Experts on Mideast See No Shooting War Soon : Outlook: But participants in UCLA conference are pessimistic about the long-term developments.

American, Soviet, Egyptian and Israeli specialists on the Middle East meeting at a UCLA conference predict no shooting war in the Persian Gulf in the short run, but they are perplexed, even pessimistic, about developments in the long run.

“Saddam Hussein has shown he can miscalculate, but he is not a fool,” said Mark Heller, senior research associate at the Jaffee Center for Strategic Affairs at Tel Aviv University. “He evidently thinks time will work to his advantage.”

Heller’s comments fairly summed up the consensus among the 35 participants at the conference, “Crisis Management in the Middle East,” sponsored by UCLA’s Center for International and Strategic Affairs and UC’s university-wide Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, based at UC San Diego. The meeting, for which planning began two years ago, started Monday and ends today.

“It is not easy to find a compromise; President Bush and Saddam Hussein have taken diametrically opposed positions,” Georgy Mirsky, a specialist on Iraq at the Moscow Institute of International Relations, said at the one conference session open to the public at UCLA’s Dickson Auditorium Monday evening.

“The danger of war in the short run is receding, but in the long term I am very pessimistic,” he said.

Mirsky said that the economic blockade, even if tight, will take a long time to work. It is hard to punish the aggressor except by force, he said, “but all hell would break loose if the United States, unprovoked, attacked.”

“As we used to say in Marxist thought,” he added wryly, “it is a ‘fault line in history’ we are seeing.”

Samuel W. Lewis, U.S. ambassador to Israel under presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, expressed the general sense of the participants that the international cooperation summoned against Hussein is the most positive development of a dangerous and uncertain situation.

Lewis called it “the beginning of the evolution, of strengthening the United Nations” as a force for peace supported by the great powers and most of the small ones.

He told the Dickson Auditorium audience, however, that if, after Bush’s “extraordinary success” in creating a united international front, the United States, acting alone, used military force against Iraq, the result would be “quite catastrophic,” turning the conflict into a “United States versus Saddam Hussein, or United States versus the Arabs.”

Tahseen Basheer, former Egyptian ambassador to Canada, agreed, saying, “A new international system is developing; Saddam Hussein has to be stopped, but we should not allow international banditry to be the answer to international banditry.”

None of the participants in the conference claimed to have a clue to untying the Persian Gulf knot.

Heller, of the Jaffee Center, suggested in conversation that perhaps Bush is trying to build an Arab coalition against Irag, composed of Syria, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, with non-Arab Iran and Turkey in support; but that, he thinks, is a “gamble,” which, if it failed, would leave Hussein stronger than before.

Mirsky, the Soviet specialist, suggested with a smile of experience that “it is a feature of a totalitarian regime that it can make a 180-degree turn in policy without public opposition,” but he added that Hussein is a “very tough and ruthless character.”

Heller said he isn’t sure that Bush has a policy for the gulf.

“I was somewhat surprised by the vigor of the U.S. action to begin with, and now I am surprised that they don’t seem to have a policy of what to do next. I don’t want to sound like a Cassandra, but if Saddam Hussein is still in power in a couple of years, he’ll be even more dangerous” as he moves toward acquiring nuclear weapons.

“They’ve been saying in the Middle East that ‘the Americans didn’t send troops to Saudi Arabia just to get a suntan,’ but maybe that’s just what they’ll do.”

The extent of U.S.-Soviet cooperation in the gulf fundamentally changed the political equation there, the conferees agreed.

Mirsky explained Soviet policy this way to the Dickson Auditorium audience: With the end of the Cold War, the strategic importance of the Middle East to the Soviet Union is “drastically reduced,” since Moscow no longer feels the need to challenge the United States for influence. Having its own oil, the Soviet Union has much less interest in Middle Eastern oil than does the United States. The Soviet Union once had an ideological interest in the Middle East, but since the failure of socialism at home, no one can imagine that anyone would want to build socialism in the Middle East.

“We want to have our part to play,” Mirsky said, perhaps sending warships under a U.N. mandate--but “never” using land forces, he said.