As George Bush prepared to launch a ground war, Mikhail Gorbachev made one last attempt to broker peace between Iraq and the allies. Once again he dispatched his personal adviser, Yevgeni Primakov, to Baghdad, and then agreed to see Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz in Moscow. The Kremlin desperately tried to persuade Saddam that he must comply with the U.N. Security Council resolutions or face the terrible consequences of a ground battle. Here is Primakov's account of those last, tense days.
I had been to Baghdad twice since October to see Saddam, but this time it was much more difficult to get to the Iraqi capital because of the air war. I flew to Tehran on Feb. 11, then drove to the Iraqi border, where I was met by Iraqi Deputy Foreign Minister Saad al-Feisal and Soviet Ambassador Viktor Posuvalyuk. We drove at high speed toward Baghdad. From time to time the cars, which traveled in a tight convoy, switched on their headlights in order to make out the road in the pitch dark.
As soon as we entered the suburbs of Baghdad after more than two hours of driving, the convoy split up. The cars we drove, like all other vehicles of top Iraqi officials, had been spattered with dirt as camouflage. I could not help thinking that perhaps this made these cars more conspicuous, giving away those who were in them.
My meeting with Saddam occurred the following evening, Feb. 12. We thought we would be taken to a bunker, perhaps far out of Baghdad. But everything was much more prosaic. We were escorted to a guest house in the center of the city. A power generator suddenly clicked on, and the house was filled with light. Then Saddam Hussein appeared with the entire Iraqi leadership.
After hearing rebukes that Soviet policy had given the "green light" to the "U.N. war against Iraq" and declarations about Iraq's "unshakable" stand, I asked to be left alone with Saddam. Then I said to him, "The Americans are determined to launch a large-scale ground operation to crush Iraqi forces in Kuwait." Politics, I reminded him, was the art of the possible. On Gorbachev's instructions, I made a proposal: to announce the pullout of troops from Kuwait. The deadline should be the shortest possible, and the withdrawal should be total and without conditions.
We had reached a turning point. Saddam began to ask specific questions -- evidence that he was not flatly rejecting the proposals. Would there be guarantees that Iraqi soldiers leaving Kuwait would not be "shot in the back"? Would attacks on Iraq be halted after the pullout? Would the U.N. sanctions against Iraq then be lifted?
Because I was leaving for Moscow shortly and telephone communications had been knocked out by the bombing raids, Saddam said a "brief reply" to the * overall proposal would be brought to the Soviet embassy by Aziz, who would also go to Moscow to continue the contacts. At 2 a.m. on Feb. 13, Aziz brought a written statement declaring that "the Iraqi leadership is seriously studying the ideas outlined by the representative of the Soviet President and will give its reply in the immediate future." Two days later, the Iraqi Revolutionary Command Council announced that it was willing to comply with U.N. Security Council Resolution 660. But it also included a whole series of conditions.