Soviets Hurl Harsh Words at an Ex-Ally : Reaction: Once the source of massive foreign aid to Iraq, Moscow now assails it for bullying Kuwait.

By JOHN-THOR DAHLBURG

Aug. 5, 1990 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

MOSCOW — The Soviet Union called on Iraq on Saturday to back up its words with deeds and pull its army out of Kuwait as official media heaped scorn on Moscow’s former ally, accusing Iraq of the same phony justifications the Kremlin once used to legitimize the Afghan invasion.

“The moving in of troops ‘at the request of’ and ‘to prevent foreign intervention’--that is quite recent,” the daily Rabochaya Tribuna wrote in an acid commentary. “We know better than anyone else the pretext used by the Iraqi leadership to justify the attack on its neighbor.”

In an extraordinary example of the new superpower collaboration, the Soviet Union joined with the United States on Friday to call for an international weapons embargo against Iraq, a longtime arms customer of the Kremlin and the co-signatory of a 1972 treaty of friendship and cooperation.

As confusion reigned about Iraq’s plans, the Soviet Union made it clear that it would be satisfied with nothing less than a withdrawal from Kuwait. A Foreign Ministry spokesman, speaking through the official Tass news agency, welcomed the Baghdad government’s expressed intent to begin the pullout today but said words are not enough.

“If this encouraging statement is supported by real measures, this would mean the start of implementation of U.N. Security Council Resolution 660 and of settlement of the acutest crisis in the Persian Gulf, which has caused worry to the entire world,” said the spokesman, who was not identified by name.

The U.N. resolution, passed Thursday, calls for an immediate and unconditional Iraqi withdrawal. The superpowers joined to demand that Iraq fully obey it.

If there were any doubts after the joint statement issued Friday by Secretary of State James A. Baker III and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze, the escalating language Saturday used by official Moscow-based media showed there is no sympathy here for Iraq’s point of view.

The government of President Saddam Hussein, once routinely lauded for its “peace-loving” policies, was accused by Rabochaya Tribuna, a publication of the Communist Party’s policy-making Central Committee, of waging a Wehrmacht-style blitzkrieg against a tiny, helpless foe.

“What kind of adversary is it whose total forces, including police, are fewer than 20,000, whose territory is 25 times smaller than Iraq’s and whose population is less than half of Baghdad’s?” the newspaper’s Vladimir Mikhailov wrote in indignation.

So closely bound to Moscow that it owed the Soviet Union $6.3 billion for foreign assistance at the end of last year, Iraq is now being pilloried in Soviet media as an “absolute dictatorship” guilty of massive human rights violations.

“President Saddam’s coming to power was accompanied by an unprecedented campaign to physically annihilate any dissidence, let alone any potential shoots of opposition,” the Sovietskaya Rossiya daily said. “Thousands of Iraqi Communists vanished into the dungeons of the security forces. The northern region of Iraq, Kurdistan, was drowned in a sea of blood when government troops enforced Baghdad’s policy of assimilation of the Kurds.”

The language in such commentaries was so harsh that it made it hard to envisage renewed cooperation with the Hussein regime on anything approaching the pre-invasion scale, although Shevardnadze noted Friday that the Soviet Union is keeping its official channels to Baghdad open and sees no merit in breaking diplomatic ties.

Under Shevardnadze and President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the Soviet Union has publicly broken with many of the foreign policy practices of its past, withdrawn its soldiers from Afghanistan and apologized for the 1968 Warsaw Pact intervention that snuffed out Czechoslovakia’s “Prague spring” turn to democracy.

Such revisionism is now being applied to Iraq in the press accounts of last week’s Kuwait invasion, which tacitly criticize past Soviet indulgence for the Hussein government.

“This unprecedented aggression should be regarded as yet another manifestation of Baghdad’s hegemonist policy in the region, the logic of power pressure and rejection of world public opinion,” Komsomolskaya Pravda, the Communist youth organization newspaper, said.

A. Shumilin, writing for Komsomolskaya Pravda, one of the Soviet Union’s most popular dailies, also bared what would be a secret for many of his readers: Tanks and airplanes used by the invading Iraqi army were Soviet-made and Soviet-supplied.

“It is to be regretted that the Soviet weaponry which comprises the backbone of Iraq’s armed forces is being used for fanning regional conflicts for the sake of satisfying ambitious designs of myopic politicians,” Shumilin wrote.