Hussein’s Russian Roulette

Now Saddam Hussein is playing Russian roulette with Moscow, seemingly toying with the one Security Council power that stands anywhere close to his side in defying United Nations demands that he give weapons inspectors full range to find and eliminate his weapons of mass destruction.

Acceptance of weapons removal was a key part of the cease-fire that ended the 1991 Persian Gulf War and stopped Desert Storm forces from pushing farther into Iraq. With Baghdad, however, a deal most assuredly is not a deal. Hussein has attempted to block almost all attempts by U.N. inspection teams to track down his weapons caches, a strategy that promises to bring his regime under the bombsights of the U.S. and British military. Temperatures are rising in the gulf.

The Russian factor has been key in the crisis, with President Boris Yeltsin’s regime applying a brake to the U.S. attempt to muscle Iraq into giving inspectors free rein. Moscow knows Hussein for what he is and knows the trouble he can cause in the Middle East, which lies not far south of Russian territory and includes a number of countries with which Moscow would like to do business. If there is a leader that Hussein wants and needs on his side in this crisis, it’s Yeltsin.

So imagine the unease Monday in whichever of his palaces Hussein was reposing when the report came from Moscow’s Itar-Tass news agency that a Russian envoy, Viktor Posuvalyuk, had returned from Baghdad with word that Hussein was prepared to receive Richard Butler, the Australian head of the U.N. inspection team, and would open to Butler’s experts as many as eight presidential sites--Hussein’s so-called palaces. Was this a breakthrough?

No way, said Bill Richardson, Washington’s U.N. ambassador, declaring it was not up to Hussein to decide which sites might be inspected. Absolutely not, said Riyad Kaisi, an Iraqi deputy foreign minister, who said no such plan was ever even discussed with the Russian envoy Posuvalyuk.

At day’s end, Hussein had probably lost a few more points with Yeltsin and still had the Americans on him for continuing to assert as true what is not: that Baghdad will call the shots on inspections. It’s Washington that is likely to do the shooting, and properly if Hussein refuses to agree to commitments he made to save his neck in the aftermath of war.