Hussein’s New Tactical Goal Is to Outlast Bush

WASHINGTON —  Casting himself as a pious, peace-loving, born-again democrat, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein is employing a new strategy aimed at defeating President Bush not on the Iraqi battlefield or in the skies overhead but in the American political arena.

In what Bush Administration officials are calling a “peace offensive,” Hussein appeared last week to be taking steps--holding back his military, hinting at internal reforms, dispatching an experienced new envoy to the United Nations--designed to stall any military action by the U.S.-led coalition until after the Nov. 3 presidential election.

The premise of Hussein’s strategy is that he can win simply by out-surviving Bush, according to officials throughout the Persian Gulf and in Washington. “Saddam is really putting a great deal of stock in this election,” one U.S. military specialist said.

“Based on what American pollsters are predicting, he’s concluded Bush will probably lose,” the specialist added. “So he thinks we’ll have a lame-duck President for three months, then another, longer period of a new Administration settling in. And ultimately he’s counting on a new Administration, without a historic stake in the outcome in Iraq, taking a different route.”

Hussein hopes the transition process will buy Baghdad at least six months of nonintervention and possibly much longer. He plans to exploit that time, Persian Gulf and U.S. officials said.

Administration officials are not ruling out the possibility that Hussein might change course abruptly and precipitate a direct confrontation, perhaps an “October surprise” designed to sway the American election, if the “peace offensive” proves ineffective.

But two weeks into Operation Southern Watch, the name given to the coalition effort to keep Baghdad’s warplanes out of southern Iraq, officials believe that Hussein has temporarily decided to step back.

“Saddam hasn’t challenged us yet, and it now looks like he won’t--at least for the time being. We’ve really gotten his attention. He knows any move in violation of the U.N. resolutions would be a big risk,” said an Administration analyst.

U.S. officials claim that allied enforcement of the “no-fly” zone has significantly reduced Baghdad’s repression of the Shiite Muslim community of southern Iraq.

Interviewed between missions on board the carrier Independence, the staging ground for about half the aerial patrols over Iraq, U.S. fighter pilots said Iraqi warplanes have stayed far behind the 32nd Parallel that marks the southern no-fly boundary.

(A no-fly zone north of the 36th Parallel has been enforced by the allies to protect the Kurds in northern Iraq since the Gulf War ended. An Iraqi warplane was intercepted over the northern zone Thursday and turned back without incident.)

“Our planes won’t attack him unless he attacks us, and he won’t,” one allied military officer said about Iraq’s tactics. “I’d say it’s a pretty good strategy by Saddam. . . . The longer he holds back, the longer he survives.”

As a result, daily patrols by American, British and French warplanes have already been cut from more than 100 in the first days of Operation Southern Watch to 26 at the end of last week, according to U.S. naval commanders in the Gulf.

In contrast, the Baghdad regime is still active on the ground. Iraqi troops are engaged in a process known as “pacification”--mainly draining and clearing southern marshlands, burning homes and detaining people, according to U.S. officials and Iraqi opposition groups in Europe and Iran.

Defense Minister Ali Hassan Majid, whose ruthlessness is legendary, recently visited the area. Baghdad also is alleged to have transferred financial reserves from southern banks, as well as wheat, other produce and medicines, to Baghdad or elsewhere north of the 32nd Parallel.

Security forces have built up Iraqi defenses along the Iranian border, apparently in an attempt to seal it from Iranian Shiite sympathizers or arms shipments to rebels. Baghdad reportedly is using plainclothes security forces to try to disguise the regime’s role in intimidation and killings.

The regime has intensified its “popular mobilization” program, arming hundreds of Arab tribesmen in the nation’s southern marshlands, where dissidents and military defectors have taken refuge and launched sporadic anti-government attacks. Baghdad has bestowed aid and largess on select tribes, most notably in the form of new cars.

Shiite opposition leaders, visiting Washington this weekend to show congressional committees a videotape of recent marshland destruction, report that the mobilization is part of a broader scheme to sow discord and foment tribal rivalries, diverting their focus away from anti-Hussein activism.

“Before, everyone in the south was basically a victim. Now, Saddam’s playing them off--the favored versus the victims--against each other,” said Laith Kubba, an official of the London-based opposition Iraqi National Congress.

Yet Administration officials say that Baghdad is noticeably less repressive than it was before the creation of the southern no-fly zone. “There’s still movement against the (Shiites), but it’s not at the level reported a few months ago by the United Nations,” said an Administration spokesman. British Air Commodore Bruce Latton told reporters in the Gulf last week that fighting on the ground was so limited that allied reconnaissance flights were unwarranted.

Some Iraqi officials have even tried to sound dovish in recent days. Explaining why Iraq’s rebuilt air defenses had not fired on allied warplanes, former army Gen. Latif Mahal Hmoud, Hussein’s governor in the strategic southern hub of Basra, told visiting Western journalists last week: “We don’t want any aggression, and we don’t want to resist the enemy with weapons. We hope to solve all problems through diplomacy.”

Baghdad’s softer tactics on the ground have been matched by a new political line from the ruling Arab Baath Socialist Party. To help modify the regime’s oppressive image, Hussein’s son Uday called last week for sweeping internal democratic reforms as Iraq’s best weapon against a conspiracy by “the so-called democracies of the West.”

“Time has come to apply democracy to disarm our enemies of the weapon they brandish against Iraq,” the younger Hussein wrote in an editorial in the Baghdad daily newspaper Babel, which he publishes.

The article triggered similar appeals in other state-run newspapers calling for immediate implementation of “such cherished objectives as democracy”--all rarities in a nation long controlled by tight censorship, a dedicated secret police and the constant threat of execution for political dissent. “Democracy is the only way through which Iraq will be able to crush all conspiracies,” declared the state-run daily newspaper Al Jumhouriyah.

U.S. officials dismissed talk of reforms in Baghdad as “a sham,” reminiscent of past short-lived pledges of political openings, particularly after the Gulf War last year. But they conceded that it may be an effective short-term stalling tactic.

The soft-sell at home is soon to be accompanied by a new diplomatic offensive spearheaded by Nizar Hamdoun, who was Iraq’s first ambassador to the United States when the two countries restored diplomatic ties in the early 1980s after a 17-year break. Hamdoun is expected to arrive in New York this month as Iraq’s new chief delegate to the United Nations.

Hamdoun, an architect by training, wooed and wowed Washington, cultivating broad contacts within Ronald Reagan’s Administration, Congress and even American Jewish groups. He is credited with persuading the Reagan Administration to aid Iraq’s war effort against Iran and not to hinder Iraq’s access to financial centers and military and technical equipment.

Wright reported from Washington and Fineman reported from Bahrain. Times staff writer Kim Murphy in Tehran contributed to this report.