Baker Asks NATO Nations to Bolster U.S. Forces in Gulf : Mideast crisis: The request draws a ‘favorable response.’ Secretary will visit Syria. Kuwait, the Emirates and Saudi Arabia will cover America’s military costs.

Secretary of State James A. Baker III called on NATO members Monday to send ground-based military units to join the U.S. troops deployed against Iraq.

Baker coupled his appeal to the United States’ closest allies with an announcement that he will visit Damascus on Friday to coordinate regional policy with Syria, a nation the United States has long accused of supporting terrorism, possibly including the December, 1988, bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.

Foreign ministers of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization gave Baker no immediate answer, but Manfred Woerner, the alliance’s secretary general, said the request for at least token contingents of ground troops received a “favorable reception.”

At the same time, Baker announced that Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and the exiled government of Kuwait have agreed to contribute the entire $6-billion cost of the U.S. operation for the rest of this year and to put up another $6 billion to ease the impact on front-line nations like Egypt and Turkey.

Addressing a meeting of NATO foreign ministers less than 24 hours after the Helsinki meeting of President Bush and Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, Baker sought to expand West European participation in the American-led drive to force Iraq to end its occupation of Kuwait and return the deposed Kuwaiti emir to his throne.

He said several NATO members agreed to provide aircraft and ships to transport Egyptian combat troops to Saudi Arabia, to help evacuate foreigners from Iraq and Kuwait and to support U.S. and other forces in the Persian Gulf. Egypt has offered to send a substantial number of troops but lacks the transport capacity to get them there.

Although NATO will not change its policy of keeping its formal alliance structure aloof from conflicts that do not involve an attack on the territory of a member nation, Woerner said that most of NATO’s 16 members pledged to provide either military or financial assistance as individual nations.

“There is a feeling that the allies can and should do more,” Woerner said.

At Monday’s meeting, West Germany offered to provide transport aircraft and ships, the Netherlands agreed to send defensive equipment for chemical and biological warfare, Belgium said it would send aircraft and 20,000 tons of wheat to Egypt, Greece volunteered three sea lift ships and Denmark offered two large “garage ships” to move troops and heavy equipment, Baker said.

He said he urged all other members of the alliance to send ground-based forces to the region, “even if they were only symbolic” in number.

Responding to suggestions that the United States, with more than 100,000 military personnel in the area, is providing too large a share of the combat troops that would be at the front if hostilities break out, Baker said Britain and France have already sent small contingents of ground forces. He said Turkey also has combat troops in the area, but they are all in garrisons and the government of President Turgut Ozal has declined to join the international force established to resist Iraqi aggression.

If all the NATO nations agreed to send ground troops to the region, their presence would constitute a tripwire that could bring most of the industrialized world’s strongest nations into the war at once if hostilities break out.

Nevertheless, the NATO foreign ministers joined Gorbachev in flatly opposing the use of military force even if the U.N.-sanctioned trade embargo fails to force Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to back down.

“We did not speculate about what could or would happen should peaceful efforts fail,” Woerner said.

He said the allied leaders agreed to redouble their efforts to keep the trade embargo “watertight” in order to guarantee that economic measures will work.

Baker said he told his NATO colleagues that the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait is “a political test of how the post-Cold War order will work.”

“The manner in which we, a coalition of democracies, respond will be a measure of how well the institutions of Western security, NATO and the WEU (Western European Union) can adapt to today’s dangers and tomorrow’s threats,” he said.

Baker acknowledged that his trip to Damascus this week is intended to solidify anti-Iraq sentiment in a country that shares very few of the values that motivate NATO and the West.

Syrian President Hafez Assad, who leads a wing of the Baath Arab Socialist Party that is a rival to the one controlled by Hussein, was a sworn enemy of Iraq long before Baghdad’s forces overran Kuwait. Assad has been seeking allies for his stand against Hussein for years.

Nevertheless, Baker said, “I don’t think anything highlights the isolation of Saddam Hussein in the Arab community more than Syrian participation in the multilateral force.”

In its latest annual report on terrorism, the State Department said that “both Syria and Syrian-occupied areas of Lebanon . . . remain sanctuaries for a wide variety of international groups that have engaged in terrorism, including the PFLP-GC (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command).”

The report said the U.S. government has repeatedly raised with the Syrian government accusations that the PFLP-GC, possibly with Syrian help, planted the bomb that brought down Pan Am Flight 103.

Nevertheless, when Baker was asked if he was concerned that his visit to Damascus would signal a U.S. readiness to ally itself with any country, even an unsavory one, to oppose Iraq, he replied, “Not in the least.”

Baker said the United States recently opened dialogues with Vietnam and Cambodia, two other nations with which Washington has strong differences. However, Baker said he would not consider a visit to Iran, another traditional enemy of Iraq. Baker said he believes Iran will continue to abide by the trade embargo against Iraq despite Monday’s move toward resumption of diplomatic relations between the two nations.

It will be Baker’s first visit to Syria. Former Secretary of State George P. Shultz stopped in Damascus several times in the course of his unsuccessful effort to restart the Arab-Israeli peace process.

Baker’s trip will be the first into the Middle East by a U.S. secretary of state that does not include a stop in Israel. Baker said he has no plan to go to Israel because he met last week in Washington with Israeli Foreign Minister David Levy.

In his NATO news conference, Baker claimed a remarkable success in Bush Administration efforts to offset the cost of resisting Hussein.

Citing information he said he received by telephone Monday from U.S. ambassadors in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, Baker said those two countries, plus the ousted government of Kuwait, have agreed to provide $12 billion over the rest of this year. The money will be divided nearly evenly between the cost of the U.S. deployment to the gulf and economic assistance to countries like Egypt and Turkey that were hard hit by the effects of the embargo.

Last week, Baker said Kuwait had agreed to a $5-billion contribution. He did not cite individual figures for Saudi Arabia and the Emirates but said that together they total $7 billion.

The $6 billion earmarked for the U.S. military is enough to cover all the “incremental” costs identified by the Pentagon for the rest of this year. This means that it will cost the U.S. taxpayer no more to deploy ground, naval and air forces in the gulf region than it would to keep them at their usual bases.

Italian Foreign Minister Gianni De Michelis said in a brief news conference at NATO that the 12-nation European Community had adopted a goal of $9 billion in contributions to nations that have suffered economically as a result of the boycott. Italy now holds the rotating presidency of the organization. De Michelis said the community will not change its earlier decision not to help fund the U.S. military operation. But he indicated that the European Community has decided to make a much larger contribution to affected countries than had been announced earlier.

Baker said he told the NATO meeting that money was important “but all the money in the world cannot create the airlift and sea lift capabilities required today to move heavy forces into place and return refugees home.”

Despite the military buildup of the Reagan Administration, the United States has failed to modernize its fleet of aircraft and ships required to transport troops, tanks and other military equipment.

Baker said the operation needs still more planes and ships beyond those promised Monday. He asked NATO members to:

-- Reactivate the alliance’s senior civil emergency planning committee to coordinate sea lift and airlift contributions.

-- Redeploy naval forces from the western Mediterranean to the eastern sector in order protect the flanks of the Middle East operation.

-- Expand airborne warning and control flights from bases in Turkey.

-- Provide economic aid to formerly Communist nations in East Europe that are being hard hit by interruption of barter deals for Iraqi oil.

-- Improve compliance with the sanctions against Iraq.