Soviet-Iraqi ties are pragmatic, not profound

By John Yemma, Globe Staff, 2/20/1991

oviet-made Lada sedans cruise the streets of Baghdad. Iraq's Soviet-made tanks are dug into revetements in Kuwait. Iraq's Soviet-made MIGs are hiding in Iran. And now Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev has positioned himself as a peace broker between Iraq and the US-led coalition.

In the absence of relations with Europe and the United States, Iraq once again reluctantly turned to the only party with which it has been able to deal consistently over the years: the Soviet Union. These two nations have a long and stormy relationship and deal with each other out of pragmatism rather than from mutual respect, according to Middle East analysts.

Saddam Hussein has periodically killed Iraqi communists, has expressed displeasure at Soviet ties to rivals in Syria and Iran and has eagerly sought Western technology to develop his industries and military.

But time and again, he has had to turn to the Soviet Union when he has alienated other countries or has been caught in a tight spot.

The month-old war against the US-led coalition and the prospect of a punishing ground campaign has put him in the tightest spot yet. So again he has turned to Moscow.

Gorbachev was waiting yesterday for a response from Saddam Hussein to a peace proposal that Gorbachev gave the Iraqi foreign minister, Tariq Aziz, at a meeting in the Kremlin on Monday. Though President Bush was cool to the Soviet plan, no official word had come from Baghdad by late last night..

Before the war began, Soviet technicians and advisers were a common sight in Iraq. The Iraqi military is largely equipped with Soviet tanks, bombers and artillery pieces. Iraq's Scuds were Soviet-made and delivered to Iraq in the mid-1980s.

But for the most part, this has been an alliance of convenience for both parties.

G. Henry M. Schuler of the Georgetown Center for Strategic and International Studies said Iraq had to turn to the Soviets for oil technology after it nationalized Western oil companies in the 1960s. The Soviets developed the Rumaila field, which is one of the points of the dispute between Iraq and Kuwait.

"It's always the fallback," Schuler said of the Iraqi-Soviet relationship. "The Saddam Husseins and Moammar Khadafys of the world take the view that no superpowers are to be trusted because depending on them too much might give them leverage they don't want to have."

Major ideological differences have caused friction between Iraq's ruling Baath Party and the Iraqi Communist Party, with attendant strains in the Baghdad-Moscow relations. In 1977, despite a treaty of friendship with Moscow and a coalition government in which Communists were supposed to participate, Saddam Hussein conducted a bloody crackdown on Iraqi Communists. Shortly thereafter, Moscow suspended delivery of weapons to Iraq.

Much of the Soviet weaponry that Iraq bought just prior to the beginning of its war with Iran in 1980 was provided by North Korea, Libya and Syria, with tacit Soviet approval. Official Soviet arms shipments to Iraq did not resume until 1983, three years into the war and long after the tide had turned in Iran's favor.

Like Washington, Moscow was careful during that war not to get too cozy with Iraq out of fear of driving Iran into the opposing superpower's camp. For despite Iraq's oil wealth, foreign affairs specialists in both Washington and Moscow consider Iran the real long-term prize, given its dominant position on the eastern shore of the gulf.

Nor has Iraq cared in particular for Moscow, seeing it as the more backward of the superpowers and a producer of inferior technology. But as with most Arab states, Iraq turned to Moscow because the United States and its allies refused to supply great quantities of military hardware to nations still in a state of war with Israel.

"We cannot do without the West," Hazim Mustak, a military adviser to the Iraqi government, said in the fall. "We need the West to develop and build."

During its war with Iran, Iraq used its oil money to shop the arms markets of the world -- to acquire weapons from France, South Africa, the United States, Germany and nations other than the Soviet Union. But because the bulk of the Iraqi military was based on Soviet equipment and because many officers trained under Soviet advisers, Soviet-Iraq relations slowly warmed.

Still, though Saddam Hussein traveled to Moscow in 1985 to meet with Gorbachev and members of the Soviet military establishment, Iraq never became a client state of the Soviet Union, as happened with Syria and South Yemen. Iraq did not have Soviet bases, and no military contingents were stationed in Iraq.

Five thousand Soviet technicians and advisers were working in the country under contract before Kuwait was invaded on Aug. 2. Most were oil workers. Only 200 were military advisers, according to the Soviet government newspaper Izvestia, and half of these were interpreters and support staff.

Most were withdrawn in the early days after United Nations sanctions were invoked against Iraq. At the time, the Soviet chief of staff, Mikhail Moiseyev, said the advisers were not making a major contribution to the Iraqi military effort and "one ought not to create an issue" over them.

Charges have persisted, however, that Soviet advisers remain in the country, including a report in the French newspaper Liberation that Russian has been heard on Iraqi military radio transmissions. But the Soviet foreign minister, Alexander A. Bessmertnykh, told his French counterpart, Roland Dumas, that the last 160 Soviet advisers left Iraq on Jan. 10.