The Arabists.

• Author: Karabell, Zachary

By Robert Kaplan The Free Press. 333 pp. $24.95.

Until August 2, 1990, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, the Bush Administration pursued a policy of constructive engagement toward Iraq. Having tilted to Saddam during the Iran-Iraq war, the U.S. Government viewed Iraq as a bulwark against a fundamentalist revolutionary Iran and Saddam as a predictable if brutal asset.

In the aftermath of the Persian Gulf war, Bush Administration officials claimed there had been no alternatives to this policy of befriending Saddam, and they denied allegations of misconduct. As one senior Administration official told me in an interview, "Everybody knew Hussein's reputation, and no one thought he was a potential member of the Kiwanis Club. But could he become a better member of the region? It was worth exploring the possibility, and we didn't have a lot to lose."

Not true; they had a lot to lose, and they did.

The policy of engaging Saddam Hussein must rank as one of the major failures of recent American history. Saddam was not moderated, and he was only strengthened by American aid before the invasion of Kuwait. A brief look at his past behavior would have been enough to bury any hopes that he might become "moderate" or "reasonable," and no one could have seriously believed that he would not lash out militarily, in the face of intractable economic problems and his own megalomaniac ambitions. Yet calculations of American interests in the Middle East led the Reagan and Bush Administrations to ignore reality, avoid hard decisions, and bend over backward to accommodate Saddam Hussein.

When Saddam became the enemy of the U.S. Government, the embarrassing past coziness was downplayed by Bush and company. When U.S. Representative Henry B. Gonzalez and the banking committee he chairs began asking questions about pre-Gulf war policy toward Iraq, the Bush Administration stonewalled. When Gonzalez, William Safire of The New York Times, and others raised allegations of illegal weapons sales, the Bush crowd angrily denied ever having "coddled" Saddam and refused to say more.

When a Justice Department investigation of the Atlanta branch of the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro (BNL) uncovered more than $5 billion in loans to Iraq which had been partially underwritten by the Agriculture Department, Bush operatives pleaded ignorance. And when they did that, the media, the Congress, and the Atlanta judge in charge of the BNL case charged them with conspiracy, a conspiracy of...