U.S. Insists There Will Be No Negotiating

Top-level Bush Administration officials, hastening to fend off criticism of the President’s surprise offer to engage in talks with Iraq, insisted Saturday that there will be no negotiations with the government of Saddam Hussein.

In separate televised interviews, Vice President Dan Quayle and Deputy National Security Adviser Robert M. Gates repeatedly emphasized that Bush’s initiative is not an attempt to arrange some sort of deal with Hussein’s regime.

“It is not a negotiation. It is not a change of policy,” Quayle said. “It is simply to make one last direct appeal to Saddam Hussein to live up to those United Nations resolutions. . . . There are going to be talks. There is going to be discussion but no negotiations beyond what the United Nations has already decided.”

The two officials also rejected an Iraqi effort to link any discussion of a possible Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait with broader Mideast issues, such as an Arab-Israeli peace settlement or the rights of Palestinians.

On Friday, Bush offered to send Secretary of State James A. Baker III to Baghdad to meet with Hussein within the next few weeks and invited Iraqi Foreign Minister Tarik Aziz to meet with him in Washington the week of Dec. 10. The President previously had rejected the idea of sending a high-level American envoy to Baghdad.

The comments by Quayle and Gates appear to be aimed, in part, at rebutting former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, who termed Bush’s offer “a very grave step” that could prompt U.S. allies in Europe and the Mideast to open their own, separate negotiations with Iraq.

“I have not been this worried in decades,” Kissinger said during an interview Friday night on ABC-TV’s “Nightline.”

“I have the impression that none of our allies were informed of this, much less consulted, especially the Arab allies,” Kissinger said. “It will now be impossible to prevent others from starting their own negotiations with Baghdad.

“I believe also that, if Saddam Hussein is even halfway skillful, he will present us with a number of propositions that will narrow the issue to a point where the military option will disappear, and therefore our bargaining position will erode.”

Over the last few months, several Mideast experts have predicted that Hussein might wait until just before the outbreak of war and then announce he would pull his troops out of most of Kuwait--retaining only small but vital portions of Kuwaiti territory. Such an action would have the effect of eroding the international coalition that favors using force, if necessary, to make Iraq withdraw from all of Kuwait.

Quayle maintained in an interview on CNN’s “Evans and Novak” program that Baker would merely present Hussein directly with the same message that other world leaders, including Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, have conveyed to Aziz, the Iraqi foreign minister. The message, the vice president indicated, is that the United States and its allies will not negotiate until Iraq withdraws completely from Kuwait.

“Now, you will have a face-to-face meeting with Saddam Hussein so he can get the message directly, and he can see the body language of Secretary Baker, and he will see how serious we are,” Quayle asserted.

In a separate interview broadcast by CNN, Gates indicated that one of the Bush Administration’s major aims is to communicate directly with Hussein.

“It’s not clear what information gets through to him,” Gates said. “ . . . Those in his entourage are scared to death of him and don’t want to tell him the bad news.”

Quayle and Gates emphasized that the Administration is not willing to address the Palestinian issue in the talks, which would be held before the Jan. 15 deadline contained in a U.N. Security Council resolution authorizing use of force if Iraq does not withdraw from Kuwait by that date.

Earlier Saturday, in its first response to Bush’s offer, the Iraqi Revolutionary Command Council maintained that “Palestine and other occupied Arab lands will remain before our eyes and at the forefront of the issues dealt with in any dialogue.”

But Quayle asserted: “Palestine is not an issue on the table. The issue on the table is Saddam Hussein’s invasion into Kuwait.”

After unveiling his new diplomatic overture, Bush spent Saturday at Camp David, Md., in a rare session with all of America’s top military officials, including Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

“It is not some sort of council of war,” Gates said. “There are a couple of new chiefs, and it’s an opportunity for them to discuss a whole range of issues.” He suggested that in addition to the Persian Gulf, the military leaders might address plans for next year’s defense budget.