U.S. Calls Iraqi Offer ‘Cynical Manipulation’

As President Bush, Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev and other European leaders arrived here Sunday to sign the most sweeping conventional arms reduction treaty in history, U.S. officials angrily denounced as “cynical manipulation” a proposal by Iraq’s President Saddam Hussein to begin releasing foreign hostages on Christmas Day.

The Iraqi proposal, made on the eve of a Paris summit meeting convened to begin creating the structure for a new world order as well as endorsing the agreement on conventional arms, was rejected as an attempt to divide the international coalition opposing Iraq’s seizure of Kuwait.

“This is just further cynical manipulation of innocent people’s lives,” Secretary of State James A. Baker III told reporters here. The hostages, many of whom are being held as human shields at military and other strategic sites, “should never have been taken in the first place,” Baker said.

The Persian Gulf crisis, while not on the official agenda for the summit, is expected to dominate the behind-the-scenes talks between U.S. leaders and the chiefs of the 33 other nations participating in the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe.

Bush and Baker are pressing hard to win support for a possible U.N. Security Council vote approving a military offensive against Iraq if the current economic embargo does not force Hussein to withdraw from Kuwait soon.

“I think the prospects are reasonable and we would be laying a very firm political foundation in case a military option is needed,” said British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd in supporting the American position.

Hussein’s proposal on release of the hostages, made in Baghdad, offered to begin freeing them gradually at Christmas and to complete the process by mid-March, when the Islamic holy month of Ramadan begins.

To U.S. strategists, that timetable would assure that no military attack could be launched against Iraq until late 1991 because of extreme spring and summer weather conditions and the annual Muslim pilgrimage to holy sites in Saudi Arabia beginning next June.

American officials have long predicted that Hussein would seek to drag out the Persian Gulf confrontation by periodically releasing hostages in the hope that over time the alliance opposing him would begin to crack.

No significant fissures have developed yet, and the Bush Administration moved quickly to squelch any possible debate on the latest Iraqi proposal.

“It happens so frequently that our response is we think he should release all the hostages right now,” said White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater.

Supporting that position, Hurd said: “I shrug my shoulders. It seems to me this is just a further demonstration of the human shield policy. Why doesn’t he let them go this week?”

Britain has been among the most ardent supporters of Bush’s hard-line position against Iraq since Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait last August.

Iraq is holding hundreds of Western and Japanese citizens, many of them at potential target sites.

While the gulf crisis captured the spotlight, Bush and other U.S. officials are aware that the CSCE meeting--although it will take only modest specific actions--will be an important step toward shaping American relations with Europe for decades to come.

Bush, as he flew here from brief visits to Czechoslovakia and Germany, said the summit “seems to have been overshadowed by what’s happening in the gulf, but it is a significant milestone.”

Despite the importance of the Paris summit, Bush and the other major leaders, who assembled here Sunday to a red-carpet welcome, approach it weakened politically.

Bush, Gorbachev, and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher have all suffered recent, severe political setbacks at home.

Even one of the French hosts, Prime Minister Michel Rocard, faces the prospect that his Socialist government will be brought down today by a parliamentary censure vote--involving an argument over new tax proposals--after the country was shaken by student demonstrations.

The French opposition parties see the censure vote as a golden opportunity to embarrass Rocard and French President Francois Mitterrand as they host 33 other chiefs of state and government at the glittering summit.

Only German Chancellor Helmut Kohl comes to the summit confident that his Christian Democratic party will probably win the all-German elections next month. He also expects to get the summit’s seal of approval on Germany’s now-accomplished reunification. But Kohl and his country are burdened by the enormous financial bill involved in rebuilding the former East Germany.

So what was meant to be a celebratory occasion, highlighted by the signing of the East-West treaty drastically reducing conventional arms in Europe, has taken on a more somber air.

Bush is worried about the unraveling support among Americans for military action in the gulf, and from Paris will head for the Middle East for a Thanksgiving visit to U.S. troops and an appeal for solidarity among the Arab allies.

Bush has been bedeviled by plummeting popularity ratings at home in the wake of his waffling during the budget debate and his failure to articulate a coherent rationale for committing U.S. troops to a possible major war against Iraq.

