ANALYSIS : Bush’s Plan to Scare Iraq Instead Jolted Supporters

Five days after ordering that more than 200,000 additional troops be sent to the Persian Gulf, President Bush has landed squarely in the middle of a dilemma: How can he scare Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait without scaring the American people out of their support for his policies?

Bush aides leave no doubt that jolting the Iraqi president is a big part of the Administration’s strategy. “His thought processes--that’s what we’re really trying to affect here,” a senior Administration official said the day after Bush announced the new Persian Gulf deployment. “One of the things we want to do is to convince him . . . that we are serious.”

But the policy also has convinced many members of Congress--and many of their constituents--that the United States is a lot closer to a bloody war in Kuwait than they had thought.

The result has been a sudden upsurge of publicly expressed doubts about Bush’s plans and calls for Congress to return to Washington to debate what, exactly, the United States is doing in the Persian Gulf.

On Tuesday, the White House tried belatedly to calm those fears, with spokesman Marlin Fitzwater repeating, over and over, during his daily briefing for reporters that “We want a peaceful resolution” and “There is no war . . . we want to avoid it.”

And Secretary of State James A. Baker III--who was Bush’s chief political operative long before he became the nation’s top diplomat--tried his hand at convincing Americans that the fate of Kuwait matters to their lives.

“It’s jobs,” he declared flatly.

The United States cannot allow Hussein “to sit astride the economic lifeline of the industrial world (that) runs through the gulf,” Baker said in Hamilton, Bermuda, where he met with Canadian Foreign Minister Joe Clark. “To bring it down to the level of the average American citizen, let me say that means jobs.”

In making that argument, Baker was advancing in public the line that nearly all Administration officials offer in private. If Hussein emerges victorious from this conflict, they say, he will be able to dominate the gulf, controlling oil production from the entire region and exercising enormous power over the world economy.

But the argument is one that Bush has shied away from making publicly, ever since protesters began appearing at his speeches accusing him of plotting a “war for oil.”

“It’s not a war for oil,” the President has insisted. Instead, he has said, the United States is involved in the gulf to prevent “naked aggression.”

The resulting split--an economic argument in private, a lofty “principle” argument in public--has contributed to an air of confusion over the Administration’s purposes.

In most wars Americans have fought, the government eventually has settled on a single, easily explainable rationale to justify fighting, from “making the world safe for democracy” in World War I to preventing the expansion of communism in Vietnam. The explanations have not always turned out to make sense after the fact, but they have served a crucial role in a democracy of helping both troops and the folks back home understand why they were being asked to sacrifice.

In this case, the absence of a single explanation has laid bare a fundamental problem for the President.

Despite more than three months of speeches, news conferences and statements, he and his aides clearly have not yet persuaded Americans to accept his view that a war in the gulf may be necessary for U.S. national interests.

Part of the problem is that Bush and his aides have offered at least half a dozen different explanations for the U.S. policy in the gulf, ranging from concerns over the “new world order” to worries about Iraq’s future potential as a nuclear power.

A second factor has been Bush’s reluctance to address the economic argument head-on.

Some experts on international oil markets and finance question Administration assertions that Hussein could be a major threat to the world economy.

However, Administration officials insist that if the Iraqi leader emerges victorious from this conflict, he will be able to dominate the gulf, controlling oil production from the entire region and thereby wielding enormous international economic power.

At stake, said Baker, could be “an economic recession worldwide, caused by the control by one nation--one dictator, if you will--of the West’s economic lifeline.”

The result, he said, repeating his key word for a third time, would be “the loss of jobs on the part of American citizens.”

Bush has preferred to make the argument that the United States must prove that “aggression” cannot prevail.

That argument, however, has a major flaw that even Administration supporters, such as former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, have pointed out.

On many occasions the United States has allowed aggression to go unchallenged and the Administration will almost certainly do so again, Kissinger wrote recently.

Otherwise, he said, the country would have to turn into a sort of “global policeman,” a concept that Americans would be unlikely to support. Bush, Kissinger said, needs to spell out why this particular aggression is worth shedding American blood to stop.

Asked Tuesday why Iraq’s aggression is different from the many others that the United States over the years has not tried to stop, White House spokesman Fitzwater turned to the United Nations.

“Our policy is support of these U.N. resolutions,” Fitzwater said when asked to explain why Bush is committed to deterring aggression in the Persian Gulf.

The U.N. resolutions “have charted the course, they have set the policy,” he added.

Given the relatively low esteem in which the United Nations is held by many Americans, however, the notion that the Administration is merely following a U.N. mandate in the Persian Gulf may not help much in calming concerns about the path that the President is following.

Times staff writer Robert C. Toth contributed to this report.