PERSPECTIVE ON THE PERSIAN GULF : Full Success Would Be Utter Failure : If Bush’s goals are met, Saddam Hussein will be back in Baghdad, free to intensify his murderous ambitions.

President Bush has declared that the goals of his policy are to prevent further Iraqi invasions by showing the “resolve” to defend Saudi Arabia, to induce a withdrawal from Kuwait by economic blockade, to avoid war while doing both, and to protect the lives of American citizens. His purpose, in other words, is to restore the status quo that prevailed before the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. But that earlier situation included Iraq’s accumulation of more military power than any coalition of its neighbors could match. And, of course, it also included the very vigorous development of ballistic missiles of steadily longer range, biological-warfare agents and nuclear weapons, as well the production of increasingly refined chemical weapons.

Consequently, if President Bush achieves his goals in full, he will have returned us to a catastrophic progression toward a nuclear and overwhelmingly strong Iraq. To fail to achieve goals in foreign policy fully, or quickly or painlessly, is only normal. But his is a case in which full success in achieving all of the stated goals would be the great failure of all.

The problem is not the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait--which, if anything, offers the possibility of a solution--but the very nature of Iraq’s regime, and the varied weaknesses of its immediate neighbors. That Saddam Hussein’s rule is a tyranny is not the issue; in their different ways, all the neighboring regimes are also tyrannical, whether it is Saudi Arabia itself with its absolute monarchy, or Syria with Hafez Assad’s sectarian dictatorship, or Iran with its disorderly oppression of competing ayatollahs. But Hussein’s tyranny happens to be oil-rich, remarkably efficient, and especially determined to accumulate military power.

Saudi Arabia has even greater oil revenues, but the rule of its hordes of high-living princes is also grotesquely inefficient, so that in all Saudi endeavors, much money yields little. That is certainly true of Saudi Arabia’s own military buildup, which amounts to the purchase of the flashiest and most costly weapons on the market largely as prestige items, regardless of their operability by Saudi personnel. Besides, even though Saudi Arabia does spend lavishly on its mostly ineffectual military forces, to acquire military power is simply not the overriding priority of the dynasty, as it is for Hussein.

The Syrian regime is much more efficient than the Saudi in converting money into military strength, but it is also poor, with its own economy impoverished precisely by its prior military buildup, and lately also deprived of the vast military aid that the Soviet Union used to supply.

Iran, for its part, has not been able to match Iraqi militarization for the same reason it has not been able to reconstruct its oil industry, or its economy, or its foreign relations. Competing religious leaders hate each other more than they love their country or religion, and undercut any coherent policy that they cannot themselves wholly command.

In contrast to all this, Saddam Hussein’s regime is extraordinarily free of corruption by the standards of the region, so that little of the money allocated for military purposes is diverted into private hands. Moreover, Iraqi programs are rather well managed as well as remarkably ambitious, so not much money is wasted. Finally, because Hussein’s repression is so effective, it has been able to impose austerity on the civilian population to pay for its vast military ambitions. That is why until the U.N. oil embargo stopped the process, Iraq was becoming stronger by the day as compared to its neighbors, while making real progress in acquiring nuclear capabilities for its growing missile forces. To restore the status quo ante would merely delay Iraqi aggression until the day when it could no longer be stopped without nuclear war.

The policy of President Bush as now laid down is therefore programmed to fail in real terms even if it achieves all of its goals, simply because the invasion of Kuwait is not the true problem, and a drawn-out effort to protect Saudi Arabia is not a valid solution. The true problem is the very nature of Saddam Hussein’s regime, and the solution must be to incapacitate its military-industrial-nuclear base. In this sense, the invasion of Kuwait is more of an opportunity than a problem.