The Washington Post, by Jim Hoagland

''Who are you? Where do you work? … I don't want to talk to this man anymore. If people in Lithuania have attitudes and slogans like this, they can expect hard times.''

Thus the Man of the Decade, raging at a Lithuanian factory worker in Vilnius on Jan. 11. The outburst, reported in detail by Agence France-Presse, reveals a side of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that is rarely considered by Western observers, but which is likely to be an important factor in the crisis-filled year that lies ahead for the Soviet Union.

Despite his considerable skills as a politician, when Gorbachev feels the heat, he shows it. His testiness leaps out to smother the reasonable, dynamic image that he usually projects. As he faces up to the twin threats of nationalist uprisings at home and demands for major Soviet troop withdrawals from Eastern Europe, Gorbachev's temper becomes a major factor in international politics.

''Who are you? Where do you work?'' These are the questions of an authoritarian taking down names for the files. They bear the chilling ring of the questions that Chinese Prime Minister Li Peng repeatedly put to the protesting students he met with last May at the height of the Tiananmen Square protests.

''Who are you? What school are you from?'' These were the only questions the Chinese prime minister asked the students. ''He's nothing but a cop,'' one of the students said afterward of the man who would shortly order the Tiananmen Square massacre.

This is not to suggest that Gorbachev is considering the use of brutal force against peaceful demonstrators, or that he deserves to be compared with Li Peng. Gorbachev's handling of the multiple East European crises of the past year have vindicated his pledges to avoid using force to resolve political problems. He wants to avoid bloodshed.

But the challenges of Eastern Europe could turn out to be a poor guide for predicting Gorbachev's reactions when he has to make the dangerous choices between compromise and confrontation that he has allowed his East European comrades to face on their own last year.

Faced with the new sink-or-swim school of management at headquarters in Moscow, Eastern Europe's hard-liners promptly and collectively went under like boulders. Now it is Gorbachev's buoyancy that is being put to the test.

''The revolution that began in Moscow, thanks to Moscow, thanks to Mr. Gorbachev, who liberalized the system, will run through Europe and then return to Moscow,'' French President Francois Mitterrand said on Dec. 6 after meeting the Soviet leader in Kiev. ''Gorbachev understands this and is preparing for it.''

But in Vilnius, Gorbachev gave no sense of having a clear strategy for resolving the demands put forward by the independence movements now fully developed in Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia and taking form in Armenia, Georgia and other Soviet republics. He seemed to be playing for time by conceding to the crowds the right to secede, while artfully pleading that the right not be exercised.

Then he saw an elderly worker carrying a sign demanding full independence for Lithuania. ''Who told you to write that banner?'' Gorbachev asked accusingly, initiating the exchange that quickly caused him to boil over.

Gorbachev's impatience with those who question his decisions on internal matters registered strongly on a small group of us who interviewed him in May of 1988. He grew openly irritated when we returned several times in the 90-minute interview to the subject of Soviet dissidents. It was the last meeting of that length and character he has conducted with a Western publication.

That Gorbachev developed authoritarian reflexes as he rose to the pinnacle of power in the Soviet Communist system is hardly surprising. It is his democratic tendencies that have surprised and impressed his admirers at home and abroad. Gorbachev has been able to keep these more positive attributes in the spotlight.

But he will be hard-pressed to keep the approach of reasonableness and persuasion center stage as the downward spiral of the Soviet economy continues and as the new governments in Eastern Europe demand greatly accelerated Soviet troop pullouts in the coming year. Stress of a maximum kind lies ahead.

''It is easier to retire a tank than it is to retire a general,'' one of Gorbachev's associates said glumly a few weeks ago. ''There is no housing, there are no jobs available in the Soviet Union for all these generals that the Czechs, Hungarians and others want us to bring home. We are moving into a very difficult moment that will be unpredictable.''

Crying wolf about Gorbachev's chances for survival has been a favorite Western pastime since he came to power. Gorbachev has steadily gained and consolidated political power over his opponents, and the Western cries of alarm have been exaggerated. But his blowup in Vilnius suggests to this observer that this time Gorbachev himself thinks that the wolf may finally be at the door.

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

The Arab League is outraged. With characteristic courage and vision, the organization that represents 21 Arab governments and the PLO has taken up the execution by Iraq of London-based journalist Farzad Bazoft. Pulling no punches, the Arab League has blasted Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher for asking Iraq not to carry out the execution.

