In His Refusal to Accept Bush’s Letter, Aziz Invokes an Old Ploy

By formally rejecting President Bush’s letter to Saddam Hussein on Wednesday, Iraqi Foreign Minister Tarik Aziz invoked one of diplomacy’s most time-honored practices: refusing to accept an unwelcome message.

But by rebuffing a personal message from Bush, Aziz was taking a deliberate and calculated slap at the President, diplomats said.

Aziz told reporters in Geneva that he read the letter and handed it back to Secretary of State James A. Baker III because it contained impolite language that might offend his boss, Hussein.

“The language in this letter is not compatible with the language that should be used in correspondence between heads of state,” Aziz said with apparent indignation. “. . . When a head of state writes to another head of state a letter, and if he really intends to make peace with that head of state or reach genuine understanding, he should use polite language.”

Ironically, U.S. officials said, the letter was almost certainly one of the most polite messages Bush has addressed to Hussein in recent weeks.

In public statements, the President has called Hussein “the rapist of Kuwait” and compared the Iraqi leader to Adolf Hitler. But the letter he sent with Baker contained none of that emotional rhetoric, they insisted.

“The letter was not rude,” Bush himself said at his news conference. “The letter was direct. . . . To refuse to even pass a letter along is another example of the stonewalling that is taking place.

“I’ve been around the diplomatic track a long time,” Bush, a former ambassador, added. “The letter was proper.”

After Aziz rejected the letter, the State Department called in Iraqi Ambassador Mohammed Mashat and tried to hand him a copy. But Mashat, presumably acting under instructions from Baghdad, also refused to accept it.

The White House has refused to release the text of the letter, but officials have described it as a tough but polite warning that Iraq will suffer a devastating military attack unless it withdraws from Kuwait.

And that is probably what Aziz objected to.

“The usual standard in official letters is that you’re not allowed to be insulting,” said George S. Vest, a former assistant secretary of state and 40-year veteran of the diplomatic service. “But if you want to be insulted, it’s easy to be insulted.

“This is one more gesture, a posturing on the part of the Iraqis,” he said. “They clearly want to play up their situation--that they’re not going to be pushed around, that they’re not going to give in to pressure.”

One feature of Aziz’s action was unusual, Vest said.

“It’s quite common to reject a diplomatic note or message from one government to another,” he said. “But this was a letter from one head of state to another. I cannot recall another case in which one of those has been rejected.”

In 1984, in the midst of a severe chill in U.S.-Soviet relations, Soviet officials rebuffed a request from Brent Scowcroft, then a White House national security official and now President Bush’s national security adviser, to deliver a letter from then-President Ronald Reagan to Soviet leader Konstantin U. Chernenko.

Indeed, the United States has formally rejected several diplomatic messages from Iraq during the crisis. In August, the State Department refused to accept a note demanding the closure of the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait. In September, it rebuffed an Iraqi note asking for the names of American citizens being sheltered in the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.

“That happens quite frequently,” said L. Dean Brown, who served as a U.S. ambassador in several Arab capitals. In one sense, he said, Baker was lucky that diplomatic practices have become as refined as they are.

“Back in the days of the Ottoman Empire,” he noted, “they’d not only refuse the message; they’d kill the messenger.”