Soviet Generals Skeptical About War Gains, Say U.S. Misjudged Hussein : Military: The top Kremlin brass contends that the allied operation has determined nothing so far.

In barbed remarks with implications for superpower cooperation in the Persian Gulf, Soviet generals and civilian experts are expressing skepticism about the achievements of Operation Desert Storm, and they accuse U.S. leaders of patently misjudging the leader of Iraq and its army.

“The Americans clearly underestimated Saddam Hussein,” said Lt. Gen. German S. Starodubov, deputy chief of the main administration of the Soviet General Staff. “They thought that after the very first bombardments, he would either capitulate or lose his head and rush into some sort of adventure. But that could hardly be expected of an adversary who had just fought in the desert for eight years (against Iran)!”

Delivering what appeared to be the collective judgment of the top Soviet brass as Desert Storm entered its third week, Starodubov told a Communist Party publication that the U.S.-led operation had determined nothing so far.

“As long as an infantryman hasn’t put his foot on the ground, it’s a bit early to talk about the real accomplishment of the goals that have been set forth,” Starodubov said. He said the Soviet military has acquired information--he gave no details--debunking the “victory proclamations” of U.S. officials after the initial round of aerial bombardments.

With this analysis, Starodubov and others implicitly have rejected an upbeat progress report delivered at midweek by Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, the allied commander. Schwarzkopf said that the allied forces have gained complete control in the air and are engaged in methodically destroying Hussein’s military capabilities, largely with bomb and missile attacks.

Quite often, Starodubov maintained, allied pilots have attacked only decoys or warehouses that had been emptied in advance. The troubles of the U.S.-led forces have only begun, he noted: “To fight in the sand is difficult. There are reports that the Americans are having plenty of problems with their equipment.”

Since much of the weaponry used by Iraq’s army is Soviet-made and its top cadres were often schooled in military academies here, generals like Starodubov have an understandable interest in talking up the Iraqi ability to do battle. However, civilian experts here on the Arab world who express nothing but loathing for Iraq’s regime also foresee a long, lethal conflict with an unflinching adversary, whom many of them liken to Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.

“Enormous losses do not demoralize Saddam, as they would a civilized nation,” Vitaly V. Naumkin, the deputy director of the Oriental Studies Institute, said in an interview. “If, like in the war with Iran, he loses today, he will merely say, ‘Fine, I will win tomorrow.’ In my view, the Americans have totally misunderstood this.”

“If there is a land battle in Kuwait, I am deeply convinced that among the allied forces, there will be enormous losses,” said Naumkin, who has spent 15 years studying Middle Eastern wars. “Saddam is counting on ecological weapons (the release of oil), on land battles, on the Americans’ loss of morale. He is betting that if enough Americans are killed in land operations, then the climate in America will change, and he will be able to save himself.”

Westerners who believe in the likelihood of the Iraqi army’s collapse misunderstand both the Iraqi character and the nature of the regime, said Anatoly E. Yegorin, a former Soviet envoy to Libya who was received by Hussein last May in Baghdad as part of a visiting Soviet delegation.

“There is little hope that an Iraqi will retreat. No, he’ll die, but he won’t take one step backward,” said Yegorin, who is now a senior researcher at the Oriental Studies Institute, a Kremlin think tank for policy on the Middle East and Muslim world. “Besides, a system of barricades will have been constructed so that anyone who tries to retreat will be shot by someone standing behind him.”

Such Soviet viewpoints are important for two reasons. First, they affect policy. The pessimistic scenarios emerging from Moscow think tanks that now forecast a long and widened war near the country’s southern border heighten the Kremlin’s desire for a peaceful settlement, an idea reflected in a joint U.S.-Soviet cease-fire proposal earlier this week.

In addition, few nations are better qualified to assess the capabilities of Saddam Hussein’s 1-million-man army than the Soviet Union. It was Iraq’s chief weapons source until it broke off sales to protest Baghdad’s invasion of Kuwait, and in past years provided thousands of military specialists to train the Iraqi armed forces.

Despite the colossal scale of the air raids on Iraq, in the Soviet military’s view, Hussein’s forces are sufficiently intact to keep open the very question of Desert Storm’s ultimate success or failure. “Underestimating Iraqi military potential may cost dearly,” Maj. Gen. Sergei Bogdanov, one of the Soviet army’s top strategic thinkers, cautioned.

“Baghdad has a substantial enough military arsenal to inflict tangible losses on the enemy,” Bogdanov, the chief of the General Staff’s Strategic Research Center, told the military daily Red Star. “I would not dare to make bold forecasts about Iraq’s final defeat based on the analysis of the first days of combat operations.”

What appears to bother some, but not all, Soviet policy-makers the most is what they suspect is America’s “hidden agenda”--the invasion of Iraq itself and the overthrow, or assassination, of Saddam Hussein.

Venting the feelings of the resurgent anti-American right here, one Moscow daily has even accused the Bush Administration of plotting the “formal genocide of the Iraqi people” to install a more pliant regime in Baghdad.

Even making allowance for such hyperbole, the Kremlin will not associate itself publicly with any attempt to topple Hussein, for reasons linked both to foreign and domestic policy, Soviet specialists on the Arab world note.

“President Mikhail Gorbachev is under pressure from the right wing not to be seen as an ally of Bush on this,” explained one of the foremost Soviet experts on Iraq, Georgy I. Mirsky. On the other hand, he said, many Arabs already feel betrayed by Moscow’s siding with the United States against Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, and the Kremlin does not want to alienate them further.

Paradoxically, Mirksy said, anything that stops short of destroying Saddam’s regime will not guarantee the elimination of Iraqi militarism. Asked if the Soviet position--support for the use of force to drive Iraq out of Kuwait, but nothing more--was not therefore an unsatisfactory half-measure, Mirsky replied immediately, “of course.”

“I have no doubts that Kuwait will be eventually liberated, but if Saddam is allowed to sit tight in Baghdad, then he will appear to be the victor, whatever happens in Kuwait,” explained the professor at the Soviet Institute of World Economics and International Relations, a top Kremlin think tank.

Echoing Mirsky’s line of reasoning, the country’s most popular newspaper, Komsomolskaya Pravda, proclaimed Hussein the war’s victor in an article that made an impassioned plea for a fresh initiative by the Soviet government to get him out of Kuwait by peaceful means.

“The wise guys in strategic planning are predicting inevitable triumph for their side,” the daily said. “Lord, isn’t it clear now that Hussein has already won his own war in the moral sense? He has been fighting the world’s biggest military power longer than any Arab leader before him. If Allah sends him a grain of sense, he will pull out of Kuwait and immediately be proclaimed the greatest hero of the entire Arab world.”