It came as no surprise that the appeal was rejected by Iraq's rulers, who head not a government but a criminal enterprise that has taken control of a country. But the Arab League reaches a new stomach-turning low in meekly endorsing Iraq's judicially sanctioned murder of the Iranian-born free-lance journalist, who was traveling on British documents when he was arrested and accused of espionage.

How dare she? the league huffed of Thatcher's appeal for clemency. Meddling in Iraqi affairs! the league puffed, much as it did 18 months ago when outsiders briefly criticized Iraq for using poison gas against its Kurdish citizens.

The truth is that Western nations, including Britain and the United States, have responded too mildly to this latest example of Iraq's disregard of international norms. The weakness of the Western response to Iraq's cynical execution of Bazoft encouraged the Arab League to spit in Thatcher's eye. The league knew it would not suffer from doing so.

Arab governments have again shown a collective willingness not just to endure evil within their community, but to endorse it. Claiming to speak on behalf of the world's 200 million Arabs, the Arab League reflexively defends murder in its midst in the name of Arab solidarity.

This is not solidarity. This is craven and mindless surrender to the worst elements within the ranks of Arab leadership, who insist that their fellow rulers sink to their own beastly level. By failing to take a moral stand on the excesses and brutality committed by the butchers of Baghdad, by Gadhafi and others, Arab leaders undermine their criticisms of human-rights abuses committed elsewhere, specifically in Israel.

Moreover, the Arab leaders undermine their own legitimacy with their policy of silence and acquiescence. Their disgusted citizens see this not as solidarity, but as weakness and lack of courage. Given a choice between decency and Iraq, Arab leaders make the wrong choice time after time.

That is not the worse part of it. The worst part is that they are aided and abetted in this by Western democracies and Japan, which do not even have the phony excuse of solidarity to explain their inaction. They placate Iraq because they smell money -- or rather, they smell oil. They fail to see that the promise of lucrative contracts from the debt-ridden regime in Baghdad is a mirage.

I exaggerate? Consider the dispatch from Tokyo this week: Japan's Foreign Ministry has asked the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan to explain why it had revoked the honorary membership of the Iraqi ambassador to protest the Bazoft execution. The Foreign Ministry should be joining the correspondents in ostracizing Iraq, not exerting the subtle pressure of an official demand for an explanation.

Or think back to the debate in Congress about imposing economic sanctions on Iraq for using poison gas on its own citizens in 1988: Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Claiborne Pell (D-R.I.) was unable to get House members to share his outrage and pass a bill imposing limited sanctions against Iraq. Heavy pressure from firms doing business or wanting to do business in Iraq helped block passage. During the debate, I found out later, a major U.S. chemical company called one congressional office to ask for a briefing on the effect the sanctions might have on its business in Iraq.

Sanctions are generally an ineffective, unwieldy policy tool. But because of Iraq's $ 70 billion to $ 100 billion in war debts (making Iraq an unlikely source of future profits for American companies), sanctions would bite and force change in this case.

But there is an even more important point to be made with sanctions. Iraq is one of a handful of governments that openly engages in criminal conduct as a matter of routine. This is government by Murder Inc. As were the educated classes of Cambodia during the time of Pol Pot or Jews in Hitler's Germany, Iraqi Kurds are killed or dispossessed of their belongings because of who they are, not what they have done. There must be a way to cast such countries beyond the pale of the international community. Sanctions here would be a beginning.

But the House did not have the courage to do that in 1988. Nor did the British, the French or others take meaningful action. Iraqi President Saddam Hussein must have taken the measure then of his fellow Arab leaders and his outside critics and concluded that he could continue to act in the blood-soaked style to which he has become accustomed.

If poor Farzad Bazoft counted on international pressure to save him, he misunderstood both Saddam Hussein and the international community.

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

George Bush would not have let Willie Horton out on parole. Or so he persuaded the American electorate in 1988. Why, then, is Bush so ready to see the good in the Willie Hortons of international politics and let them redeem themselves under his patient, forgiving guidance?

Consider the president's mild reaction to the crude boast by Iraqi President Saddam Hussein that Iraq will wipe out half of Israel with chemical weapons if the Israelis smack Iraq again, as they did in 1981. Asked by journalists to respond, Bush urged Saddam to "forget about talk of using chemical and biological weapons'' and to stop making "bad" statements.

Bush shushes a man who has ordered the shooting, poisoning and dismembering of political opponents and the gassing of his own citizens, and reveled in these acts. Somehow I doubt that Saddam, who was a teenage gunman himself, will be shushed. Like the Chinese leaders who respond with new slaps each time Bush turns yet another cheek, Saddam will go his own murderous way without regard to probation diplomacy.

