Bush Critics Warn of Going Too Far to Attract Allies

President Bush’s determination to build a wide coalition to support the war on terrorists is running into opposition from groups fearful that the United States will promise too much to strategically located but repressive governments, including some traditional state sponsors of terrorism.

In cobbling together an ideologically diverse group of allies, the administration has made it clear that it will accept help--intelligence information, perhaps--from nations that normally are so estranged from Washington that they prefer to keep their support secret. In return, Bush is offering a variety of incentives, some publicly announced and some undisclosed, tailored to the requirements of each country.

Although the White House says it needs extremely broad support for a long and difficult campaign against Osama bin Laden and his terrorist network, critics ranging from the liberal Human Rights Watch to the conservative Heritage Foundation are warning Bush that the backing of some countries may cost more than it is worth.

“This isn’t the time to cut clever political deals that result in halfway measures in the war against terrorism,” said Kim Holmes of the Heritage Foundation, a Washington public policy center. “If the price is too high, the president should tell would-be allies that Americans will get the job done without them.”

Holmes, a member of the Defense Policy Board, a Pentagon advisory group, said the administration was in danger of building “an unwieldy coalition of military forces that gives everybody a seat at the decision table.”

Coming from the other ideological direction, Chairman Jonathan Fanton and Executive Director Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch, a New York-based advocacy group, said in a letter to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell that potential allies may use the war on terrorism to obscure their own oppressive policies.

“The danger is that some governments may cynically take advantage of this cause to justify their own internal crackdowns on perceived political opponents, ‘separatists’ or religious activists, in the expectation that the United States will now be silent,” they wrote. They said China, Russia, Malaysia, Kyrgyzstan and others have already begun to cite the budding campaign against terrorism to explain their own repression of opposition groups.

Fanton and Roth said the situation was particularly acute in Central Asia, a critical staging area for any military action against Afghanistan, where Bin Laden’s terrorist network is based. Uzbekistan, a former Soviet republic, is waging a campaign that the government says is against a Bin Laden-linked terrorist group but which seems instead to target all devout Muslims.

Stickiest Situations: Syria, Iran and Sudan

“Uzbekistan has arrested thousands of nonviolent, pious Muslims for offenses such as praying at the wrong mosques, reading the wrong religious literature and listening to the wrong sermons,” Human Rights Watch said. “Uzbekistan’s indiscriminate repression of Muslims who worship outside state controls directly undermines” Bush’s pledge that the struggle against terrorism will not become an assault on Islam.

Nowhere is the potential quid pro quo more sensitive than in the U.S. overtures to Syria, Iran and Sudan, three of the seven nations on the State Department’s list of countries that support terrorism.

Although administration officials insist that Washington will not make common cause against Bin Laden’s network with nations that continue to harbor other terrorist groups, the White House is willing to overlook the past acts of countries that join its campaign now.

“We’re leaving open the possibilities, and we’re exploring,” National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice said this week when asked if the administration was hoping to enlist Iran and Syria as coalition partners. But she quickly added that those governments would have to end their support for anti-Israel terrorist organizations before they could expect warm relations.

On Wednesday, Iran sent a decidedly mixed reply. In a speech on state-run television, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country’s hard-line supreme leader, ruled out any help for an attack on Afghanistan and called U.S. behavior “disgusting.” But Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi, a leader of a far more moderate faction within the government, said Washington could act if there was firm evidence of the Bin Laden network’s involvement in the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Israel Complains It’s Being Left Out

Washington’s closest ally in the Middle East, Israel, is complaining that it is being left out because of the administration’s concern that active Israeli participation would cause Arab governments to back off. Middle East experts in the United States say Israel is supplying intelligence and might be called on for more assistance if necessary. At the same time, the administration prefers to keep much of the help secret.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon initially welcomed the administration’s declaration of war on terrorism, which he thought would end international criticism of his government’s counter-terrorism policy. But recently, Sharon has complained that the crisis has brought the United States closer to Israel’s traditional Arab enemies.

It seems unlikely that Iran, Syria or Sudan will become open and announced members of the alliance. But administration officials have made it clear that they want--and need--at least their covert support. (Senior U.S. officials told The Times on Wednesday that Sudan has quietly begun rounding up agents in extremist cells, and has offered the U.S. the use of its military facilities.)

Iran is the primary backer of Hezbollah, a Lebanon-based terrorist organization that targets primarily Israel, although it has hit other countries as well. Syria is home to a number of aging and probably retired terrorists. The Damascus government has not been accused of mounting a direct terrorist attack for more than a decade, although there are terrorist training camps in the Syrian-controlled Bekaa Valley of Lebanon. According to the State Department, Sudan hosts a number of terrorist organizations, including Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda, but the Muslim-dominated government is most controversial for its repression of its own non-Muslim religious groups.

Enlisting Iran and Syria “is definitely something the administration is trying to do,” said Edward S. Walker, a retired State Department expert on the Middle East. “The past is behind us. We are talking about global terrorism, and that takes you away from some, but not all, of the Hezbollah actions. If that dialogue can lead to actual concrete assistance on the global terrorism issue, that can be invaluable.”

Administration officials say that Iran, Syria and Sudan will have to stop supporting terrorism in the future. That would be a win-win outcome for Washington. But critics fear that the administration may be prepared to overlook behavior that it had earlier condemned.

“One of the ugliest consequences of a war on terrorism will almost certainly be the betrayal of moral principle amid the fierce lust for intelligence about various terrorist groups,” said Eric Reeves, a Smith College professor and an outspoken critic of the government of Sudan.

“Precisely because of its terrorist past, [Sudan] has self-interestedly offered the U.S. some potentially important intelligence leads,” he said. “These leads may . . . be a significant part of the intelligence that will help us in the war on terrorism. But we cannot forget that the regime [has] been instrumental in propagating world terrorism.”