Saudi Officials Prepared for a Long Waiting Game : Gulf crisis: Casualty estimates and minimal impact of GIs on local culture help cool fervor for military action.

After nearly two months of itching to drive the Iraqis out of Kuwait, Saudi Arabian government officials appear to be increasingly convinced that speedy military action may not be the best solution, and they say now that they are prepared to play a long waiting game before moving to the battlefield.

Although the Saudis are no less committed to a military offensive if it proves necessary to liberate Kuwait, interviews with a number of government officials indicate that Saudi Arabia is no longer adamant about getting American troops off Saudi soil before the Muslim holy month of Ramadan in the spring, and may be willing to wait several more months to allow sanctions against Iraq to take effect.

A key factor in the new evaluations is an estimate, reportedly prepared by the U.S. government, that the multinational forces would suffer 30,000 casualties and Iraq as many as 90,000 in a 7- to 10-day drive to liberate Kuwait, according to one Saudi official.

“During the first two weeks of the crisis, it was, ‘We have to secure Saudi Arabia, we have to secure Saudi Arabia,’ ” the official said. “After that, we shifted to, ‘We have to sock it to Saddam Hussein.’ Now, people think about 120,000 casualties and say, ‘Do we want to go to war?’ ”

Although Saudi officials initially feared that the presence of more than 200,000 U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia would have an adverse impact on the kingdom’s highly conservative, traditional Islamic lifestyle, it has become clear that stationing the Americans in the desert, far from Saudi population centers, has had a minimal impact.

“The presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia has not put a dent in our culture,” the official said. “So, the troops are here another four, five, six months. Who cares? Why rush? Why end up with 90,000 Iraqi casualties and 30,000 on our side, and tremendous damage, if maybe you can achieve your ends peacefully?

“So, we sit here for awhile and see how it goes. If it turns out it’s not going anywhere, fine. We sock it to him. But war is very funny. It takes only one side to start it, and it takes both sides to stop it.”

The official went on to say: “I don’t think anybody wants to go to war unless there is no other way out. We want to keep the embargo up, but it might be another four or five months before you see any action.”

The seeming lack of urgency is alarming Kuwaiti officials, who say they are committed to following timetables drawn up by the international community and the United Nations but fear that Iraq’s looting of Kuwait and the movement of Iraqi nationals into the tiny Persian Gulf emirate, replacing Kuwaitis, requires urgent action.

“My God, who has the illusions to believe the sanctions will work?” said Abdullah Bishara, a Kuwaiti who heads the six-member Gulf Cooperation Council. “We don’t have the illusions, no. The Kuwaitis are suffering every day inside Kuwait. The Kuwaitis can’t wait more than two months. They cannot. Kuwait cannot wait more than two months. Kuwait will disappear from this globe. Kuwait cries loudly and eloquently and painfully for a rescue.”

In interviews over the past two weeks, a variety of senior Saudi government officials and businessmen indicated that few believe there are any immediate indications that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein can be induced to leave Kuwait peacefully.

“There is no sign it will be finished by peace,” Prince Nawaf ibn Abdulaziz, brother of King Fahd and a key unofficial adviser on foreign policy, said in an interview.

“The one who has the decision is Iraq, and until now we haven’t heard from Iraq that they really want to finish it in a peaceful way. The Iraqi officials still say they don’t want to leave Kuwait. They still say Kuwait is part of Iraq, there is no Kuwait, there is no people of Kuwait. Something like that doesn’t mean there is a peaceful solution at all.”

How long the Saudis are willing to wait remains an unanswerable question, he said, and added: “This you have to ask yourself: How long will you wait? How long (will) the world wait?”

Abdulaziz al Soyiagh, a senior official in the Saudi Foreign Ministry, said Iraq exercised the military option with its Aug. 2 invasion of Kuwait, and it remains simply for the rest of the world to decide how and when to respond.

