To Much of the World, Iraq Standoff Left U.S. Weaker

It has been an inglorious, perhaps fateful week for U.S. foreign policy--or such is the view of many watching from foreign shores. As the danger of combat in the Persian Gulf cools, the biggest losers to some abroad--at least for the moment--seem to be President Clinton and American pretensions to global leadership.

“Now the world power [the United States] looks foolish,” the Washington correspondent of Der Tagesspiegel, a Berlin daily, told readers back home. “But this scorn is not undeserved. . . . Anybody who leans too far out the window has a hard time pulling back onto solid ground.”

Faced with what may have been one of its most delicate international situations in the past five years, the Clinton White House, some foreign experts contend, flubbed it by ignoring the protests and wishes of even longtime allies and by handing Iraqi President Saddam Hussein a sterling chance to pose as a pan-Arab, Muslim hero threatened by an America seemingly bent on war.

“The United States wanted to bomb Iraq, and Russia and the United Nations prevented it,” reported Russian historian Andrei V. Kortunov, summarizing the prevalent view in Moscow, where Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin had opposed renewed attacks on Iraq. “Saddam Hussein stood up against the pressure and was able to negotiate something.”

Even worse, some foreign analysts said, the White House appeared unable to persuade even staunch U.S. friends that it had clear, coherent policy goals--witness how key figures in the Clinton administration seemed incapable of giving a convincing rationale for military action against Iraq at a Feb. 18 “town meeting” in Columbus, Ohio. That session, some said, turned into a fiasco televised worldwide.

“It’s very difficult for allies like Germany, which really want to support American policy and weaken people like Saddam Hussein, to stay loyal if the construction of the policy isn’t clear enough,” said Karl Feldmeyer, a Bonn-based correspondent who specializes in security issues for the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. He claimed that the U.S. government, in the eyes of many, hadn’t lived up to the dictum of 19th century Prussian military strategist Karl von Clausewitz: that the use of weapons makes sense only if there is a clear, achievable political aim.

But U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan has made clear that his negotiations for unrestricted U.N. weapons inspections of Iraqi sites were helped by the American and British military buildup in the Persian Gulf. And Annan’s “soft cop act could not have worked without the hard cops in London and Washington behind him,” maintained the London-based Financial Times newspaper.

Viktor I. Borisyuk, a Russian political analyst, told an American reporter in Moscow: “I hear people say it [the Annan accord] was the victory of diplomacy. But, in fact, it was the victory of the hard position. It was your victory, not ours.”

Frustration in Europe

In Europe, admirers of the U.S. line had expressed their frustration with the attitude of such Western countries as France, which ruled out a military response. “Everybody here agrees on the danger posed by Saddam,” a non-American official at North Atlantic Treaty Organization headquarters in Brussels said earlier this month. “So why are so few countries willing to act?”

Asahi Shimbun, an influential Japanese newspaper, predicted that Operation Desert Thunder, without a shot fired yet, could go down as the textbook example of the optimum use of military power to enforce international norms. “It is best to polish a sword, but not to use it,” the newspaper observed, quoting a U.S. Army general visiting China.

But in many countries, ordinary citizens and leaders have, for now, been interpreting the events of recent days as a setback for the United States and a victory for Russia, France and other countries that pushed for a diplomatic solution.

In South Africa, a carefully worded Foreign Ministry statement seemed bent on excluding Washington from congratulations. A newspaper in Argentina likened Hussein and Clinton to two boxers and said that the Iraqi dictator is “winning on points”--although, the daily Clarin added, Clinton could still achieve a devastating “knockout” by ordering a U.S. military action.

The French, always suspicious of American yearnings for global hegemony, have been particularly delighted with the way things have gone. When Washington seemed to be spoiling for a fight with Hussein, French Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine insisted that diplomatic approaches hadn’t been exhausted, and Paris pushed for a last-ditch trip by Annan to Baghdad. Last week, President Jacques Chirac lent the U.N. leader a French presidential jet so he could fly to Iraq. After Annan clinched his deal, he flew back to Paris and dined with Chirac.

What thrilled the French was that the U.N., an organization once dismissed by Charles de Gaulle as le machin (“the thingamajig”), seemed to be functioning independently of U.S. wishes, though Washington insiders say that is more appearance than truth.

“For the first time in the history of the United Nations, it has taken an autonomous position in relation to American diplomacy, and this is a new fact,” said Bertrand Badie, professor of international relations at the Paris-based Institute of Political Science. “Clinton is the loser insofar as the U.N. has distinguished itself from U.S. policy.”

Damage Among Arabs

The Arab world is where damage to America’s image and prestige may be most serious. Already, the U.S. administration had been viewed there with mounting suspicion for its inability or unwillingness to advance the peace process it brokered between Israel and the Palestinians. Observers said the crisis in the Gulf greatly strengthened Hussein’s position in Iraq and the Middle East.

“Saddam is winning along two lines--firstly with Arab leaders who all said they did not want an attack on Iraq,” Palestinian analyst Mahdi Abdul Hadi told Reuters news service. “Several of them had direct, open contact with him, and he has been recognized and legitimized by the Arab League. Second, the Arab street is for him all the way, although demonstrations were seriously contained in Jordan, Egypt and Palestine.”

Many foreign analysts hope America will use the pause created by Annan and his accord to reassess its goals and policy toward Iraq, and especially the international economic sanctions imposed on the Baghdad regime.

Still, some, including the London newspaper the Independent, are openly skeptical that much will come from the Annan agreement. It “has a ‘Peace in our time feel’ to it,’ ” the British daily said, citing the tragically optimistic assessment by Britain’s then-Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain of the 1938 Munich Pact with Adolf Hitler.

Now that the United States, in the view of many, has backed down from using force against Iraq, it may have a much tougher time justifying future military action. “The U.S. must give diplomacy a chance,” said the conservative Kenya Times, which criticized the administration for appearing to want to wage war against Hussein no matter the outcome of Annan’s mission.

Last week, demonstrators in New Delhi gathered before the U.S. Embassy brandishing signs that included “Who are you to police the world, U.S.--the biggest violator of human rights?”

Mandela’s View

Meantime, Nelson Mandela, South Africa’s president and a Nobel Peace Prize winner, in a meeting with reporters, expressed relief for the peaceful--if tenuous--end to the Iraqi standoff. He also took a swipe at Washington, saying, “It was of great concern, the threat to strike, because we knew it’s not going to hit any military targets, it’s going to kill children, women, the aged--very innocent people--and that is something we cannot tolerate.”

Mandela urged U.S. officials to adopt the same principles of nonviolence in dealing with Hussein that governed his own long, ultimately victorious struggle against apartheid.

“We are against any form of violence, no matter by whom it is caused,” he declared. “We went out of our way in our own country to avoid violence, and we think the entire world should do that.”

Times staff writers William D. Montalbano in London; Sebastian Rotella in Buenos Aires; Dean E. Murphy in Johannesburg, South Africa; Mary Williams Walsh in Berlin; Richard C. Paddock in Moscow; Ann M. Simmons in Nairobi, Kenya; David Holley in Tokyo; and Dexter Filkins in New Delhi contributed to this report.