The far right's contention that Bush is at heart a secret liberal always struck me as loony. But his view that Deng Xiaoping, Saddam Hussein and Pol Pot can be reasoned into doing the right thing if the United States stays in touch with them makes me think the far right may be on to something after all.

If there is a way to compress into one sentence the essential difference between conservative and liberal politics, it seems to me to be this: liberals believe in the perfectability of man, while conservatives believe that people have to be accepted for what they have made of themselves and dealt with accordingly. The Left says that with a little help the worst of us can be engineered into something much better. The Right responds that we are in the environment we are in because of ourselves, not because of the environment.

The Bush administration came to office convinced that Saddam was among nature's engineerables. Despite all the evidence to the contrary (most recently laid out in chilling and persuasive detail by Middle East Watch in its report, "Human Rights in Iraq"), the State Department offered the view that Bush could persuade Saddam to become a useful citizen of the world.

The administration provided Baghdad with $ 1 billion in guaranteed credits in 1989 to enable Iraq to buy U.S. food supplies while pouring money into missiles, chemical weapons production and the search for an atomic bomb. After Congress voted at the end of 1989 to bar U.S. Export-Import Bank credits to Iraq, President Bush signed a waiver on Jan. 17. He said it was in America's national interest to continue providing Baghdad with $200 million a year in subsidized financing.

We now know that as the president signed the waiver, the FBI was closing in on Iraqi agents who had for a year tried to buy and illegally export electronic devices that could be used to trigger a nuclear weapon. Once again the question Washington should be asking is: What did the president know, and when did he know it?

The White House at last may be wising up to Saddam. An administration official, sounding solicitous about Bush's image, said the White House was only informed of the investigation a week before the March 28 arrests. The State Department, it turns out, knew at least six weeks before the arrests. And, the official added, Bush had signed the waiver because Secretary of State James Baker had recommended that he sign it. Saddam is Jimmy Baker's friend, not Bush's, was the sub-text of this conversation.

That's progress, but that is not a solution. The problem is not Bush's image, nor the fact that Saddam talks about chemical weapons. The problem is that he makes and uses them. That is not a matter for shushing or intramural blame-shifting within the administration. The United States must contribute to ending the malignant evil that has taken hold in Baghdad, not help perpetuate it while hoping that Saddam will mellow.

Caught with his hand in the nuclear-technology cookie jar, Saddam tries to brazen it out, daring the Israelis to attack him and threatening Armageddon if they do. The last Arab leader who tried this tactic was Egypt's Gamal Abdal Nasser in June 1967. Nasser's bluster cost Egypt an army, and the Sinai Peninsula.

Why invite destruction? With Saddam it is part psychology, part calculation. He rules at home through terror and responds with the same tactic when challenged abroad. The Middle East Watch report makes clear that the cruel rejection of Margaret Thatcher's plea for clemency in the case of journalist Farzad Bazoft is part of an established pattern. Saddam reminds his terrorized population that no one can hope to be saved by an appeal for mercy to him, no matter who makes that appeal.

Going to the brink of confrontation with Israel is also useful in blackmailing other Arab leaders for the oil money he needs to bail Iraq out of financial disaster. Saddam may calculate that Israel, in the middle of a political crisis, will not take his dare. But I think he miscalculates. When the Israelis respond, it will be with much more than a shush or a turned cheek.

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

The showdown Mikhail Gorbachev has provoked in Lithuania marks a dismal turning point for the Soviet president and for perestroika. Gorbachev has chosen to restore order, and Moscow's dominance within the internal Soviet empire, at the cost of delaying or damaging the reform programs that have won him approval and support in the West.

The debate in the West over whether Gorbachev is being forced into this by a suddenly restive army and resurgent conservatives misses the point. For whatever reason, Gorbachev seeks to save his position through a humiliating subjugation of the Lithuanian independence movement. For whatever reason, he has ignored chances for compromise with the Lithuanians that would ultimately have encouraged economic recovery and decentralization of power in the Soviet empire.

Within the past month, Gorbachev has also ceased to be a significant catalyst for change here in Eastern Europe. He is digging in his heels on German unification and on negotiating further Soviet troop reductions with the West, as if to distance himself from the changes his policies have wrought.

This does not mean that Gorbachev is abandoning perestroika, a term that has been widely misunderstood in the West. Perestroika is a description rather than a plan for reform. It is an accurate overview of Soviet weakness and the threat of chaos that hovers over Soviet society. By pretending that perestroika was a program, Gorbachev persuaded his countrymen to consider and then admit the abject failure of the Soviet system of the past 70 years.

