Cuomo Sees Bush Faults in Foreign Policy

Gov. Mario M. Cuomo said Wednesday that President Bush may be even more vulnerable in the 1992 election on foreign policy issues than he is on the domestic economy.

Sounding like a contender for the White House, Cuomo said that the President had let Iraqi President Saddam Hussein out of the box and had not been tough enough on China in the wake of the June, 1989, massacre of pro-democracy student protesters in Tian An Men Square.

The governor said he could envisage Republican presidential campaign commercials praising the Administration’s handling of the Persian Gulf War. “How about showing a commercial of Saddam Hussein reviewing his troops?” Cuomo asked. “Congratulations, George!”

Cuomo congratulated President Bush for winning the war and for handling the arranging of world powers before the war “very deftly.” But he charged that the President had allowed Hussein to build up his nuclear bomb-making programs before the war and, in the end, had failed “to defang Saddam.”

In a long and feisty telephone interview with The Times, Cuomo underscored the foreign policy theme. He stressed that he is still studying whether to fight for the Democratic presidential nomination and said he needs more time to make up his mind.

“I haven’t even tried to make this decision yet,” Cuomo said.

“I am looking at it analytically--how many primaries, where . . . I cannot allow anybody to force me into a schedule I think is not fair to the people of the state of New York.”

But from the tone of his remarks, it was clear that the governor, a veteran trial lawyer, was rehearsing how he would address the jury of the American people.

Cuomo said Democratic Sen. Harris Wofford’s smashing victory in Pennsylvania over former Atty. Gen. Dick Thornburgh demonstrated the potential power of the economy and health care as issues for Democrats in the presidential campaign.

“Health care is a metaphor now. It is a metaphor for taking care of people’s real problems, taking care of the middle class,” Cuomo said. “Health care is a middle-class issue . . . . The poor people are on Medicaid . . . .”

“The problem is the middle-class people, the people who go into nursing homes with a little money in their pockets and a house and a car; the people who don’t have health insurance.”

Cuomo said the Democratic Party and the Democrat-controlled Congress now face the danger that the White House, in the wake of Thornburgh’s defeat in Pennsylvania, could quickly come out with economic and health care programs that could dominate the debate.

Cuomo said the end of the Cold War had underlined the link between U.S. economic policy and U.S. foreign policy.

“There is no foreign policy nowadays that is not economic policy,” he said. “This is a global economy. If you fall behind the Japanese and the Germans, you have lost the foreign policy race. You cannot be dominant with military might and diplomacy. That’s the way we did it for 40 years. But you can’t be powerful with just that. Ask the Russians.

“You can’t just do it with just military might in the new global economy . . . . It is an economic struggle now.”

Cuomo previewed what some of his responses might be to GOP attacks on his record as governor, should he seek the White House.

In answer to anticipated arguments that New York state’s credit rating has fallen dramatically and that only one other state has a worse rating, Cuomo said New York’s bonds and other commercial paper would be paid on time and in full.

“Ask the Japanese, who are pumping a fortune into New York City,” he said, posing a hypothetical question to President Bush. “So what are you telling us, the Japanese don’t know how to invest? You are begging for money to fill your deficit every year. We (in New York) get it voluntarily. They come here to invest in New York City.”

Cuomo said Japanese investors are putting more money into New York than California, which has had Republican governors in recent years.