Syria’s Assad Takes a Risky Stand in Siding With West : Strategy: He has been accused of breaching Arab protocol by sending troops to Saudi Arabia. But he is doing what he views as best for Arabs, his regime.

President Hafez Assad, the lone gun of Middle East politics, has joined the posse, sending Syrian troops to Saudi Arabia for the showdown with Iraq.

In the shifting alliances of the Arab world, the 60-year-old Assad, two decades in power here, had remained obdurate and aloof. Diplomats called him “Mr. No.” He was the man who sat and waited for things to turn his way.

Now, faced with hard and complex new realities, he has taken a stand, one that is rife with risk.

Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has accused him of siding with Western powers, a breach of Arab protocol. And many Syrians are tuned to Baghdad Radio. There is grumbling in the army. Fundamentally, Kuwaitis, Saudis and the oil-rich sheiks of the Persian Gulf are not Assad’s kind of people.

But Assad, as always, is keeping his eye on Arab interests as he sees them, and those of his own regime. The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, he says, is an unacceptable threat.

With the perennial outsider in the thick of the confrontation, the regional lineup has changed radically.

“I don’t think anything heightens more the isolation of Saddam Hussein in the Arab world than Syrian involvement,” Secretary of State James A. Baker III told a news conference in Brussels on the way to his Sept. 14 talks with Assad.

In explaining his motivations to his own people, Assad declared in a long, nationally televised speech two days before Baker arrived:

“Can we say that the invasion and annexation has placed the Arab nation in a stronger position? . . . Did it unite our ranks? . . . Did it benefit Iraq, or has it, once again, wasted Iraq’s potential and placed Iraq in a position foretelling grave harm? The invasion of Kuwait and the canceling of a state is a great catastrophe, an unforgiveable sin.”

Diplomats here say there is more to the Syrian stance than Assad’s long-held personal antipathy toward Hussein and fears that his old rival might end up calling the shots in the Middle East. The region has been rattled by a series of events over the past decade: the Iran-Iraq War, the Palestinian rebellion in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza; the interminable strife in Lebanon, and the collapse of the Soviet empire.

None has affected Syria more than the last. Syria was the premier Soviet client in the Middle East, and Assad milked the connection rigorously. With his Soviet arms, only the Israelis dared to stand up to him. Now he has seen the writing on the Berlin Wall.

A European diplomat here said: “Moscow had put Assad on notice two years ago that it would no longer pay the bill to make Syria a regional military colossus. But what shook them was the fall of the East German and Romanian regimes. They got the message. They had to change their style.”

Assad has moved to open up the state-run economy, and he has dipped a toe into Arab diplomacy, re-establishing relations with U.S.-bankrolled Egypt, which had been shunned from his tent for a decade for its separate peace with Israel.

“Assad can see what’s going on with the Soviets and Eastern Europe,” another diplomat said. “He has to put his eggs in another basket, in this case with the Arabs.”

Syria had remained an outsider as Arab blocs were forming in the wake of the Iran-Iraq War. Saddam Hussein engineered the Arab Cooperation Council--Iraq, Egypt, Jordan and Yemen--as a counterweight to the Saudi-led Gulf Cooperation Council and as a personal vehicle for Arab leadership. The North African Arab states formed their own union.

Damascus was the odd capital out.

Now the Arab Cooperation Council is a shambles, and the prospect of an ad hoc Syrian, Egyptian, Saudi axis is rising in opposition to Iraqi power. Each brings its own special power and influence.

There is a Middle Eastern adage, attributed to former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, which holds that “you can’t make war without Egypt and you can’t make peace without Syria.” It could be amended to add that nothing moves in the Middle East without the oil of Saudi money. According to Damascus-based diplomats, it is flowing.

“We understand that the Saudis will be meeting the payroll of the Syrian troops,” one diplomat said, “and putting in something government-to-government as well. We’re talking megabucks.”