Perestroika was a way to admit the Kremlin's inability to stop change in Soviet society and in Eastern Europe, short of a reversion to Stalinism. It is to Gorbachev's credit that he understood the futility and immorality of such a reversion.

Here in East Germany and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, Gorbachev made the case that accepting change would strengthen the Soviet Union. It would cost the Soviet Union too much to oppose the drive for self-determination by nations weary of being kept in the Soviet empire at the point of a bayonet.

The crisis in Lithuania demonstrates how important Soviet withdrawal was in producing change in Eastern Europe. History was not, as some argue, made only from below, by the massive crowds that turned out in the streets of East Berlin and Prague. It was also fashioned by the active and pragmatic role Gorbachev played in dropping aging Stalinist leaders rather than rescuing them from an enraged populace.

Gorbachev rejects this vote in Lithuania, even though the same dynamics of self-determination and Soviet weakness have produced a predictable declaration of independence by a Baltic state. Gorbachev rules out the change he granted to the East Europeans and adopts tactics of intimidation and blockade.

Lithuania represents the moment in which Gorbachev's policies of ''strengthening'' the Soviet Union have switched from the passive lifting of control in Eastern Europe to an operational, offensive effort to impose control on the processes that now threaten his grip on the Soviet Union.

In withdrawing from Eastern Europe, Gorbachev may have believed he was building up his ability to respond to the inevitable challenges from the Soviet republics and to the crises that will come in Moscow when he introduces drastic economic measures. In Eastern Europe, he was giving the West in general and West Germany in particular an enormous stake in letting him deal with his problems in his way. Bonn and its allies are unlikely to put Lithuanian independence before the unification of Germany as a strategic goal.

I am not suggesting that Gorbachev set out with a master plan that brought him to this point. That is not the true nature of perestroika. There is instead a framework for the series of choices that he has made. Some appear contradictory when viewed separately, but are tied together by the thread of dealing with Soviet weakness as events demand.

Perestroika, and its creator, can no longer traipse across the stage of world politics like a guileless young ingenue for whom excuses must be made. In the harsh spotlight of the Lithuanian crisis, it becomes clear that Gorbachev has reached the limit of policy by retreat.

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

Back when he was a rising foreign-service officer based here, John Kelly was noted for playing a melodious acoustic guitar and possessing a wicked sense of humor. I see from his latest testimony to Congress that the sense of humor is intact.

Kelly is now the assistant secretary of state for the Middle East, a policy-making job where a sense of the absurd is more important than a key to the executive washroom: consider Kelly's deadpanning to a Senate committee that U.S. sanctions against Iraq would impair ''our ability to exercise a restraining influence on Iraqi actions."

The missing punch line came almost immediately from Baghdad. President Saddam Hussein not only repeated his threat to incinerate and poison half of Israel but expanded his rationale for doing so.

The Iraqi tough guy had already said he would release his chemical demi-Holocaust in response to any Israeli aggressive action against Iraqi territory. After Kelly spoke of America's ''restraining influence,'' Saddam said an Israeli attack against any Arab state would trigger the flight of missiles that are Saddam's airborne version of Hitler's ovens.

Some restraint. Some influence. Without such finely tuned American statesmanship, Saddam might well be promising to destroy all of Israel. By opposing sanctions, Kelly presumably got the Iraqi to limit the destruction to half of Israel. The difference to be split with Saddam turns out to be Israel.

Attentive readers will have recognized Saddam as the man who has violently attacked American policy in the Middle East and demanded that U.S. warships leave the Gulf, who has used poison gas on his own citizens and who is eradicating Kurdish villages and tribesmen from northern Iraq. But Kelly neglected to mention these particular effects of his ''restraining influence on Iraqi actions'' when he testified against a moderate, well-balanced sanctions bill for Iraq before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on June 15. The two instances he cited of Iraqi responsiveness were revealing:

''One step, for example, was the expulsion of the Abu Nidal gang, a group of terrorists,'' Kelly said. But intelligence sources report that Saddam has recently allowed Abu Nidal to reopen a Baghdad office. In real life, government inspectors would demand a product recall for a car or baby crib as faulty as Kelly's statement turns out to be. In bureaucracy, it is different. The State Department, no doubt, is drafting a declaration to explain why the reopening of the Abu Nidal office proves that Washington exercises a restraining influence on Saddam.

''Kelly also noted that Iraq cooperated with Arab League efforts to end the fighting in Lebanon,'' according to a State Department description of the hearing. Well, yes, sort of, in a very Iraqi way.

