Broadcast Gives Iraqis Fleeting Moment of Joy

Air-raid sirens wailed and machine-gun fire filled the air throughout Iraq’s besieged capital city just after 2:30 p.m. Friday, but for the first time in a month, these sounds of war were an emotional explosion of hope and relief.

“The war is over!” civil servants and militiamen were overheard shouting exultantly as they embraced in the streets after hearing Baghdad Radio’s “historic” broadcast indicating that their leadership had finally decided to do what many of them had hoped for weeks ago: get out of Kuwait.

The celebration, of course, was short-lived. Tears of joy turned quickly to tears of frustration, fear and despair as President Bush and other allied leaders flatly rejected the heavily conditional withdrawal offer.

But the few moments of frenzied joy in the streets and cafes of Baghdad spoke volumes about the real motives behind the Iraqi leadership’s offer to pull its hundreds of thousands of troops out of occupied Kuwait in exchange for nearly a dozen demands, among them, full war reparations by the allies and an Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories.

For, as much as the Revolutionary Command Council’s announcement was a public relations ploy by Baghdad aimed at casting the allies as warmongers and searching out potential weak links in the multinational coalition ranged against it, it was also a critically timed message for Iraqi’s domestic audience, which increasingly believes that Kuwait is simply not worth losing Iraq over.

“In the eyes of the Iraqis, for the first time since this whole crisis began on Aug. 2, President Saddam Hussein has rid himself of the issue of Kuwait once and for all,” said one Western expert on Iraq, now based in Amman, who has spent several years in Baghdad.

“It’s safe to assume that, even at the level of the Command Council itself, there have been voices saying, ‘This has gone far enough.’ And throughout the Iraqi armed forces, it would be very hard to find an officer or soldier willing to withstand much more of this (allied air) bombardment simply for the sake of Kuwait.

“So, what you’re really seeing here is Saddam, for the first time, backing down in front of his own people to shift the emphasis of his war effort in what can only be seen as a fairly desperate move to keep some support from a nation that feels it’s on the brink of oblivion. He’s saying, ‘It isn’t Kuwait anymore. Now, it’s Iraq.’ ”

At the same time, though, the Iraqi leadership felt compelled to keep its standing demand linking Kuwait to the Palestinian issue or risk losing the support that it has built up throughout the Arab world since its first self-styled “peace initiative” 10 days after invading Kuwait on Aug. 2.

Most Middle East-based experts on Iraq stressed that the communique did signal the first significant shift in Iraq’s policy since the Persian Gulf crisis began. The Iraqi leadership, as always, had multiple objectives in issuing it, they said, but allied acceptance of the proposal clearly was not one of them.

The ruling council, they all agreed, knew full well that Bush and his allies would reject the proposal. And most agreed that it was Hussein’s need to shift the focus of the war, as Iraq’s morale is reaching its lowest ebb, that was a key motive behind the seeming policy shift.

Most Iraqis, who remain hunkered down in their homes and along the front lines of Kuwait under the continuing allied aerial bombardment, are likely to see the offer as a sincere peace effort, they added. They will shift blame for their suffering from their stubborn leader to the allies who so quickly rejected the offer.

“It’s Saddam’s manipulation at its finest,” said one Western military analyst in the Middle East. “Now he can turn to his troops and his people and, in effect, say, ‘Look, it’s not my fault. I said Kuwait isn’t important anymore, and Bush wouldn’t even listen, let alone talk. So it’s clear Bush doesn’t care about Kuwait either. He wants to destroy Iraq.’ ”

That same argument is also likely to be compelling to any weak links in the anti-Iraq coalition outside the country as well, the analysts said.

“Saddam is nothing if he isn’t a master of timing. The international stage is perfectly set for this initiative,” one European diplomat said. “Remember, this comes just two days after the world saw those horribly blackened corpses of hundreds of women and children who were incinerated by allied bombs.”

Most analysts agreed that the Iraqi offer was timed deliberately to take advantage of world sympathy for victims of two precision bombs from a U.S. F-117A Stealth fighter that fell on a Baghdad structure that Iraq says was a civilian bomb shelter but U.S. officials insist was a key military command and communications center.

As it made the withdrawal offer Friday, Iraq’s propaganda machinery continued to churn out gruesome videotape of more charred bodies being recovered from the underground chamber, bringing their number of confirmed dead to 306.

“Sure it’s orchestrated,” the European analyst added. “First, the Iraqis show the allies killing women and children. Then Saddam offers peace in such a way that it forces the allies into a position where they are the ones who seem to want only war.

“But remember, there’s a domestic side of this bomb shelter tragedy, as well.”

As much as the allied air strike scored a public relations coup for Iraq abroad, it struck a devastating blow to civilian confidence at home. Reports reaching Amman from Western journalists in Baghdad and from Jordanians who commute between the neighboring nations indicate that the attack on the structure shattered what little confidence the public had in Saddam Hussein’s ability to protect them.

“The guy’s a dictator, no doubt, but he’s their dictator,” said one diplomat based in Baghdad until late last year. “Saddam has sent teen-agers to their death at the front, he has ruthlessly killed his enemies at home, but, through eight years of war with Iran, he always proved his ability to shelter Iraq’s civilians from the direct impact of war.

“Clearly, this time it’s different. From the beginning, the only question has been how long his people can endure it before they start blaming him.”

Several of the Western journalists permitted to visit Baghdad since the war began, among them British Broadcasting Corp. correspondent Alan Little, confirmed that Wednesday’s bombing deepened the popular fear in the Iraqi capital.

“There is now a sense that, if you’re not safe in a bomb shelter, you’re not going to be safe anywhere,” Little said Friday in a BBC interview by satellite telephone from Baghdad.

Iraq’s Revolutionary Command Council, an inner circle of Hussein’s most trusted and loyal aides, clearly sensed that unprecedented insecurity when it crafted Friday’s communique, which opened with a lengthy condemnation of the allied air strikes. The conclusion, the communique stated, is that the allies “are trying to destroy all of the economy and progress of the Iraqi people.”

It was only after that 10-minute introduction, punctuated with Iraq’s now-standard phrases about “the imperialist-Zionist-criminal conspiracy,” that the communique finally outlined the withdrawal offer and its many conditions.

“That (introduction) clearly was aimed at reassuring the home audience that their leaders have not abandoned them,” said a Western diplomatic analyst in the Persian Gulf who recently left the Iraqi capital. “They (Iraq’s leaders) were trying to say, ‘You’re not alone in this,’ and then go one very significant step further by saying, ‘We’re doing something about it. We are now going to forget about Kuwait and try to end this war.’ ”