Bush Reported Unhappy With Gorbachev Bid

Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev has jeopardized his warm relations with the United States by pushing a last-ditch Gulf peace proposal that President Bush considers an ill-advised gesture to win greater Soviet influence in the Arab world at the expense of allied goals, government analysts said Wednesday.

Bush is “biting his lip” to contain his unhappiness with Gorbachev’s diplomatic efforts, according to one analyst who said the Soviet president “has done more harm to himself (in Washington) in the past 72 hours than he did by all the head-knocking in the Baltics.”

Administration officials say Gorbachev’s initiative--which Bush has rejected as falling “well short of what is required” to end hostilities--complicates the allies’ efforts to force an unconditional Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait and remove Saddam Hussein as a future threat to Persian Gulf stability.

But they insist that the Soviet initiative is having no effect on the timetable for a ground attack on the Iraqi dictator’s forces.

With some sources suggesting that a ground assault is imminent, a senior aide to the President said: “Bush just tells the staff, ‘Don’t worry. We’ve got a plan and we’re not changing it.’ And there’s a feeling among the staff that we want to get on with it and get it over with.”

Despite Moscow’s support for the U.N. resolutions demanding Iraq’s unconditional withdrawal from Kuwait, some allied leaders were wary even before the war began on Jan. 17 that Gorbachev might try to exploit the situation to bolster Soviet influence in the Middle East.

In fact, the allies were so suspicious that they told Moscow the air war was about to begin only an hour before allied planes bombed targets in Baghdad, a senior official of an allied Arab country disclosed. His country and the British favored telling Gorbachev “five minutes ago we bombed Baghdad,” the official said, but the allies compromised on an hour’s notice.

And once Gorbachev was notified, the official said, the allies’ uneasiness was confirmed when he asked for a two-day delay to give him time to talk with the Iraqis. Gorbachev was told that it was too late to recall the planes, the official said.

“Immediately, Gorbachev fires a message to Saddam Hussein that night,” the Arab official said. “You talk about panic. I thought I lost my stomach. Here are hundreds of airplanes already under way, and we have detected absolutely no signal from Iraq that they know what’s happening. Can you imagine if they go up, fully with their radars, surface-to-air missiles and everything, and receive us with that greeting?”

Gorbachev’s message to Hussein, urging him to pledge immediately to withdraw from Kuwait, was sent to the Soviet ambassador in Baghdad, Viktor V. Posuvalyuk. But the ambassador could not deliver the message to Hussein because Iraqi officials refused to awaken their leader, the official said.

As a result, Hussein did not receive the Soviet message until well after the bombing began, he said.

Senior aides to Bush, while conceding that Gorbachev’s advancement of the peace proposal has proved “troubling,” insist that the President maintains good personal relations with the embattled Soviet leader and hopes he will be able to survive the political crisis in his own country.

“The President wishes he hadn’t done it, but he’s not mad at Gorbachev,” said a senior aide. “We expected a lot of proposals but never thought they would be successful. From our standpoint, another attempt is made and passed on and we continue the war.”

In fact, one of Bush’s main concerns apparently is that Gorbachev, with whom he has developed such a close relationship, may find himself toppled from power. Bush was described as worried that Gorbachev is following a hard-line conservative course and surrounding himself with like-minded aides. At the same time, Bush is worried that if the Soviet leader is ousted, he may be replaced by someone even more intractable.

“There’s real concern that he’s in a weakened condition, no doubt about that,” said one senior aide. “But you play with what you’ve got and the prevailing attitude is that, if he left, he would be replaced with somebody a lot harder than he is. The general consensus is that it wouldn’t be Yeltsin.”

The aide was referring to Boris N. Yeltsin, president of the Russian Federation, who has become Gorbachev’s arch political rival. Yeltsin asked Gorbachev to resign on Tuesday and turn over power to the Council of the Federation, an executive body made up of the leaders of the 15 constituent republics.

Yeltsin accused Gorbachev of leading the country to a dictatorship, a view endorsed by government analysts here who say that the Soviet leader has replaced more moderate officials with hard-liners in positions close to his own.

What Gorbachev is trying to do in pushing the Gulf peace proposal, one analyst said, “is to preserve the Saddam Hussein regime for a lot of geopolitical or selfish, client-type reasons.”

Bush, however, continues to defend Gorbachev against critics within his Administration who think the President should start distancing himself from a leader who not only has abandoned democratic reforms for dictatorial powers but has become extremely unpopular in his own country.

“The President takes the position that we can’t turn our backs on the things he’s done for the world,” a senior official said. “And in the end it may be that Gorbachev doesn’t want to turn his back on the things he’s helped bring about--the tearing down of the Berlin Wall, bringing down the Iron Curtain, reuniting the Germanys and giving dignity back to Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia.”

Bush frequently has pointed out to his advisers, the official said, that “we wouldn’t be having the success we’ve had in the war with Iraq if the Soviets hadn’t taken the position they did. If they had opposed or been reluctant to approve the U.N. resolutions, or been supportive to Iraq under the table, in any number of ways they could have thrown a wrench in the works. And we shouldn’t overlook their contributions.”

PRESIDENTIAL RELATIONS

Warm relations between George Bush and Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev began in December, 1988, when the then President-elect joined Gorbachev and President Reagan on Governor’s Island, N.Y. It was Bush’s first formal session with the Kremlin leader, and Gorbachev discussed his plans for sizable reductions of Soviet forces in Europe. A year later, Bush and Gorbachev met in Malta, agreeing it was time to end the Cold War, and Bush pledged to take steps to ease U.S. tariffs on Soviet exports. In June, 1990, they sealed agreements to slash strategic nuclear arms, stop building chemical weapons and lift trade barriers against Moscow. They also discussed Baltic unrest, German unity and other European developments.