Ready or not, the United States is in the Persian Gulf for the long haul. A series of rapid and complex events have resulted in U.S. naval forces being deployed into the middle of a bitter war in a far off place over issues that many Americans do not understand.
President Reagan`s commitment to provide Navy escorts for 11 Kuwaiti oil tankers flying American colors is open-ended, scheduled to last as long as there is a threat to shipping in the gulf, U.S. officials say.
No one knows how it will end, or when. Some U.S. military sources estimate Navy ships could be patrolling the gulf for at least six months. Other officials believe it could be longer.
As the Pentagon prepared this weekend to conduct a second convoy through the dangerous waterway, a reconstruction of the events that led to the reflagging operation provides a partial picture of how Reagan, driven by the debacle of the Iranian arms sales and fear of Soviet expansionism, embarked on this hazardous course.
One major motivation, White House officials admit, was the administration`s desire to restore its credibility and compensate for the political damage of Reagan`s decision to sell U.S. arms to Iran.
”The main reason we got into this is that we had no credibility left with the gulf states after word got out about the arms sales,” said one senior administration official who asked not to be identified. ”We needed to reassure them that we were not selling them down the river.”
Not only was Kuwait`s confidence in the U.S. shaken, but there also were concerns in Saudi Arabia, Oman and the United Arab Emirates.
Thomas McNaugher, a Middle East analyst at the Brookings Institution, traced the decision directly to the arms-for-hostage swap with Iran, and said, ”If we get into a disaster with this policy, you can go back to Ollie North and the rest of that gang.”
Not surprisingly, concern over Soviet military or diplomatic inroads in the region formed the administration`s other main preoccupation with the gulf, officials said. Fear of Soviet expansionism has dominated virtually every U.S. foreign policy decision involving the Third World since Reagan entered the White House.
A review of the last nine months also leads to new questions about the wisdom of the reflagging operations, the Navy`s capability to carry it out and the adequacy of America`s safeguards against terrorist reprisals.
The decision to give Kuwait`s vessels U.S. naval protection developed over the same time period that the greatest crisis of Reagan`s presidency–the Iran-contra affair–dominated American domestic politics. How much one chain of events influenced the other is hard to gauge.
Senior White House officials categorically deny that Reagan engineered the gulf crisis in the hope of being able to lash back at Iran and rally the nation around him in the wake of the failed attempt to win the release of hostages held by pro-Iranian groups in Lebanon.
So far, the President`s Democratic critics have not publicly raised that charge.
But several weeks ago, after an Iraqi warplane unleashed a rocket attack against the Navy frigate Stark that killed 37 American sailors, one administration official confided there was an itch to strike out and have a replay of the U.S. air raid against Libya last year.
”There are a lot of folks around here who wish that would`ve been Iran that hit us and not Iraq,” the official said.
White House officials contend that Reagan`s thinking has been guided by a desire to maintain the longstanding U.S. commitment to freedom of navigation in the gulf.
In Reagan`s view, the U.S. commitment to that principle preceded him and even his predecessor Jimmy Carter, White House officials say. The President found justification for his policy as far back as Harry Truman, who ordered Navy ships to begin patrolling the gulf in 1949. U.S. warships have been there ever since.
”The President was not about to walk away from that commitment,” one senior White House official said last week.
The general commitment to keep the waterway open for shipping explains the specific decision to raise the ante by reflagging Kuwaiti ships with American colors.
The President`s options were narrowed even further, some officials admit, by the consequences of the arms sales to Iran.
If the gulf states could not depend on the United States as their guarantor against the spread of Iran`s revolutionary Islamic fundamentalism, they would be forced to ”make accommodations with Iran against American and Western interests,” said Michael Sterner, a former deputy assistant secretary of state for Middle Eastern affairs and former U.S. ambassador to the United Arab Emirates.
”The backlog of American policy failures in the Middle East on the part of this administration is there, and undoubtedly (those failures) made it more difficult to turn down that proposal,” Sterner said of the reflagging request.
Reagan himself has insisted that the Soviets` involvement in the gulf was a major reason for his decision. The President learned in late February that the Soviets already had lent to tankers to Kuwait and placed them under Soviet naval protection.
”If we don`t do the job,” Reagan said recently, ”the Soviets will.”
But even the new Soviet role has its roots in the Iranian arms affair. It was not until the arms sales became public that Kuwait turned to the Soviet Union for help. Arab diplomats and U.S. officials now say it was a gambit to entice America into a greater role in the gulf.
Sen. Patrick Moynihan (D., N.Y.) said Soviet gains in the gulf region
”could be the largest geopolitical loss of the whole Iran (arms sales)
operation.”