President Gorbachev faces an unruly Parliament and a political system at odds over how to deal with the Soviet Union’s crumbling economy as well as a nightmare posed by separatist movements in many of the Soviet Union’s constituent republics.

Thus, the man who reshaped world events and made the Paris summit possible is in danger of being seriously weakened at home, even as he prepares to receive the Nobel Peace Prize next month.

Gorbachev’s frequent trips abroad are sharply criticized domestically: Soviet citizens generally do not understand that Gorbachev’s travels helped create East-West rapprochement, which permits big reductions in Soviet military spending and the diversion of resources to the consumer economy.

Prime Minister Thatcher must undergo a vote on her leadership in her Conservative Party on Tuesday--one that could dislodge her from office.

Though the odds are in favor of Thatcher’s defeating her challenger, former Defense Secretary Michael Heseltine, her authority could be sharply eroded by a close vote.

At worst, she would be removed as prime minister, souring what was meant as a gala Paris occasion--something that would be reminiscent of Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s abrupt ouster from office during the Potsdam Conference in 1945, as World War II was being won.

On Sunday, Thatcher insisted she would fight all the way for the leadership and not resign unless actually defeated.

The uncertainty and unease among those attending the CSCE summit here is not restricted to the major players.

The widespread euphoria that greeted the downfall of communism in Eastern Europe last year has all but dissipated in the morass of problems that new democratic leaders and institutions have discovered.

With the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, Eastern European nations are worried that age-old disputes and ethnic rivalries--between Serbs and Croats, Slovaks and Czechs, Romanians and Hungarians, Turks and Bulgars, Poles and Germans--will cause serious disputes.

The new leaders in impoverished Eastern Europe expect the richer members of the 34 CSCE nations--all the European countries except Albania plus the United States and Canada--to provide economic aid to bring their countries up to Western standards.

But Western European nations are facing an economic slowdown and hesitate to be over-generous with scarce funds.

The Eastern European countries and the Soviet Union, which first proposed the Paris summit, want the CSCE to play a strong role in creating a security system for the “new European order,” now that the Warsaw Pact is moribund.

The hope of Gorbachev and former Communist nations was that CSCE, in which they expected to have a strong voice, would supplant the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as the major European security grouping.

Thus, for Gorbachev, the Paris summit was to be the diplomatic event of the year, although for him it now appears overshadowed politically by his problems with the wretched Soviet economy. Soviet citizens look to Gorbachev to do what the new political institutions are not yet capable of doing. He responds with caution, and the problems grow.

But a leading role for the CSCE in the new structure of Europe--an approach pushed by the former East Bloc and the French and Germans--has been quietly but firmly opposed by the United States and Britain, which believe that a big, 34-nation organization, based on consensus, should not replace the tried and true NATO, which for more than 40 years has helped keep the peace in Europe.

U.S. and British officials say that at best the CSCE would be slow and unwieldly in a security role such as responding to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.

In this view, CSCE could turn into an ineffectual debating society, influenced by the smaller nations from Eastern Europe that have little experience in effective democracy.

Still, the CSCE summit’s final declaration Wednesday will establish a small secretariat in Prague to organize biannual summit conferences and semiannual foreign ministers meetings.

The summit will also establish a Conflict Resolution Center in Vienna to address those disputes that worry Eastern European countries.

During the three-day meeting here, each head of government will be allotted 15 minutes for a speech, with Bush, Gorbachev, and Thatcher all scheduled to speak today.

But much of the summit’s unscheduled business will be done behind closed doors in bilateral meetings between leaders.

A central topic of these chats, particularly those involving Bush, will be firming up a wide-ranging CSCE consensus opposing Iraq’s takeover of Kuwait.

Bush would also like to persuade France’s Mitterrand to back military action in the gulf--if needed. The harried U.S. President wants to arrive in Saudi Arabia and Egypt after the summit, secure in the knowledge that he has the support of Western and Eastern leaders, particularly Gorbachev.

Times staff writers Michael Parks and Rone Tempest contributed to this story.