NEWS ANALYSIS : Alleged Plot to Kill Bush May Cost Iraq at U.N.

On the eve of former President George Bush’s arrival in Kuwait last month for a triumphant three-day state visit to the land he helped liberate two years before, a Kuwaiti patrol on the Iraqi frontier intercepted two cars packed with arms, explosives and more than a dozen Iraqis, Kuwaitis and stateless Arabs.

It was a quiet arrest. Authorities in the jittery emirate took pains to keep it so in an effort to ensure that nothing but pomp, circumstance and national adulation would accompany the visit of a man venerated by Kuwaitis after he forged a multinational, U.S.-led coalition that drove Iraq’s occupation army out of Kuwait in the Persian Gulf War.

Only after Bush left for home, at a Sunday night meeting of the Kuwaiti Cabinet two weeks ago, did Defense Minister Ali al Salim al Sabah outline in detail how, through interrogation, his investigators learned that the border arrest actually had thwarted what he called a three-tiered Iraqi plot to assassinate the former American President on Kuwaiti soil.

First, the group, which Ali said included at least eight Iraqi intelligence agents, hoped to pick Bush off at the airport when he arrived. If that failed, the defense minister said, the group planned to strap a remote-controlled bomb to the underside of a van and park it at Kuwait University, where they hoped to detonate it when Bush arrived there to accept an honorary degree.

If all else failed, Ali told the Cabinet, a member of the group had volunteered to serve as a suicide bomber who would approach the former President and Barbara Bush wearing a belt packed with high-powered explosives that Kuwaiti authorities said they recovered from the suspects’ vehicles.

The Kuwaiti government did little to keep those disclosures secret.

In fact, Abdelaziz Dakhil Abdallah al Dakhil, Kuwait’s influential Cabinet secretary, went out of his way to detail the plot against Bush’s life for reporters on April 26, the day after the Cabinet meeting, declaring, “This will lead to nothing but more lamentation for the Iraqi people and to more tension and instability in the region.”

But few outside Kuwait took it seriously--at least not until last week, when the Clinton Administration sent a special team of FBI and Secret Service investigators to the emirate to sift through the evidence and question 16 detained suspects, among them 11 Iraqis, who were arrested and jailed by Kuwaiti authorities nearly a month ago. One suspect is still at large.

Typical of Washington’s public reaction at the time was a statement by a State Department official who was quoted April 27 by the British news agency Reuters as saying that most U.S. officials believed the alleged plotters were little more than “thugs” and doubting that the former President was among their targets.

Responding to reporters’ questions about the Kuwaiti allegations after meeting with Iraq’s exiled opposition leaders in Washington on April 28, Secretary of State Warren Christopher said he knew nothing of the alleged plot against Bush.

“I guess it’s a lot like the boy who cried wolf, but this time it seems there was really a wolf,” one diplomat in the region said Sunday.

In the wake of the White House’s weekend confirmation that it is now taking the reported Iraqi plot “very seriously,” there were more concrete theories to explain the long delay between Kuwait’s April 13 border arrest and the concern expressed in Washington.

Most analysts and diplomats in the Middle East are convinced that the Clinton Administration is gathering evidence on the plot for use against Iraq toward the end of this month, when the harsh, 33-month-old U.N. economic sanctions against Baghdad are scheduled to come up for review at the United Nations.

There were strong indications Saturday that Baghdad too ties the U.S. position that Iraq plotted against Bush to economic sanctions that have crippled that nation but left the regime of Saddam Hussein virtually unshaken.

“The sheiks of Kuwait, in coordination with American intelligence, are plotting another deception to fool American public opinion in order to justify a new aggression on Iraq and tighten the economic siege imposed on it,” Iraqi Information Minister Hamid Youssef Hammadi declared in a statement released by Iraq’s embassy in Jordan on Sunday.

Non-Arab diplomats in the Persian Gulf similarly saw the recent revelations about the alleged plot in the context of the upcoming U.N. sanctions review in New York.

After nearly three years of extreme financial hardship for Iraq’s poor and the middle class caused by sanctions that have cut off American and European manufacturers from Iraq’s lucrative consumer market, the United States and its allies are under growing pressure to ease the punishment of the Baghdad regime.

At the same time, the sanctions, imposed after Iraq invaded and occupied Kuwait on Aug. 2, 1990, have had little effect on their prime target, President Hussein, who has survived largely by lavishing his most-trusted military officers, party leaders and Republican Guard troops with huge salaries and generous benefits.

“With Saddam still so firmly in the driver’s seat, it looks to me like the Clinton Administration is searching for ways to step up the pressure on him,” said a diplomatic analyst in the region who asked not to be identified. “I’d expect to see this alleged plot as the centerpiece of the sanctions debate later this month, along with anything else the Administration can come up with by then.”

Officially, the Clinton Administration has stated its policy toward Iraq as a “depersonalization” of a confrontation in which Bush demonized Hussein as another Adolf Hitler and the Iraqi leader labeled the former American President “a devil” he vowed to destroy.

During testimony last month before Congress, Christopher explained that the United States would continue to support sanctions against Iraq only as a means to force Baghdad’s compliance with a host of cease-fire agreements. These include a requirement that Iraq disclose all of its weapons of mass destruction and allow their destruction. This process has been the ambitious, two-year undertaking of U.N. weapons inspectors, who nevertheless still believe Iraq is withholding key information on its weapons programs.

But Christopher stressed that the new Administration’s policy, which was criticized as a softening of the Bush Administration’s demand that the sanctions remain in effect as long as Hussein remained president, was, in effect, the same. There would be no change in Iraq’s defiance, Christopher concluded, as long as Hussein and his regime remained in power.

Iraqi opposition leaders later said that the Clinton Administration was taking an even stronger stand against Hussein. In a statement issued after they met with Vice President Al Gore in Washington two weeks ago, leaders of the opposition alliance, which calls itself the Iraqi National Congress, said the Administration’s demands on Baghdad include strong demands that Hussein’s authoritarian regime safeguard human rights.

Against this backdrop of a stiffening Washington stance against Baghdad, several Middle East analysts speculated Sunday that U.S. investigation of the anti-Bush plot, initially dismissed as Kuwaiti propaganda, also could foreshadow another round of U.S. military action against Iraq, where American warplanes continue to enforce “no-fly” zones above and below the 32nd and 36th parallels.