British Fire Verbal Attack Over Hostages : War rhetoric: The foreign secretary calls Hussein a ‘destructive loser’ and says Iraq’s ‘human shield policy is not going to work.’

Amid growing concern for the safety of British hostages in Iraq, the British government Wednesday launched an intensely personal propaganda campaign against Iraq’s President Saddam Hussein and made it clear that Britain has assumed the role of chief European protagonist in the Persian Gulf crisis.

Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd, attacking Hussein as “a loser--a destructive loser,” confirmed that his government has been working quietly to forge unified European opposition to Iraq.

Hurd asserted that when the Western European Union on Tuesday threatened Hussein with “grave consequences,” it doomed his hostage strategy to failure.

“This policy of Saddam Hussein’s is a loser,” Hurd declared in a radio interview with the British Broadcasting Corp. “It was designed to weaken, particularly, European opinion. What happened (at the WEU meeting Tuesday in Paris) showed that it has had the opposite effect. It’s strengthening. It portrays him, instead of being a warrior, as being a worried man sheltering behind women and children. And that, I’m sure, is bad news for him.”

Hurd said Britain is the driving force behind the unity move, which he said had been threatened briefly when Iraq drew a line between citizens of countries that have contributed naval forces to the blockade of Iraq and those that have not done so.

Earlier, Italian officials had been quoted as saying that Iraq had agreed to free the citizens of the six European countries that are not taking part in the blockade. But Iraq said this is not true.

“You see the pressures which are building up at our instigation,” Hurd said. “This human shield policy is . . . not going to work.”

He referred to Iraq’s announced intention of placing foreign nationals at strategic military and industrial sites in Iraq and occupied Kuwait in an effort to discourage any attempt to attack the sites.

As Hurd spoke, the Foreign Office confirmed that some of the 137 Britons rounded up in Kuwait have been taken to military sites.

The Foreign Office said it has tracked 97 of the hostages and that 76 are being held at civilian installations. The other 21 are presumed to be at military bases.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher said she is “deeply upset” about Iraq’s behavior.

“Our nationals should be looked after very well indeed,” she said of the estimated 4,700 Britons stranded in Kuwait and Iraq when Iraqi troops invaded Kuwait on Aug. 2. “It’s a scandal the way they are being treated.”

Asked to comment on a statement by the Iraqi ambassador to the United Nations that British colonialism is to blame for the present crisis in the gulf region, Thatcher said:

“The trouble is, Saddam Hussein marched in and invaded another country and took it by force, and that is the root of the whole problem. And we must never forget it. There are thousands and thousands of people--Arabs and Indians and Asians--streaming out of Iraq to get away from the present dictator, and that says it all.”

Thatcher ruled out negotiating with President Hussein on the fate of the British hostages. She said she is considering expanding Britain’s military role in the region. Britain already has warships and fighter aircraft there.

Defense Secretary Tom King told BBC-TV that Britain’s military involvement is “in the interest of ending aggression.”

“We can’t take hostages into account in this situation,” he said, “or we run the risk that more hostages will be taken.”