That is, Saddam pumped tanks, ammunition and other weapons into Gen. Michel Aoun's renegade army as long as it looked like it was winning. Then Iraq supplied weapons to Aoun's rival Christians when their fortunes improved. Iraq's policy in Lebanon, like that of Syria's, is simple: Fight to the last Christian. By egging all sides on, Baghdad joins Damascus in working for the peace of the graveyard in Lebanon.

One is tempted to conclude, not to put it more strongly than that, that the Bush administration has turned a blind eye to Iraq's continuing crimes and misdemeanors in the Middle East, just as Washington long turned a blind eye to the financial manipulation and corruption created in the United States by Iraqi misuse of $ 1 billion in U.S. agricultural commodity credits.

The FBI investigation into the Lavorno banking scandal, named after the Italian bank involved, shows that the Iraqis carefully studied and targeted the U.S. banking system and then bribed their way to big loans on the strength of the commodity credits. The details still to come on how these loans helped finance arms exports will be even more devastating.

The biggest of principles is involved here. If the United States does not respect itself, how in the world can it exercise any influence over people like Saddam Hussein? He walks up to Washington time after time and delivers it a punch to the nose. Then as he walks away the bureaucracy pats Saddam on the back for his moderation.

Kelly told the senators that sanctions would be ineffective because other Western countries would continue to sell to Iraq. Perhaps. But the Lavorno affair shows that profits from doing business with this deeply indebted, war-ravaged country are likely to be tainted not only morally but financially. At this point, only funny money is to made off Iraq, with fraud involved somewhere in the chain of transactions.

But the whole relationship the Bush administration has developed with Iraq is based on fraud. A policy that requires conscientious officials like Kelly to shade and avoid the truth, to speak no evil of a completely evil regime, cannot be the basis for effective diplomacy or for the self-respect a nation owes itself.

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

The Arab nations that have chosen to stand with Saudi Arabia and Kuwait against Iraq have cast off the chains of a meaningless myth that has held them in thrall for decades.

The confrontation with Iraq is not the end of Arab unity. It is the beginning of a meaningful Arab identity in world affairs. By declaring that they will go to war with Saddam Hussein if necessary -- as it may well be -- Egypt, Morocco and the others have changed history.

The action of these Arab nations can be in its own way as dramatic and consequential as Eastern Europe's breakout from the Soviet empire last year. Their decision also represents an attempt to escape a dying regional order as the world moves beyond the Cold War.

In the name of an Arab unity that existed only on the most superficial level, the modern Arab states have refused until now to recognize, and cut out, the moral cancer that has spread across their collective entity. They have refused to confront the evil that Saddam Hussein, Moammar Gadhafi and a few other Arab dictators have supported and have come to embody. Arab unity has meant a descent to the lowest common denominator for all Arabs.

The rape of Kuwait showed that the malignancy now threatens the entire Arab family. Saddam has forced his fellow Arab rulers to choose whether they will continue to mouth slogans or will act to protect themselves from a rabid creature loose in their midst. Those who resist him show that Saddam does not represent Arab values or Arab nationalism, that elusive concept being falsely invoked by some to condone Saddam's invasion.

Americans and Europeans have understandably focused on the importance of Middle Eastern oil fields to their economies. But the historical sweep of the conflict that Saddam has ignited is also vitally important. If the other Arab states, backed by the United States, do stop Saddam they will have begun to define a new, more hopeful nationalism in the Third World in the post-postwar era.

To accept Saddam as a legitimate figure of Arab nationalism is to misunderstand both Saddam and the nature of nationalism. Whatever support he stirs is based on frustration and hatred, on the politics of payback rather than of nationalism. His support is rooted in a fantasy of an otherwise idyllic Arab World despoiled by Western invaders who must be driven out and punished.

King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and their allies have finally chosen to put this fantasy aside. George Bush has sent the 82nd Airborne to the Arabian Peninsula as much to encourage this political development as to protect real estate. Americans need to understand and support the political component of this mission.

Saddam, caught in the middle of a rape that he hoped would be quietly accepted, cries out that his crime is an act of Arab nationalism. Dispossessed Palestinians and Yemenis long exploited by the ''oil emirs'' respond with mindless enthusiasm to the destruction of the existing order by violence from any quarter. More surprising are Western commentators who accept Saddam's ex post facto pretense to be waging a nationalist uprising.

Saddam's political ''strength'' is built on a thirst for revenge by Arabs who blame the West for their vast problems and want payback. It is a ''strength'' that can create nothing. It can only destroy. Or be destroyed. That is the choice that Fahd, Mubarak and the others finally understood they confront.

The peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America have long had reason to blame the United States and its European allies for many of their problems. The Cold War distorted American policies and aligned Washington against Third World nationalism in case after case. The need to expel first colonialist and then American influence and control became the driving force of nationalism for most in the Third World and many in the West.

The mythical force of Arab unity was fashioned out of the frustration Arabs felt over the post-World War I carving up of the region by Britain and France and the post-World War II creation of Israel in Arab-inhabited Palestine. The need to pretend that others were entirely responsible for their misfortune caused the Arabs to embrace a unity based on silence and on acquiescence to evil in their own ranks.

Saddam and his few Arab supporters say the Arabs must continue on this dead end. Those who oppose him show, at last, that there is another road. Those Arab states have acted out of immediate needs of survival. But they will also have thought about the tantalizing prospect that the Bush administration may successfully resolve the greatest challenge to stability in the Middle East since 1973 without having relied on Israel in any way.

Freed from the Cold War, the United States can also make a valuable contribution to a genuine Arab reawakening. The diplomatic skills George Bush has demonstrated in marshaling support at the United Nations and the muscle the 82nd Airborne brings to bear in the desert protect something more nebulous, but just as important, as oil wells.

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

The failure of the Bush administration to understand Saddam Hussein and to prevent him from invading Kuwait is documented in disturbing detail in secret Iraqi minutes of the dictator's last meeting with the American ambassador in Baghdad. One week before the invasion, U.S. policy makers refused to see evidence of Saddam's intentions even when he forced it on them.

The administration has now embarked on a determined effort to explain away its enormous political and intelligence failures on Iraq by focusing attention on its sensible and courageous actions since Aug. 2. But a reading of the complete Iraqi minutes, which are not challenged by the State Department, establishes that the administration's gentler and kinder handling of Saddam must have encouraged the Iraqi dictator to conclude he could get away with invading and then annexing Kuwait without facing American retaliation.

In the same week that Ambassador April Glaspie met a menacing tirade from Saddam with respectful and sympathetic responses, Secretary of State James Baker's top public affairs aide, Margaret Tutwiler, and his chief assistant for the Middle East, John Kelly, both publicly said that the United States was not obligated to come to Kuwait's aid if the emirate were attacked. They also failed to voice clear support for Kuwait's territorial integrity in the face of Saddam's threats.

These statements have turned out to be the most disastrous disavowals of U.S. responsibility toward a threatened, friendly nation since Dean Acheson's public declaration in 1950 that South Korea lay beyond the U.S. defense perimeter in Asia -- shortly before the Communist invasion.

Glaspie's defenders claim that she is being made a scapegoat for a policy failure that originates with Baker and President Bush. They have a point, but the minutes establish that she was effusive in Saddam's presence about the policy line of coddling Saddam and in dismissing the repeated predictions from some members of Congress and from this corner of the disaster such coddling would bring.

A key warning from Saddam in that meeting that he would accept a humiliating peace with Iran in order to go to war with Kuwait also appears to have been missed by Washington. The minutes show Saddam suggesting that he sees an understanding with his former enemies in Tehran as his hole card in a broader conflict with Kuwait. He says that Iraq will give up navigational control of the Shatt al Arab estuary to gain Iran's support when war comes. "If we fight, we shall win," he explains.

Explicitly warning that the United States must choose between friendship with Iraq and supporting what he alleges is Kuwait's "economic war" against his regime, Saddam is recorded in the minutes as issuing a threat of terrorism against America: "If you use pressure, we will deploy pressure and force. . . . We cannot come all the way to you in the United States but individual Arabs may reach you."

Glaspie quickly turns the other cheek when it is her turn to reply. She praises Saddam's "extraordinary efforts to rebuild your country. . . . I know you need funds. We understand that. . . . But we have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait. . . . James Baker has directed our official spokesman to emphasize this instruction," she says, according to the Iraqi minutes.

Saddam promises to try to resolve his differences with Kuwait peacefully. But he adds, "If we are not able to find a solution, then it will be natural that Iraq will not accept death" because of Kuwait's alleged economic warfare. He underlines the gravity of his remarks: "I hope the president will read this himself and will not leave it in the hands of a gang in the State Department. I exclude the secretary of state and Kelly because I know him and exchanged views with him."

Glaspie, a foreign service professional, made it clear to Saddam that she was acting under instructions from Washington. But even admirers in Washington's Arabist establishment believe she erred in not seeking to change or dilute those instructions as Saddam's intentions unfolded.

