U.N. Vote Shows Fragility of New U.S.-Arab Ties : News ANALYSIS

For President Bush and his Persian Gulf policy, the weeklong debate at the United Nations that ended in a relatively mild censure of Israel over the killing of 19 Palestinians was a perilous exercise in which a single misstep could have spelled disaster.

As it turned out, the U.S. government dodged the bullet this time. But the action demonstrated just how fragile and delicately balanced the American-led coalition against Iraq really is.

If the U.N. Security Council had voted on a much harsher PLO-backed resolution instead of the U.S.-British draft that it passed unanimously, the United States would have been forced into a veto. That veto might have split the coalition and certainly would have caused serious political damage to Washington’s Arab allies in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Syria.

“It would have been potentially very serious if the United States had to use its veto,” said Robert Hunter, a former National Security Council expert. “The (Arab) governments would understand because they know how the game is played. But there could have been a public reaction that would be impossible to calculate.

“If the coalition falls apart, that increases the danger of war,” continued Hunter, now a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “Bush can’t back down. I don’t believe that he wants war, but if the coalition collapses, that means the non-war option is exhausted and war is all that is left.”

Passage of the U.S.-backed resolution, Hunter said, “gets us through the immediate problem.”

From the Bush Administration’s standpoint, the Security Council vote was a not a victory to be savored because it resulted in U.N. condemnation of Washington’s closest ally in the Middle East. But defeat would have been far worse.

Kuwait’s ambassador to the United States, Sheik Saud al Nasir al Sabah, whose government, exiled by Iraq’s invasion, will have the most to lose if the anti-Arab coalition begins to fray, said, “It would be damaging if there is a veto on any resolution.”

Saud insisted that there is no real linkage between the crisis in the Persian Gulf and the Arab-Israeli conflict, a point that the Bush Administration also has stressed repeatedly.

“Many people seem to think there is a connection between what is going on in Kuwait and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict,” the ambassador told The Times’ Washington bureau. “I don’t see any connection here at all.”

But in the volatile Arab world, just about everything seems to be linked to just about everything else.

Judith Kipper, a Middle East expert at the Brookings Institution in Washington, said the killing of the Palestinians in East Jerusalem and the U.N. debate that it spawned must be viewed very seriously “considering the violence that is sweeping the area.”

“They are two separate crises but the whole area is a puzzle,” Kipper said. “When you move one piece, every other piece also moves.”

The danger, of course, is that any unexpected movement could push the region into war.

“It is like Sarajevo in the sand,” Hunter said, referring to the town in Yugoslavia where a seemingly unrelated assassination touched off the series of events that led to World War I. “Things that are external to the gulf crisis, like the situation in Jerusalem, can have a major impact.”

When Israeli security forces killed at least 19 Arab demonstrators on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount on Monday, the fracas underlined the interlocking nature of the region’s disputes.

Israeli officials claim that the Palestine Liberation Organization provoked the clash to reignite the sputtering Palestinian uprising against Israel. Saud, the Kuwaiti ambassador, accused Iraq of provoking the incident to divert attention from the invasion and occupation of Kuwait.

On their side, Palestinians say Jewish religious zealots caused the conflict by trying to establish a foothold in the vicinity of Islam’s third holiest shrine.

Regardless of the validity of the conflicting claims--and there was surely blame enough to go around--there can be no doubt that Iraq exploited the incident at the United Nations.

In alliance with the PLO, the Iraqis sought to force a Security Council vote on a resolution that Washington could never accept.

Although Baghdad’s interest was never concealed, the United States had to go through days of late-night meetings and behind-the-scenes arm-twisting to guarantee an outcome that it could live with.

In the end, the Security Council rebuffed the Iraqis, but the diplomatic struggle was far more difficult than the earlier council votes condemning the Iraqi invasion and annexation of Kuwait. For the time being, Washington’s coalition has survived. But it may not be able to withstand much more of this kind of pressure.