CRISIS IN THE PERSIAN GULF : Saudis Overcome a Distaste for Conflict in Inviting U.S. : Intervention: For King Fahd, the decision was painful. But the threat to the balance of power was overwhelming.

Nowhere does history seem to repeat itself more quickly than it does in the turbulent Middle East.

Just over three years ago, the skittish sheikdoms of the Persian Gulf watched with a concern that bordered on alarm as U.S. naval forces converged on this part of the world to protect Kuwaiti oil tankers and safeguard the shipping lanes then being menaced by Iran.

The fear then was that the U.S. presence would escalate the Iran-Iraq War, invite Iranian retribution and leave the Arab regimes that rim the southern side of the gulf even more exposed than before.

“We have to live here. You don’t,” a senior Arab official said at the time. “If you widen the war beyond your ability to control it, we will end up paying the price long after you leave.”

Barely a year later, those fears had been dispelled. But now Kuwait, once again, is the hapless victim.

The stakes are similar--oil, although this time a lot more of it. And as U.S. forces converge on the region once more, similar fears gnaw at the political calculations of the region’s nervous rulers.

The humiliation of having to call in foreigners--especially Israel’s closest ally, the United States--to settle Arab affairs “represents a dangerous political liability for all of these fragile regimes,” a diplomat who spent many years in the region said in an interview.

For Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd, a monarch who recoils from confrontation and strives for consensus in all dealings with his fellow Arabs, the decision to invite foreign intervention must have been particularly painful.

“Some countries thrive on conflict. We have tremendous dislike for it,” a senior Saudi official said.

Nevertheless, there is a crucial difference this time. Whatever the Saudi monarch’s misgivings were, they paled beside the immediate threat that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein posed to the balance of power throughout the region after his army’s invasion of Kuwait on Aug. 2.

Indeed, if the gulf states once were worried about how they would live with Iran after U.S. forces left, they are now much more concerned about how they will live with Iraq if U.S. forces do not stay.

“The way he runs Iraq, the way he thinks and acts . . . (Hussein) is a Hitler,” said Sheik Ali Khalifa al Sabah, finance minister of the ousted Kuwaiti government and a member of the Kuwaiti royal family. “He wants not only to ‘lead’ the Arab world by force, he wants to rule the world through oil.”

As the largest U.S. expeditionary force deployed since the Vietnam War digs into the sands of Saudi Arabia, Saudi officials and diplomats interviewed by visiting reporters seem uncertain as to how the crisis will unfold.

But on one point there seems a firm consensus: Iraq must not be allowed to keep Kuwait.

“Yes, we have certain sensitivities about the American presence here,” a Saudi official acknowledged. “But these troops are not here because of us. They are here because of him (Saddam Hussein). He created all of this. We cannot compromise our security. We cannot be sensitive when it comes to a threat like this.”

The Saudis still may be uncomfortable with the size and speed of the American buildup. “The numbers of American troops are larger than the Saudis originally anticipated,” conceded Maj. Gen. Don Kaufman, chief of the U.S. Military Training Mission to Saudi Arabia.

But they are quickly acclimatizing themselves to the American presence in much the same way as the newly arriving troops are becoming used to the blistering desert sun, which routinely sends temperatures soaring past 115 degrees Fahrenheit.

“The Americans are our friends,” one Saudi air force pilot declared. “We are here for the same mission--the defense of Saudi Arabia.”

Officially, the purpose of the U.S. presence, which grows larger by the day, is to deter an Iraqi invasion of Saudi Arabia. But it also serves a less tangible--and, in the long term, possibly more important--purpose of stiffening Saudi resolve by insulating the kingdom from Iraqi intimidation.

It is on this point, Saudi officials and diplomats agree, that Hussein may have made his gravest miscalculation.

“Clearly, he thought he could intimidate the rest of the Arab world into letting him keep Kuwait,” one diplomat said. “What he did not count on was the immediate American and Western response, which then served to embolden the other Arabs.”

The Arab response, the diplomat added, was a crucial follow-up. In deciding to send token forces to join the Americans, Egypt, Syria and Morocco have provided a face-saving Arab cover for what is still essentially a foreign force.

What happens next is not clear. Everyone hopes--but without much conviction--that the sanctions imposed earlier this month by the U.N. Security Council will eventually bring Hussein to his knees, if not to his senses.

But sanctions have a poor track record. They often take months to have real effect, by which time the resolve to maintain them is usually wavering.

Hussein also has a trump card in the form of the several thousand foreigners in Kuwait and Iraq who are now hostages in all but name.

“How strong will the West’s resolve be several months from now, when these Americans, West Europeans and Asian hostages are starving?” wonders an Arab diplomat.

Many hope that, as Iraqis themselves start to go hungry, Hussein may be overthrown. There have been coup attempts before--and the fact that Hussein has survived them all underscores the difficulties potential plotters face. Hussein’s control over the regime is so tight that “no one can really count on a coup to save the day, at least not in the short run,” an Arab expert on Iraqi politics said.

And slowly, the conviction is growing that “the only solution,” in the words of a Kuwaiti official, “is a military solution.”

Saudi officials say they do not underestimate the difficulties of trying to oust an occupation army of about 150,000 Iraqi troops from Kuwait by force. The military costs of such a move could be politically unacceptable and, in the end, there might not be much left of tiny Kuwait for its exiled rulers to reclaim.

Instead, the not-so-secret hope of some Saudi officials is that Hussein may yet be pressured into withdrawing--or goaded into making the mistake of his life.

Hussein’s startling acceptance Wednesday of Iran’s longstanding conditions for formally ending their gulf war is viewed here as a dramatic admission of the gravity of his position.

“Iraq got very little out of the gulf war, which took eight years and cost a million lives,” a Saudi official noted. “For (Hussein) now to surrender what little territory he did gain is a sign of desperation.”