INSIDE THE MONOLITH : Third World Diversity : Foreign Policy: After four decades, Washington still has not figured out why Saddam Husseins hold sway in developing nations.

Since the 1950s, U.S. foreign policy has constantly underestimated and misconstrued the nature and motivations of its Third World foes and challengers. As a result, the United States’ reading and evaluation of events from the Far East to the Caribbean have been seriously flawed. Washington has inexorably leapt into costly and usually futile military adventures. Today, another President appears to be in a similar predicament in the Persian Gulf.

Why does the latest team of policy-makers in Washington seemed condemned to repeat the errors of the past?

Without doubt, the Bush Administration underestimated Saddam Hussein and his determination to seize Kuwait, despite powerful warning signals from many directions, including our intelligence community. Accordingly, it did little to dissuade the Iraqi president. Once he moved into Kuwait, the Administration quickly opted for a military presence in the gulf to counter--much too late--the larger menace posed by Hussein’s sophisticated arsenal, combat-tested army and regional ambitions. It is still possible that the United States continues to underestimate its Third World adversary by thinking that superior air power and well-trained and well-equipped ground forces can finish him off.

The outcome of recognizing the problem that has haunted U.S. Third World foreign policy for four decades, and of adjusting U.S. behavior, is not acceptance of Hussein’s conquests and domination of the gulf. Rather, it may suggest more subtle and imaginative courses of action as the crisis unfolds.

The long history of U.S. misperceptions of the Third World is rooted, it seems, in the unshakeable belief that underdeveloped and backward societies would dare not defy overwhelming U.S. military might and technology. If a leader defied the overwhelming odds, it’s believed, he would be incapable of sustaining the challenge.

The next U.S. error was to think the populations of these nations would not follow their defiant leaders. This notion is born from the naive assumption that the Third World shares our political and ideological values--forgetting that even U.S.-educated elites do not necessarily share them--and would thus reject policies of challenge.

This misunderstanding was compounded by U.S. decision-makers who seemed ignorant of the staggering differences in how the Third World and the United States organize society and how popular attitudes in endemically impoverished countries vary from ours. What’s extraordinary about this official ignorance is the abundance of studies--some excellent, others less so--on the subject of this cultural gap. And there is no shortage of academic talent specializing in the Third World available to the State Department and the White House. CIA analysts are superb resources, but they seldom get much attention.

Nationalism and economic and social underdevelopment have always helped to explain Third World behavior. These societies usually have little to lose; they tend to respond enthusiastically to the clarion calls of their frequently demagogic leaders--at least by U.S. standards.

Finally, Third World dictators--and all U.S. conflicts have been with leftist or rightist versions--know how to manipulate their receptive masses with highly appealing slogans of independence and “anti-imperialism.” Coupled with domestic political repression, this is precisely Hussein’s formula--and, evidently, it works.

For the United States, the first serious exposure to Third World challenges occurred in the early ‘50s--in the Persian Gulf. In 1951, Mohammed Mossadeq, the populist prime minister of Iran, nationalized the main British oil company. He then forced Shah Reza Pahlevi to flee the country--or so it appeared. Actually, the shah fled as part of a conspiracy organized, in 1953, by the CIA and Britain. Iranian military commanders, who were involved in the plot, moved shortly thereafter to overthrow Mossadeq and restore the emperor to his throne.

Ostensibly, it was a victory for Western opponents of nascent Middle East nationalism and their way of managing rebellions. But the United States and the West paid a terrible price 25 years later--when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s revolution ousted the shah for good in 1979. The politics and the power balance in the gulf were forever altered. The Carter Administration, as the Eisenhower Administration, had underestimated the appeal of Iranian nationalism. But unlike in the ‘50s, the CIA could no longer be called upon to alter history.

Emboldened by the success of the anti-Mossadeq operation, the United States arranged, in 1954, for the CIA to organize a “rebel” army to oust Guatemala President Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, who favored nationalizing U.S.-owned banana plantations. This, too, was an easy triumph, satisfying Washington that leftist nationalism in Latin America, our “back yard,” had been eradicated. Nobody realized that the Guatemalan confrontation helped inspire two Cuban revolutionary brothers named Castro and an Argentine exile named Ernesto Guevara. Nobody in Washington had ever heard of them.

In 1956, Dwight D. Eisenhower demonstrated good sense when he compelled Britain, France and Israel to halt the war they had launched against Egypt’s Col. Gamal Abdel Nasser for nationalizing the Suez Canal. But his Administration maintained cordial ties with the rightist military dictator Gen. Fulgencio Batista in Cuba, unaware of the Cubans’ growing resentment of him and his U.S. support. The Batista dictatorship created, of course, the climate for the victory of Fidel Castro’s revolution on Jan. 1, 1959. But Washington did not understand what had happened--nor was it able to comprehend the nationalist wave that had crested on the Caribbean island.

When Castro began nationalizing U.S. property and moving Cuba toward the Soviet camp, the Eisenhower Administration summoned the CIA team that had liquidated Arbenz in Guatemala to reprise their exploit--with Castro the target in Havana. Inheriting the CIA’s Cuban exiles’ army, President John F. Kennedy authorized it to undertake the Bay of Pigs invasion in April, 1961.

Kennedy’s--and his advisers’--tragic error was to assume that most of Cuba would rise up against Castro and embrace the invaders. It was a colossal failure in understanding the sentiments of a Third World nation still mesmerized by its revolutionary chief. The rout at the Bay of Pigs led, a year-and-a-half later, to the Cuban missile crisis--the installation of Soviet nuclear weapons in Cuba--that almost triggered a U.S.-Soviet atomic war. But Third World lessons were not being learned: Although the United States had the power to destroy Castro, it could not afford to exercise it.

That year, Kennedy began enlarging the U.S. military presence in Vietnam, believing it would block the communists in the north from conquering South Vietnam, even though those same communists had defeated experienced French armies eight years earlier. Under three administrations, the United States remained committed to the concept that air superiority and a massive deployment of ground forces were enough to smash North Vietnam, a supposedly backward nation without an air force and or modern military infrastructure. Again, Americans underestimated Third World nationalism.

Washington was no more savvy in dealing with the Third World in the ‘80s. An ill-advised military intervention in Lebanon led to the deaths of hundreds of U.S. Marines, the result of underestimating the determination of Lebanese revolutionary groups to be rid of Americans. In the end, the Reagan Administration had nothing to show for it--and there still are Americans held hostage in Lebanon.

In 1989, the Bush Administration had its first taste of Third World stubbornness when it attempted to remove Panama’s dictator, Gen. Manuel A. Noriega. He’d spent years on the CIA’s payroll, then decided to defy the United States by sponsoring narcotics’ traffic from South America to the north. When Noriega managed to survive President Ronald Reagan’s years in power, it was Bush’s turn to act--and he did so with a massive military operation, after all covert efforts had failed. Hundreds of civilians were killed or wounded.

Today, Noriega sits in a Florida prison awaiting trial, but nine months after the invasion, cocaine keeps flowing through Panama, and the local economy is in disarray. Once more, the application of sheer armed might failed to solve a Third World situation that Washington had pronounced intolerable.

If nothing else, the United States should, at long last, begin to comprehend Third World dynamics, to examine the basic premises that undergird U.S. action. Maybe a disaster in the Persian Gulf can then be averted.