COLUMN LEFT : Even Bush’s ‘Triumphs’ Are Empty : Recent revelations about U.S. support for Iraq make the Gulf War seem like a salvage mission.

Once again, George Bush stands exposed as the emperor with no clothes. A report by The Times on Sunday revealed that up until the eve of Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, the U.S. government, at White House insistence, was feeding the beast with billions of dollars in financial support and access to militarily useful American technologies. The man whom Bush denounced as a Hitler, it turns out, had been actively promoted as our potential strategic friend for almost 10 years by both the Bush and Reagan administrations. The story revealed once and for all that the cloak of foreign-policy dexterity in which Bush swathed himself is a sham; the illusion he spun to hide his domestic non-policies has vanished.

When his reelection campaign began in earnest, Bush sought to deflect attention from his failures on the home front by recalling the Desert Storm triumphs of a year ago. In the State of the Union Address, Bush outlined a response to the nation’s prolonged recession that even loyal Republicans have conceded is incoherent. He tried to transfer the shine of Persian Gulf victory to his Potemkin village of domestic policies by borrowing from his own wartime speeches, declaring that the recession “shall not stand.”

Such rhetorical diversions will be impossible from now on. Who can take seriously Bush’s invocations of Gulf War glory knowing that he had a hand in creating “the butcher of Baghdad”? As interviews and documents obtained by The Times showed, Bush aggressively continued a Reagan Administration program of encouraging Arab allies to transfer U.S. arms to Iraq, and the Bush White House repeatedly overrode the reservations and objections voiced by other agencies concerning the intentions of Saddam Hussein. Indeed, Bush signed a secret national security directive in October, 1989, instructing federal departments to promote relations with Iraq. Typical was a $1-billion agricultural loan guarantee rammed through despite warnings that Baghdad was likely to default and that the food credits were allowing Iraq to spend its scarce hard-currency reserves on weapons. In July, 1990, mere weeks before Iraqi forces entered Kuwait, Ambassador April Glaspie conveyed the message that the Bush Administration was working to send the second installment of the $1-billion loan guarantee. Earlier that year, the White House turned down proposals from the Commerce Department to restrict Iraqi access to U.S. technologies with military applications.

All of this occurred after Hussein had massacred Kurdish villagers in a chemical weapons attack, after he had boasted that he would “burn half of Israel,” and after Iraqi officials had been caught attempting to purchase American-made nuclear weapons triggers. Even in the face of evidence that the government in Baghdad was supporting terrorism, Bush’s support for Iraq rolled on. In retrospect, his sudden turnabout looks more like an emergency effort to contain the Frankenstein he helped to create. Even though the effort failed, he now has the audacity to claim it as his greatest foreign-policy triumph.

The revelations should compel a sober assessment of Bush’s foreign policies. The autocratic Emir of Kuwait and Saddam Hussein are both back in power. The U.S.-encouraged revolt of the Kurds proved a shameful fiasco. The Kurds are protected from Hussein’s wrath only by the continued presence of Western troops. Bush’s other “victorious” war was Panama, where more civilians were killed than Noriega soldiers by a ratio of at least 3 to 1. At this point, it demands to be asked what, if anything, the United States gained from the use of force in Panama and Kuwait.

Bush’s policies for other parts of the world have been equally unfruitful. His posture toward China seems predicated more on a personal desire to maintain his international network of good ol’ boys than on any clearly defined strategic objectives. How else to explain his effort to ensure cordial relations with China in the future by cozying up to repressive plutocrats who will be dead in 10 years? Bush’s disastrous trip to Japan revealed an alarming failure to understand the stakes in U.S. relations with Asia’s emerging superpower. As for the epochal transformations in Europe and the former Soviet Union, Bush was nothing more than an irrelevant bystander.

When we push aside the flag-waving and self-promotion, it is impossible to identify any solid gains for the United States from George Bush’s diplomacy. Even his greatest “triumphs” are, in retrospect, ambiguous if not wholly empty. If foreign policy was to be his strong suit in winning reelection, he is playing an astonishingly weak hand.