet optimism was not clear. However, the Iraqi government chose the Primakov visit to signal Moscow that there would be no impediment to the withdrawal of 5,000 Soviet technicians and military advisers working here, the vast majority in the oil industry. An estimated 150 of the total are military men.

According to Soviet journalists, Primakov was told that the Baghdad regime sees “no reason to hinder repatriation” of the workers. They said Hussein promised that a large number would be leaving soon. The Soviets are working here under government contracts, and Moscow officials have said they would leave as their contracts expire.

Before coming to Baghdad, Primakov told reporters in Amman, Jordan, that his visit would continue a process of consultations. “I think it is necessary to find a political solution to prevent slipping into a military course,” he said. “It is necessary to continue the talks held in Moscow by Mr. (Iraqi Foreign Minister Tarik) Aziz.”

The Aziz visit, four days before Gorbachev met President Bush in Helsinki in early September, delivered the unbending Iraqi line--no withdrawal from Kuwait--and failed to dissuade Moscow from joining the United States in pressing further economic sanctions, including the air embargo, against Baghdad.

Gorbachev and other Soviet leaders, however, appear anxious to prevent the crisis from breaking into open war in the gulf, an explosive region too close to Soviet territory for comfort in Moscow. Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze said in his country’s speech to the General Assembly that Moscow might send military forces to the gulf if the operation were mandated under U.N. auspices, but a potential Security Council resolution to bring the anti-Iraqi military forces under the U.N. umbrella has yet to materialize.

Most Western diplomats here insist that Hussein is attempting to manipulate the crisis by pushing what one called “a series of buttons,” including the dribbling out of trapped foreign workers. Nine French citizens and four Germans left the country last week and the reported pledge to the Soviets removes any barriers to the largest contingent of Western and East European workers.

“They can keep this up endlessly,” said another diplomat. “They have hostages coming out their ears. . . . I consider these all to be cynical gestures.”

According to State Department figures, there are about 170 Americans trapped in Iraq: 101 detained as “special guests” and held at strategic locations as insurance against an American attack; 20 living in diplomatic “safe havens” here in Baghdad and about 50 diplomatic personnel withdrawn from the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait but prevented from leaving Iraq.

Hussein continues to push other buttons in Baghdad’s orchestrated campaign to draw attention away from what Washington and other Western capitals call the key issue, the invasion and annexation of Kuwait. Government pronouncements inveigh against the Western presence in Saudi Arabia, terming it an “occupation of Islam’s holy mosques,” and label Arab nations that support the Western squeeze on Baghdad as agents and lackeys of Washington and “colonialist Britain.”

Saturday’s editorial in the English-language Baghdad Observer assailed President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, the first Arab nation to commit troops to Saudi Arabia, as “the White House’s No. 1 ‘Arab’ man in the region.” “Mubarak is now a mere paid figure who can do nothing other than propagating for Western and Israeli interests,” the editorial asserted.