“We are already in the middle of that kind of (military) action,” he said. “We are trying to use all kinds of peaceful means to get him out of Kuwait. I think the United Nations Security Council’s decisions have to be applied, and if they decide that force is the next step that should be taken, then I think it should be.

“I think even sanctions have limited time to function, and giving the sanctions its limit, what’s after that? To kick him out by force. When they will say ‘uncle,’ I don’t know. Six months? Four months? I don’t know.”

The Iraqi president is clearly playing for time, Soyiagh said, but even time may not necessarily be a battle Iraq can win.

“Always things happen without expecting it,” he cautioned. “Nobody expected that Saddam will invade Kuwait and kick its people outside. Maybe tomorrow something will happen and Saddam will no longer be in the leadership position in Iraq. Who knows? Leaders don’t just come out and say when we will hit. We give time. But when there is a decision to take action, they will not consult anybody.”

In the weeks following the Iraqi invasion, with thousands of Iraqi troops massed at the Saudi border, most Saudis were eager for a quick military strike against Iraq to make sure they did not suffer the same fate as the Kuwaitis. But now that an invasion of Saudi Arabia appears almost unthinkable, many Saudis are having second thoughts about the advisability of going to war to liberate a neighboring country.

They worry about damage to Saudi Arabia’s gleaming cities and oil facilities, and about the possibility of a chemical weapons missile strike against population centers.

“This whole thing has been a nightmare,” said Assaf al Assaf, a well-known columnist. “I wish I could open my eyes, it’s finished, it’s done, it never happened. Everybody sees this as an individual act of aggression by one man, and they don’t like the man, but I don’t think they will be happy about sacrificing the Iraqi people to pay for his aggression.

“If lives are going to be lost, it’s not going to be just Iraqi lives, it’s going to be Saudi lives, American lives, Egyptian lives, Moroccan lives. We all think of being patriotic and so on, but how much of that is real and how much of that is rhetoric? Really.

“It takes a very special kind of person to enjoy war. Most people do not enjoy war, whether they win them or they lose them, and in this part of the world, we have had too many wars. At this point, I don’t think even the idea of going into war can evoke anything but pain in people.”

At the same time, many of the Saudis most painfully aware of the potential costs of a military conflict say the cost of going to war in the next few months will be less than the cost of allowing Iraq to remain in Kuwait, or waiting several years until Iraq is equipped with nuclear weapons, to put an end to the Iraqi military machine.

“It’s better to get it over with,” one Saudi official said. “It’ll be bad, but it’s better than waiting. Saddam is, what, five, 10 years away from an atomic bomb? What are we going to do then? Do you think the United States will be over here helping us if he has an atomic bomb? Will France be here? It’ll be a whole new ballgame.”

The Saudi business community has also been pushing for a final resolution of the crisis, one way or another, peacefully or by war, as a way of restoring some normalcy to economic relations in the gulf.

Khaled Olayan, one of Saudi Arabia’s most influential businessmen, said: “This is really affecting our life, this stalemate situation. You don’t know what the next day is going to bring. How do you plan your business? Do you plan it back to normal a month from now, or a year from now?

“I am in support of military action provided all the peaceful efforts have failed, and so far, they are not leading to anything. I think this thing needs a surgical solution, a very quick and effective one. This thing (Kuwait) has been taken by force; the only way is to free it by force--concurrently keeping all the channels open.”

Prince Nawaf said Saudi Arabia remains committed to resolving the crisis by military force if necessary in order to retain long-term stability in the region.

“If there is stalemate for the Kuwaiti people, if we don’t give them their rights, how can we give ourselves rights?” he said. “All the world will suffer, because the world stands with Kuwait.

“And if anybody says Saudi Arabia will suffer, he’s wrong. Even if Saudi Arabia suffers, it’s much better to suffer and to finish the problem. Not to say we will not suffer, and then in the future suffer a lot. Then we will have no policy, we will have no economy, we will have nothing for ourselves. We will be under attack all of our life. And that’s better? Or to finish it?”