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Unlike the Iran-contra affair, where Reagan and his top advisers were victims of a penchant for secrecy, the gulf crisis unfolded largely in the open.
The chain of events dates to November, when Kuwait began to express concerns about the American commitment to the security of the moderate gulf states. Kuwait had earned Iran`s enmity by supporting Iraq in the gulf war.
Officials of the Kuwaiti Oil Tanker Corp. discretely got in touch with the U.S. Coast Guard to inquire about the technical requirements for reflagging their ships with American colors, normally a routine commercial procedure.
The Kuwaitis knew the significance of their request, but wanted to portray it as a commercial decision and not a political one so as to avoid controversy and not overly alarm the Reagan administration, said one gulf diplomat.
While lower-level Kuwaiti and U.S. officials discussed the reflagging scheme, larger issues of war and peace were dominating top administration officials` deliberations.
Kuwait had infuriated Iran by planning to hold an international conference in March to seek an end to the Iran-Iraq war. The U.S. and Iraq welcomed the diplomatic effort, but Iran vowed retribution.
Concerned about the Iranian threats against Kuwait, Reagan, Secretary of State George Shultz, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, National Security Adviser Frank Carlucci and other top national security aides held a series of meetings at the White House in January and February.
Reagan issued two strong statements reaffirming U.S. commitment to freedom of navigation in the gulf and to the security of moderate Arab states ringing the waterway.
The statements drew little attention, though, as most of official Washington was engaged with the Iran-contra scandal and the accompanying turmoil within the White House.
Meanwhile, the Kuwaiti request for reflagging and U.S. naval protection moved steadily up through the bureaucracy until it came to Reagan`s attention in mid-January, officials said.
Reagan at first withheld final judgment about the request, but it gained greater priority after the administration learned in late February that the Soviets had agreed to protect Kuwaiti tankers, officials said.
About the same time, Iran set off more alarms in the Pentagon and the White House after it test-fired a Chinese-made ”Silkworm” surface-to-surface missile near the Straits of Hormuz in the gulf. Reagan tentatively approved the reflagging shortly afterward.
The President might have avoided some of the subsequent political controversy over his gulf policy if he had brought Congress into the planning earlier.
But no one in the administration thought anyone in Congress would object, one source involved in the early meetings blandly observed.
Indeed, there was almost no criticism from Capitol Hill until after the Iraqi attack May 17 on the Stark. It was this tragic event that focused the nation`s attention on the gulf.
By then, it was too late to change course, congressional critics of the reflagging operation admitted. Republicans and Democrats alike expressed concerns about the plan, but they did not directly challenge the President. The prestige of the U.S. was at stake.
”The United States is in here, and there is no out,” said one Arab diplomat in Kuwait. ”If Iran attacks you, you will have to attack back as a superpower.”
At the Pentagon, senior planners were not overjoyed about their new mission.
”Are we going to do this? Yes,” said one Pentagon official. ”Is it a good idea? No.”
Former Marine Cmdr. P.X. Kelley, who was involved in the initial planning, said, ”Life is sometimes full of lousy options.”
The first U.S. convoy of reflagged ships resulted in a major embarassment for the Pentagon when the oil tanker Bridgeton hit a mine July 24 in open waters near the Iranian island of Al Farsiyah. Navy officials admitted they did not expect the mine to be there, and that the ships in the convoy had little protection against the hidden explosives.
U.S. helicopters are being sent to the region to help destroy other mines found in the area, and limited help from NATO allies might be on the way. But the incident underscored the Navy`s difficulties in dealing with the dangers and difficulties of its new assignment.
Some U.S. officials believe the mines were not the administration`s only miscalculation.
”If there is retaliation by Iran, terrorism is probably the form it will take,” said one senior administration official. ”I`m not sure enough thinking has gone into that.”
A recent Pentagon report acknowledges there is now an increased threat of terrorism, but it insists that all U.S. military bases and diplomatic installations abroad are on a heightened state of alert.
Even if the precautions are successful, that still leaves so-called
”soft targets,” such as the hundreds of thousands of Americans vacationing abroad this year and even possible targets within the U.S.
If the administration did not anticipate some of the consequences of its gulf policy, neither apparently did Kuwait. Iran has now issued a double-barreled threat against the oil-rich sheikdom, warning that it will attack Kuwaiti shipping in the gulf and Kuwait itself with surface-to-surface missiles if Iraq persists in its air war against Iranian oil facilities and ships.
Thus, instead of containing the gulf war, Kuwait`s reflagging scheme may end up widening it. And it may now involve the U.S.