Glaspie Says She Warned Hussein on Kuwait Issue

WASHINGTON — Ambassador April Glaspie, answering criticism that she led Saddam Hussein to think he could take Kuwait with impunity, broke months of public silence Wednesday and told Congress that she warned the Iraqi leader that the United States would come to the defense of its allies in the Persian Gulf.

Hussein, in turn, “clearly” assured her in a crucial conversation last July 25 that Iraq would not seize the neighboring emirate and asked her to return to Washington to “convey those assurances to President Bush personally,” Glaspie said.

“It was a deliberate deception on a major scale,” Glaspie said, referring not only to Hussein’s promise to her but to his pledges to other governments, including Arab allies such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia. “It was an extraordinary miscalculation.”

Coolly and calmly and with a determination that impressed even her congressional critics, Glaspie appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to defend U.S. policy during the period leading up to Iraq’s Aug. 2 invasion of Kuwait.

She denied charges that U.S. policy had been weak or fraught with appeasement. And she disputed the accuracy of the Iraqi account of the conversation she had with Hussein in which she was quoted as telling him that the Bush Administration had “no opinion” about its border dispute with Kuwait.

“It is not a transcript. It is a fabrication. It is disinformation,” Glaspie said of the text of the conversation that was released by Iraq but never forcefully disputed by the State Department until her dramatic appearance before the committee.

“I really hope the committee shares my astonishment that a document issued by a president (Hussein) whose credibility is certainly not in high repute would be accepted as read,” the 48-year-old career Foreign Service officer said.

While not denying that she had said the things attributed to her by the Iraqis, Glaspie said that many of her remarks were deleted from the Iraqi transcript. She said that others were edited or taken out of context to the point that the transcript became a “falsehood . . . edited to the point of inaccuracy.”

On the central point of whether she tacitly encouraged Hussein to invade Kuwait by telling him that Washington had “no opinion” on the border dispute, Glaspie said that she actually told him the United States would not take sides as long as the dispute was resolved peacefully “through negotiation and without violence.”

And she said she also told Hussein--and repeated several times to other senior Iraqi officials--that in the event of war, “we would defend our vital interests, we would support our friends in the Gulf, we would defend their sovereignty and integrity.”

Congressional critics had been eager to question Glaspie about the conversation because of the impression--never convincingly dispelled by Secretary of State James A. Baker III--that it helped to persuade Hussein that the United States would not intervene if Iraq invaded Kuwait.

While few doubted that Glaspie was following State Department instructions, Baker’s failure to defend her, along with her public silence, gave the impression that she was being used as a scapegoat for what some characterized as misguided U.S. policy toward Iraq before the invasion.

“Your meeting with Saddam Hussein has generated enormous controversy,” Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Claiborne Pell (D-R.I.) told Glaspie. While “it is absurd and unfair to suggest that your meeting resulted in the invasion . . . I do believe that we sent Saddam Hussein several wrong signals and that our policy did encourage him in the belief we might not react strongly to the invasion of Kuwait.”

Glaspie admitted that the United States, along with virtually all other governments, made “a serious mistake” in misjudging Hussein. He was “totally isolated and ignorant and understood absolutely nothing about us,” causing him to miscalculate, she said.

“Our mistake . . . was we foolishly did not realize he was stupid, that he did not believe our clear and repeated warnings that we would protect our vital interests,” she said.

Asked why she had not spoken out before to defend U.S. policy and her much-criticized role in it, Glaspie said the State Department believed that “retrospectives” would not be appropriate while the war was going on.

Now that the war is over, she said, it is appropriate to examine past policy, adding that she appeared before the committee willingly but also “on instructions” from the State Department.

Glaspie was immediately surrounded by cameras as she took her place at the witness table, a slim, almost diminutive figure facing a row of Democratic and Republican senators.

But she quickly demonstrated control of the situation--articulating her answers calmly and confidently--while the senators went out of their way not to treat her roughly or to force her on the defensive.

“I don’t believe people wanted to turn this into a post facto inquisition,” said Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.). “It was a legitimate effort to understand the process . . . and clearly she was just following instructions. . . . Nobody was looking for recriminations.”

Some Republican committee members, notably Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.), voiced concern before the hearing that Democrats would try to use the hearing to “throw mud in the President’s face” by reopening the “who-lost-Iraq argument.”

But if that had been the critics’ intention, it was quickly set aside as Glaspie began testifying, impressing the senators with what one committee aide characterized as her “confidence and candor.”

“Madame Ambassador,” Sen. Paul Simon (D-Ill.) interjected at one point, “I have the impression you’re handling yourself very well.”

Glaspie said that at the July 25 meeting with Hussein the Iraqi leader took a conciliatory tone, promising “in very clear terms” that he would not invade Kuwait. At one point during the meeting, she said, he telephoned Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and told him the same thing.

Glaspie said that Hussein initially seemed startled by her firm warning that the United States was prepared to intervene in the Gulf. “I sensed he was flummoxed. It had occurred to him for the first time that we might just fight,” Glaspie said. Eventually, however, he apparently concluded that U.S. military intervention would not occur, she said.

The ambassador indicated that she had been so convinced by these assurances that she left Baghdad for a scheduled vacation the day before the invasion.

“It took two years, but I finally got to see Saddam Hussein,” she said of the fateful meeting, her first and only session with the Iraqi leader, who does not normally receive ambassadors. “I guess,” she added, “I’ll never see him again.”

APRIL GLASPIE: CAREER DIPLOMAT

BORN: April 26, 1942, in Vancouver, Canada. Reared in California.

EDUCATION: Mills College, Oakland. Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (master’s degree), Washington.

LANGUAGES: Arabic and French.

POSTS: Joined Foreign Service in 1966. Political officer in Jordan, Egypt. Director of State Department Arabic language school in Tunis. Deputy chief of mission in Syria (1983-85). Director of regional desk covering Lebanon, Jordan, Syria. Ambassador to Iraq (March, 1988- ). First female ambassador to an Arab country.

PROFILE: Workaholic. Warm. Blunt. Funny. Never married. Travels with mother, Margaret, on all postings.

QUOTE: “Obviously, I didn’t think--and no one else did--that the Iraqis were going to take all of Kuwait.”