Senators question pre-invasion policy > Cohen, Mitchell: U.S. paying price for turning cheek

The United States is paying the price for attempting to appease Iraqi President Saddam Hussein before the Arab leader invaded neighboring Kuwait, Maine’s Senate delegation said Thursday.

While issuing continued support for President Bush’s decision to send American troops to Saudi Arabia, Maine Sens. George J. Mitchell and William S. Cohen said that allowing Hussein to move into Kuwait was more a result of administration policy than a lapse in intelligence.

Mitchell said the Senate on July 27 considered imposing economic sanctions against Iraq, but that Bush opposed the legislation, saying that the sanctions would be counterproductive.

“I think it was a result of administration policy that was seeking to work with Saddam Hussein,” Mitchell told reporters in Bangor Thursday. “As the White House has now acknowledged, that policy didn’t work.”

“The intelligence was quite accurate, describing on a day-by-day basis exactly what was occurring,” Cohen told reporters later in the day. However, he said, U.S. officials didn’t believe that Hussein would invade Kuwait until 24 hours before he sent troops over the border.

Rather, Cohen said, U.S. officials believed that the mere threat of invasion would convince Kuwait to concede to Hussein’s demands.

“I think we had as much warning as we could have had. My criticism, if any, has been directed toward the policy of trying to accommodate Saddam Hussein. We have turned our cheek in respect to his practice of using chemical weapons in the Middle East,” Cohen said. “We’re now seeing the wages of our sins in the sense of ignoring what he’s been doing for some time now.”

Still, Mitchell said he was “not in any position to criticize the intelligence agencies.”

Also, both senators said that they did not believe that the United States had written off its interests in Kuwait, as some have claimed.

“We have not written off Kuwait,” Cohen said, pointing out that if the United States allowed Hussein to remain there, it would be a “dagger pointed at the jugular of the West.”