The unconfirmed word here is that the Saudis will bolster the Syrian treasury to the tune of $2 billion, in addition to the billions promised Egypt, Turkey and Jordan for their crisis-damaged economies.

Assad has reportedly promised to send another 15,000 to 20,000 troops to Saudi Arabia, joining the 4,000 already there. Among the units to be sent, diplomats said, is the 9th Armored Division, which will be pulled off the Golan Heights front with Israel, another sign of the changing times.

The moves are being handled carefully by the Assad regime. When the decision was made at an Arab League summit conference in Cairo to send troops to the gulf region, Assad convened the National Progressive Front, the loose coalition of leftist, secular parties that backs the ruling Baath Arab Socialist Party. The political doctrine was laid down and disseminated through Baathist and administration channels.

While reports of pro-Iraqi demonstrations in eastern Syria, near the Iraqi border, have been denied by diplomats and reporters who went to the areas, Assad’s decision to defend the Saudis and demand an Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait was hardly universally popular here. Iraq’s denunciation of oil-rich gulf sheiks and foreign troops in the Islamic heartland has struck a chord, diplomats say.

Amad Bagdadi, a Damascus cab driver, underlined the doubts.

“Saddam is crazy,” he said. “He wants every Arab city, not just Kuwait.” He paused for a moment, and then added, “But who can feel sorry for those rich people in the gulf?”

There has been no open defiance, however. The Assad regime “would hit them (protesters) like they did eight years ago,” the European envoy said, referring to Hassad’s brutal suppression of a fundamentalist uprising in the city of Hama in 1982. “They wouldn’t hesitate.”

He and others said some grumbling was evident in the Syrian military.

“One, they’re unhappy at the prospect of being stationed alongside Western troops,” the European said, “and two, they’re not going to make money in the Saudi desert. Lebanon, by comparison, has always been a choice assignment. In Lebanon (where 35,000 Syrian soldiers are deployed) you can become rich. A division commander there is like an old Ottoman satrap; the money just rolls in.”

The pan-Arab issue is harder to gauge, particularly as it applies to Syria’s long-held claim to championing the cause against Israel. In fact, Palestinians here are kept under tight control and Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, ranks high among Assad’s enemies.

The loyal Palestinians, including Ahmed Jibril, head of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, have found a place under the regime as a counterweight to the mainline PLO.

“This is an ugly world,” one envoy said, “and it pays to have some of these guys around.”

Jibril has been implicated in the December, 1988, bombing of a Pan American jetliner over Scotland, and his presence here has kept Syria on the U.S. terrorist list.

Syrian officials, including Assad, separate the gulf crisis from the Palestinian cause.

“The liberation of Jerusalem cannot start in Kuwait,” one said.

The Iraqi invasion has, however, had a direct impact here economically, for both good and ill. Syria, a minor player in Middle East oil production, is profiting from the price increase forced by the crisis. Production is estimated at 400,000 to 420,000 barrels a day, with about half retained for domestic needs. The rest is exported for badly needed hard currencies.

Shell, so far the lone exporter, moves its crude to the Mediterranean coast through a pipeline that carried Iraqi oil until the Baghdad connection was shut down in 1982, near the outset of the Iran-Iraq War, in which Syria and Libya were Iran’s sole Arab supporters.

Weighing against the windfall in oil revenues is the loss of remittances from Syrians working in the gulf states, an estimated 50,000. Those in Kuwait alone sent home about $200 million last year, a foreign economic analyst said. Now many are returning to a country afflicted with high unemployment.

Hard economic times are nothing new for Assad’s regime. Middle East politics is the more dangerous challenge. Diplomats ask: What if Hussein survives the military and economic stranglehold and the American-led foreign forces withdraw? Or what if Israel is drawn into the conflict?

“Syria loses either way,” the European diplomat said. “An Iraqi victory means Baghdad will be the champion of the Arabs on the Palestinian issue. And if Israel comes in, the whole region goes backward again.”