Iraq Charges U.N. Ultimatum Is Illegal : Geopolitics: Baghdad regime accuses Washington of buying the votes that passed the resolution.

AMMAN, Jordan —  Branding a U.N. ultimatum illegal and invalid, the Iraqi regime Friday held to its defiant stance on Kuwait and accused Washington of buying the votes that passed the resolution.

“It is disgraceful and tarnishes with shame the nations which helped issue it,” declared a statement issued by Baghdad’s ruling Revolutionary Command Council and the Arab Socialist Baath Party, both headed by President Saddam Hussein.

The Security Council resolution was adopted Thursday evening on a 12-2 vote of the 15-member U.N. body. It authorized “all necessary means”--military attack--if Hussein has not withdrawn his army from Kuwait by Jan. 15. The Iraqis invaded the sheikdom four months ago Sunday.

“It is an American resolution from start to finish,” said the government statement, which was broadcast Friday morning on Baghdad radio and television.

The statement came hours before President Bush announced in Washington that he was offering to send his secretary of state to Baghdad for talks and was inviting Iraq’s foreign minister to Washington. The Iraqi regime had no immediate response to that announcement.

“Money was paid to a number of governments of Security Council members,” the Iraqi leadership alleged, “and immense pressure was put on them from the President of the United States and his secretary of state.”

Repeatedly in the four-month-old Persian Gulf crisis, Baghdad has accused its opponents in the Arab world of being “agents” of Washington, particularly Egypt, which is the second-largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid.

But never before had it made an accusation of bribery, in this case clearly aimed at the 14 non-Arab members of the Security Council. Hussein’s regime offered no specifics to back up the charge.

The two votes in opposition were cast by Cuba and Yemen, currently the only Arab member of the council. China, for the first time in a series of resolutions on the crisis, abstained, but it withheld its veto.

Anticipating some sort of war-authorization for at least a month, Hussein and other Iraqi officials worked ceaselessly to splinter the coalition of the five permanent Security Council members in hopes that a veto would break the chain of resolutions that has left Baghdad in political isolation.

French President Francois Mitterrand was praised for a General Assembly speech that Baghdad interpreted as endorsing Hussein’s negotiating stance.

The Iraqi leader insists that all the political problems of the Middle East are interlinked, including the latest, his own invasion of neighboring Kuwait. None should be resolved independently, Hussein says, refusing to budge from Kuwait, which he has declared a province of Iraq.

But France could not be split from the American-led alliance demanding unconditional withdrawal, even with the release of all French hostages in Iraq. Subsequent Iraqi attempts to soften the Soviet and Chinese stands to the point of veto also failed. Now, with the passage of Thursday’s resolution, essentially an ultimatum, Baghdad apparently has run out of rope at the United Nations.

“We’re probably going to see some Arab peace efforts over the next six weeks,” an Amman-based Western diplomat said Friday, in the wake of the Security Council vote. “But there’s a great distance to bridge. Both sides are quite set in their positions.”

Iraqi officials in Baghdad, interviewed before the vote, saw little likelihood of a successful Arab initiative at that point. The Arab countries are too badly split on the crisis, one pointed out.

Wednesday’s editorial in the English-language Jordan Times outlined the differences. It said the prospective vote would leave Baghdad with only two choices: Withdraw or face war.

The editorial said “international diplomacy is clearly flawed as it leaves Iraq no honorable option.” Conceding the inacceptability of the occupation of Kuwait, the editorial argued, however, that “to corner Iraq and force it to make a choice between humiliation (of withdrawal) and a major conflagration is untenable both diplomatically and politically.”

Reasoning like that so far has not sold in Washington. It implies striking a partial deal with Baghdad, which the Bush Administration denounces as appeasement.

Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd, who has said Hussein would lose nothing in terms of prestige by withdrawing, also appears in no mood for deals. “Negotiate what?” he asked a reporter last week in discussion of peace prospects.

Predictably, Friday’s leadership statement in Baghdad was ribbed with threats and defiance, saying the only military aggression in the gulf region is the fault of the Western forces now arrayed against Iraq.

“If they are seeking battle on the basis of their technical and theoretical calculations, Iraqis and all Arabs will turn these miserable calculations upside down,” the statement said. “Iraq will in the heat of battle wipe out the dwarfs who are supporting America, especially the treacherous Fahd regime,” referring to the Saudi Arabian kingdom.

Iraqi rhetoric swings, even within a single statement or speech, from impassioned pleas for Middle East peace to threats to set the region ablaze in oil fires. Kuwait and the Iraqi occupation are seldom mentioned except in references to Iraq’s “national rights.”