NEWS ANALYSIS : Iran, Syria Could Prove the Spoilers : Iraqi strategy: Saddam Hussein was apparently confident that his old enemies would stay out of the fray.

Iraq’s Saddam Hussein is no military mastermind. He makes a few political bluffs and then hammers straight for his objective.

But he is shrewd enough to watch his flanks, and last week he invaded Kuwait apparently confident that Iran and Syria, the enemies on his borders, would not take the opportunity to strike at him.

The Iraqi strongman won the first trick, but not without possible cost. On Thursday, Iran, which was at war with Iraq all through the 1980s, condemned Hussein’s annexation of Kuwait.

In a statement broadcast by Tehran Radio, the Iranian Foreign Ministry said that “as the major power of the Persian Gulf region, Iran will not tolerate any alteration of the political geography of the region.” It called for the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of Iraqi forces from Kuwait.

Earlier in the week, Iran’s foreign minister, Ali Akbar Velayati, set out on a tour of regional capitals, stopping first in Damascus. Emerging from talks with Syrian President Hafez Assad, the black-bearded Iranian envoy told reporters:

“We exchanged views on the regrettable incident of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and its results . . . . We cannot stay indifferent about the outcome of this invasion, and we will continue to coordinate with our brothers in Syria.”

Syria, too, has denounced the invasion of Kuwait.

For Iran or Syria, or both, to take military advantage of Baghdad’s focus on Kuwait and the American buildup in Saudi Arabia would take the action to a much higher level. Andrew Duncan, a military analyst with the International Institute for Strategic Studies, in London, commented:

“The Iranians might have some capability, but they are a war-weary bunch. . . . I would not have thought for a moment that they had any intention of military action. If this leads to American air strikes against Iraq, I suppose some Iranians might want to take advantage and jump in for a bit of revenge, but it’s not likely.”

In the Iranian view, Hussein’s stroke has shattered the political balance in the gulf region, a balance built largely on sharing the benefits of oil. If Iraq can make its annexation of Kuwait stick, it will have more than doubled its share.

For Syrians, Hussein’s assertion that his expansionist takeover of Kuwait is designed to “wipe out colonial borders” is unsettling because Syria’s frontiers, like Iraq’s, were drawn by Britain and France in the aftermath of the collapse, in World War I, of Ottoman Turkey.

But the antipathy between Iraq and Syria is rooted more deeply in the sour non-relationship between Hussein and Assad, both headstrong men locked in a rivalry for Arab leadership and backed by Soviet-supplied armies.

Despite the enmity, neither man has made a military move against the other except for the threat of border buildups.

Hussein was not so reticent to move against Iran. He sent his troops into Iran’s southwestern provinces in 1980, the year after the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini imposed a fundamentalist regime of Muslim clerics.

Hussein said his aim was to block the spread of Islamic militancy, but an ancillary goal was control of the strategic Shatt al Arab, the waterway that delineates the frontier at the head of the gulf and provides the deep-water outlet for the Iraqi port of Basra. The war ended eight years later in a fragile truce, and with the Shatt al Arab blocked, as it still is, with sunken ships.

When Iraqi tanks stormed into Kuwait, Tehran spoke up immediately. IRNA, the official news agency, quoted an unidentified top aide to Foreign Minister Velayati as saying, “There should be no doubt for Iraq that there is a red line for Iran’s vital interest in the gulf region (and to go beyond it) would be definitely costly and dangerous.”

The Iranians also appear to be displeased by the Western response to the invasion. Velayati, who left Damascus for Oman and the United Arab Emirates, told Oman’s Sultan Qaboos ibn Said: “The Iraqi aggression against Kuwait has provided the pretext for the presence of domination-seeking powers in the gulf.”

The deployment of U.S. troops and planes in Saudi Arabia has heightened Arab and Iranian sensitivities on both political and religious grounds. The perception is of an infidel army defending the defender--Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd--of Islam’s holiest shrines.

“Like it or not,” London analyst Duncan said, “Americans are seen as anathema in Muslim countries. They are seen as the power behind Israel, and Israel is a subject on which all Muslim politicians agree.”

Duncan suggested that the diplomatically embattled Hussein may wave the anti-Israel flag to get out of his predicament--”I will lead the Arab nation against the Zionist, that sort of thing.”

In any case, the reality of an Iraqi Kuwait will be of concern to Iran, which under pragmatic President Hashemi Rafsanjani has been reaching out for Western ties to help rebuild the national economy. Crisis in the gulf, whatever the cause, tends to chill foreign investors’ interest in long-term projects.

Further, despite signals from Baghdad and Tehran in recent months that they are prepared to move toward a peace treaty--preliminary talks have taken place, in Europe--Iran is cautious. Its forces number only 650,000 against Iraq’s 1 million, and its air force is no match for Hussein’s.

Iraq has never been a good neighbor for Iran. When the United States was bankrolling Iran as the policeman of the gulf under the late Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, the Iraqis harbored what was at the time a little-known opponent of the regime, the Ayatollah Khomeini. When Khomeini came to power in Tehran, Hussein gave highly controlled sanctuary to the ayatollah’s militant opposition, the Moujahedeen.

Postwar Iran developed commercial ties with Kuwait and other gulf countries with heavy Shiite Muslim populations. Even during the war, when the United Arab Emirates were ostensibly supporting Baghdad, Dubai was a major supply point for goods to the Iranians, whose territory stretches the length of the non-Arab side of the gulf.

Iran and Iraq have found common cause on one point, however. In oil politics, a prime cause of the Iraqi invasion, both demanded tight production controls to boost the per-barrel price of oil. With their economies flattened by war, petrodollars are prized and overproduction by Kuwait and the Emirates over the last year had glutted the market and driven down the price.

With an international embargo on Iraqi oil now in place and prices rising, Iran may benefit without firing a shot.