"She could have fought the instructions," says one former U.S. ambassador to the Arabian peninsula. "It is unconscionable that we were not saying to Saddam and to the world in those circumstances that we supported the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Kuwait as a member of the United Nations."

Glaspie ends the meeting by thanking Saddam for clearing things up so that she can leave on July 30 on a scheduled trip to Washington. Despite the accumulating intelligence showing the massing of Iraqi troops, the invasion caught her, the White House and the Pentagon by complete surprise. Glaspie has remained in Washington since the invasion.

The Iraqis, willing to burn those who helped them in the past, have also released transcripts of an April meeting in Baghdad in which GOP Sens. Robert Dole of Kansas and Alan Simpson of Wyoming are recorded as having made sycophantic overtures to Saddam, ostensibly on Bush's behalf.

The Iraqis clearly hope the disclosure of such transcripts will weaken public support for the military campaign President Bush has undertaken and make Saddam look better. That underestimates the American public, which will support Bush in opposing this tyrant now that the president has understood his evil intentions. But when it is over, the public should remember where the political and diplomatic responsibility for this policy failure lies. It lies with Bush, his secretary of state and their diplomats.

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

The Persian Gulf crisis keeps Washington's cottage industry of instant revisionism on overtime. At the Central Intelligence Agency and the State Department, lights burn late in the offices of those who embellish or rewrite potentially embarrassing events, putting themselves in a better light before more accurate versions harden into accepted history.

This is a self-defeating reflex. Revisionism creates a protective mythology that will ensure that the problems this crisis brings to the surface won't get fixed before the next one occurs.

The CIA's claim, on "background," to some news organizations that it gave the White House timely warnings that Saddam Hussein was about to swallow Kuwait is a particularly troublesome bit of rearranging history, Washington-style. So is an effort centered in the State Department to create ex post facto a serious debate within the administration about changing policy toward Iraq that had to be subordinated to more urgent business last spring.

Neither those warnings nor that debate existed.

As Iraq made its final preparations to overrun all of Kuwait and capture or eliminate the Arab state's ruling family, the CIA was reporting to the White House that the menacing Iraqi buildup was intended as political intimidation to force the Kuwaitis to raise their oil prices and make territorial concessions to Iraq.

The agency did not suggest 48 hours before the attack began -- as some of its officials apparently later claimed to the media -- that Iraq was about to launch a full invasion. Two officials who have had independent access to the CIA's highly classified pre-invasion analysis tell me that the agency continued to report right up to the Aug. 2 blitzkreig that Iraqi troops were likely to move across the border and then stop, as a way of pressuring the Kuwaitis to cede in negotiations.

This would explain a cryptic public remark by April Glaspie, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, who would have seen the CIA analysis. In an interview with The New York Times last month, Glaspie acknowledged that neither she nor anyone else in the government foresaw that Iraq was about to take all of Kuwait. Such inadvertent honesty has not endeared Glaspie to higher level officials, including Secretary of State James Baker, who have sought to shift blame away from themselves and toward a dutiful civil servant.

Baker says that policy postmortems are dangerous because critics will exercise 20-20 hindsight. But that risk is peanuts compared to the perils of revisionism, which distorts our ability to understand what has happened and what will happen. It is understandable that officials with reputations and jobs on the line would use the media's hunger for revelation and exclusivity to create more heroic versions of a sordid story. But in misleading others, we inevitably mislead ourselves as well.

Like most failures to anticipate unwelcome events, the U.S. surprise at Iraq's invasion was a largely a problem of an existing mindset that shut out any facts and interpretations that contradicted existing policy. There was enough information available in the CIA data to foresee an invasion -- had the Bush White House been willing to believe that Saddam was a rapacious thug capable of anything.

On a smaller scale, the media's temperature-taking of this protracted confrontation on an hourly or daily basis also contributes to public confusion about the Persian Gulf crisis. The most recent broadcast or headline often obscures the underlying rhythm of this confrontation, which despite a flurry of contradictory reports in recent days continues to move inexorably toward military conflict unless Iraq withdraws completely from Kuwait.

Such temperature-taking inevitably produces an impression of policy lurches rather than of a steady policy rhythm. When national security adviser Brent Scowcroft deplores the destruction of Kuwait, the headlines run toward war. Then President Bush extends an olive twig in his United Nations speech, and the word is that peace is on the way.

Both were tactical moves aimed at specific audiences as part of a political-management cycle. Scowcroft and Bush were establishing clearly for world and American opinion that if Bush has to go to war, it will be in sorrow rather than in vengeful anger or enthusiasm for bloodshed. Bush and French President Francois Mitterrand gave dovish U.N. speeches they can point back to after hitting Iraq hard to show that they made peace offers and Saddam did not reciprocate.

