CALIFORNIA AND THE PERSIAN GULF CRISIS : Wilson Says Iraq Military Arsenal Must Be Crushed

Gov. Pete Wilson said Tuesday that the United States should make sure that Iraq’s military arsenal is destroyed, and not just settle for its withdrawal from Kuwait.

Otherwise, he said, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in three or four years will develop a missile capability that not only will menace Riyadh and Tel Aviv, but “might very well wind up threatening Bonn, London and perhaps even New York and Washington.”

Armed with missiles carrying nuclear or chemical warheads, the governor said, Hussein would have “the very considerable ability to extort concessions” from other nations.

Wilson thus took a position more hawkish than that of President Bush, who has signaled that if Hussein were to withdraw Iraqi forces from Kuwait they would not be attacked by the U.S. military. The governor, speaking to the Sacramento Press Club, said Hussein’s arsenal could be destroyed by war or voluntarily through an arms treaty, but either way the United States should insist upon it.

It was the first time Wilson has spoken out on the Persian Gulf crisis since he was elected governor last November. He was sworn into office last week and simultaneously resigned from the U.S. Senate, where he had been a member of the Armed Services Committee.

The new governor made it clear that, unlike his predecessor, George Deukmejian, he will not hesitate to speak out on national and foreign affairs. In fact, Wilson recently told an interviewer that “I intend to be a national political figure.”

Corresponding with that desire, Wilson told the Press Club that he favors moving up California’s presidential primary from June to a much earlier date to give the state more clout in the candidate nominating process. The governor said he and most Californians are “tired of” the state merely “being a bank” for candidates seeking campaign contributions and would like “to have some earlier say in the selection” of nominees.

Legislation is pending to advance the date of the 1992 California presidential primary, probably to March. Senate Republican Leader Ken Maddy of Fresno said Tuesday he supports the concept, as does Senate President Pro Tem David A. Roberti (D-Los Angeles), and predicted that it will pass his house. The Assembly last year passed an early-primary bill.

But because Bush intends to run for reelection in 1992 and Wilson has pledged to support him, it will be at least 1996 before the 57-year-old governor will have an opportunity to personally use an early presidential primary in California.

Meanwhile, Wilson demonstrated on Tuesday that he is equally comfortable in the state, national or foreign arena. Prefacing his comments with the observation that few newspaper editors would really care what he had to say about state issues, since the nation was on the eve of potential war, the governor immediately launched into a dissertation on the Persian Gulf crisis.

He said avoiding war “unhappily appears to be increasingly less likely,” and lauded Bush and Congress for understanding that “you do not solve problems with someone like Saddam Hussein by simply deferring it. . . . (They) have been right in making a judgment not to temporize “

But Wilson said he is concerned “that if, in fact, we are going to commit American troops to an armed intervention, that it not be simply to restore the status quo prior to the invasion of Kuwait.”

Asked whether he would prefer that Iraq withdraw its troops from Kuwait and avoid war, or that the United States launch an attack and destroy the Iraqi military, Wilson stopped short of calling for war, but said: “What I would prefer is . . . that the capability which Saddam Hussein presently enjoys be dismantled.”