Dole Criticizes Clinton’s Handling of Iraq

In an unusually harsh criticism of White House foreign policy in the midst of a potential crisis, Republican presidential nominee Bob Dole said Sunday that the fighting in Iraq was the result of a “failure of American leadership.”

Tackling the Clinton administration on broader foreign policy issues, Dole also faulted what he said was a “harmful and embarrassing” intervention in Israel’s election and a reluctance to challenge terrorists.

Dole’s willingness to interject himself into the administration’s unfolding policy in the wake of renewed fighting between Iraqi troops and a Kurdish faction contrasts with the traditional hands-off approach presidential candidates have taken to ongoing foreign policy developments--for example, Ronald Reagan’s reluctance to directly criticize President Jimmy Carter’s handling of the Iran hostage crisis.

In back-to-back speeches--to the National Guard Assn. of the United States and B’nai B’rith, the international Jewish service organization--Dole criticized what he called the “barely audible warnings” issued by Washington in response to the growing threat of Iraqi intervention in the conflict between Kurdish factions in northern Iraq.

“[Iraqi President] Saddam Hussein has been testing American leadership and finding it lacking,” Dole said of the Iraqi president. “. . . The very fact that the Kurdish factions in northern Iraq are fighting, when four years ago they came together at American initiative, is itself a failure of American leadership.”

Speaking on the ABC-TV program “This Week With David Brinkley,” Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.), a senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, also questioned why President Clinton had not acted before Iraqi troops moved north.

“Our intelligence obviously saw this massing of 30,000 troops plus tank divisions,” he said. “That took a good deal of movement. We should have reacted then and gotten our allies to come in before” the Iraqis attacked.

Dole confined his remarks to general criticism, without offering a specific course that he would follow as president.

In Little Rock, Ark., where Clinton was spending the day, campaign aides and White House officials cautioned against sending mixed signals abroad at a time of potential international conflict.

“This is a moment in which it is best for the United States of America to speak with one common voice,” said White House Press Secretary Mike McCurry. He said the administration plans to provide Dole with a classified briefing on the situation in the near future.

Responding to comments by Vice President Al Gore that the situation needs analysis and observation, Dole said: “We don’t need to analyze Saddam’s action. We need to condemn Saddam Hussein’s action. We know his record. We know he supports international terrorism and threatens its use.

“Saddam’s latest brutality against the Kurds further demonstrates that America’s friends and allies in the region will never truly be safe as long as this bloody dictator remains in power, and it requires strong American leadership,” Dole said. “He must know every day we will not tolerate the action he has taken here.”

In his speech to B’nai B’rith, Dole was no less adamant in finding fault with the administration’s approach to Israel.

During this spring’s Israeli election, the Clinton administration was a clear supporter of then-Prime Minister Shimon Peres, who was narrowly defeated by Benjamin Netanyahu.

“The Dole-Kemp administration will not interfere in the elections of our democratic allies,” Dole said to an audience whose applause suggested considerable support for the new conservative prime minister.

“We would not preempt Israel’s sovereign right to devise its own national security policies,” Dole said. “In contrast to the Clinton administration, we would not push Israel to give the Golan Heights to Syria. We would not condemn Israeli security concerns as intransigence.”

He also criticized the “diplomatic solicitude” that he said the administration has shown for Syria and for Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, an approach that “sends abroad the dangerous message that terrorism pays.”

Times staff writer Edwin Chen in Little Rock contributed to this story.

* DOLE’S PLAN TO FIGHT DRUGS: Candidate renews pledge to expand role of military. A17