Behind the confusing headlines, Bush is saying to Saddam in rather clear and consistent terms: "I have not yet made a final decision to expand the war you started and are still conducting. You can still affect that decision by withdrawing unconditionally and immediately from Kuwait. If you do, the United States will not seek your destruction as a war aim. I will take yes for an answer."

He must persuade Saddam Hussein that George Bush is a man of war facing a pressing deadline while showing American and world opinion that George Bush is a man of peace, willing to go the extra mile. Through the force of circumstances, it is Saddam who will decide which Bush goes into history.

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)

The Nobel Peace Prize Committee got it half right by selecting M.S. Gorbachev as peace person of the year. But the jurors should have gone all the way and split the prize between Gorbachev and Vaclav Havel of Czechoslovakia if the aim really is to celebrate the liberation of Eastern Europe.

By prizing Gorbachev and Havel -- or another dissident whose struggle made democracy the only viable alternative when Soviet-imposed tyranny collapsed -- the Nobel Committee would have paid tribute to an important political reality. Freedom for Eastern Europe was not a gift from Moscow. Freedom came as a result of the long and hard struggle led by Havel, Poland's Adam Michnik and others.

This symmetry is important in showing that change belongs to them as well as to Gorbachev. And bringing Havel to Oslo with Gorbachev would hold another important advantage for the Nobel Committee: they would at least have one leader who is beloved by his people and in control of his country.

Okay, I exaggerate. No political leader who has clawed his way to the top of the Politburo, forced the Soviet Communist Party to yield power to the government apparatus he heads and ordered a strategic retreat by the Red Army from its imperialistic adventures abroad lacks in resources or in power. The notion that Gorbachev has become a figurehead is silly. But I suspect that the Nobel Committee made its decision to crown Gorbachev alone because they sense the Soviet leader needs all the helping hands he can get these days. As it did with Lech Walesa, Andrei Sakharov and the Dalai Lama, the committee has tossed a lifeline to an embattled figure in need of moral authority and support from abroad.

The award ceremony in December in Oslo will provide Gorbachev with a splendid platform from which to rally his splintering nation behind him anew. The chaos and misery caused by the transformation unleashed by Gorbachev have spread disillusionment through the Soviet populace and even within the intelligentsia, which had formed the original cutting edge of perestroika.

But by placing Gorbachev in the line of Sakharov and Boris Pasternak, the Nobel Committee makes it harder for Soviet intellectuals to criticize or desert him for being wishy-washy and not combatting Communist rule forcefully enough. Fighting Communist oppression has become a major task for Nobel laureates these days.

The award ceremony also reopens the possibility of a December international circus to distract attention from the lack of bread in wintry Moscow. Gorbachev appears to have originally hoped for a spectacular diplomatic doubleheader that would have begun with him going to Brussels to address NATO's assembled leaders and President Bush going to Moscow later in the month to sign a strategic-arms reduction treaty.

That at least was a scenario tried out on Western journalists by influential Soviet visitors in midsummer. But prospects for such summitry appear to have dwindled as the arms talks dawdled and the Persian Gulf crisis deepened, making a Gorbachev appearance at a NATO jamboree politically inappropriate. Fortunately for Gorbachev, his December calendar now has an appearance in Oslo.

How much time does a Nobel Prize win for one who sits atop an undemocratic government rather than being persecuted by it? Don't be surprised if the answer turns out to be "Not much." Dictators apparently have been deterred from taking harsher action against dissidents who have won the Nobel Prize. But an irate citizenry convinced that a leader's policies are destroying its standard of living is not likely to shrink from abusing a Nobel laureate.

Recent Western visitors to the Kremlin report that Gorbachev himself is keenly aware of his eroding position. "You have the sense of power slipping through his fingers even as you sit and talk to him," said one European official. "Then you go to see Boris Yeltsin" -- as Western officials increasingly do when in Moscow -- "and you have the sense of watching a shark cutting through troubled waters with ease."

This was a year in which the number of credible peace candidates was phenomenal. They included Nelson Mandela, the brave Chinese protesters who took over Tiananmen Square in the cause of democracy, even the city of Berlin. Any of those would have been deserving laureates as well.

The Nobel Committee's choice of Gorbachev honors its instincts and tradition of helping the politically needy. What it does not do is fully honor those who ended Communist rule in Eastern Europe. For that, there would have to be another name on the prize.

(Courtesy of The Washington Post.)