Breaking the Gulf Stalemate : Strategy: Tactics must spotlight Iraqi weaknesses, thus forcing Hussein to confront the costs of his invasion and weakening his grip on Kuwait.

Rashid Khalidi, who teaches history at the University of Chicago, spoke for many of his deeply concerned colleagues last Sunday when he shared his fear that the United States is proceeding, “half-blind,” toward a war in the Persian Gulf. His audience of more than 1,500 teachers and specialists was assembled--not far from the Alamo in San Antonio, Tex.--for the annual meeting of the Middle East Studies Assn.

Guild rules require the specialists to grumble frequently about policy-makers in Washington who do not seek--and may even spurn--their advice. This time, the complaints were often coupled with general astonishment that President Bush seems to have no one on his top decision-making team who knows very much about the Arab world. Citing the potential backlash from the region and the dangers involved in upsetting its balance of power, Khalidi roused his audience by insisting that the specialists exert themselves to overcome the pro-war “idiots’ consensus” in the press.

But Khalidi faces a dilemma, one not unlike that bedeviling the President and his policy-makers: Despite anxiety about war, the professor believes that Iraq’s invasion and occupation of Kuwait must be reversed. Which prompted a scholar from Kuwait to stand and ask the unavoidable question: How do you propose to get Iraq out of Kuwait?

What’s needed are military measures that, by spotlighting Iraqi weaknesses, force Saddam Hussein to confront the cost of launching an attack on allied forces, while simultaneously weakening his grip on Kuwait. The point is to design steps that will withhold force as long as Iraq complies, and to make compliance an overwhelmingly obvious choice. In contrast to the war option, steps of this sort are likely to be widely supported in the international community and in the U.N. Security Council.

Creative ideas about the calibrated use of military power against Iraq have been offered. For example, the United States and its allies should, at the request of the legitimate Kuwait government, protect Kuwaiti airspace from Iraqi intruders. Given the availability of highly sophisticated battlefield technology like AWACS, the allies could police Kuwaiti airspace with minimal exposure of friendly aircraft.

Most important, this airspace option illustrates how the logic of the crisis--yield or be attacked--can usefully be changed to increase pressure on Iraq.

For a few exciting weeks in August and September, it was easy to bask in the warm glow of a new international order and marvel at the rejuvenation of the United Nations. But reality has a way of chilling hopes. It will be six months or more before the embargo ordered by the U.N. Security Council really begins to cause pain in Iraq, and time can be a fickle ally of such efforts.

The President has emphasized that his decision to bolster U.S. forces in the gulf by 200,000 soldiers is intended to leave no doubt in Hussein’s mind that his demand for unconditional withdrawal from Kuwait is deadly serious. Unmistakably, the military posture of U.S. forces is rapidly moving toward an offensive capability.

But by making the threat of war more credible, the President has dramatically stoked the fear of war. Ironically, the new deployment will likely increase pressure on Washington to accept a compromise solution rather than push the war button.

Time is a crucial dimension in the crisis, but only afterward will it be clear whether the U.S. decision to send more troops to the gulf put time to work for or against Hussein. The Iraqi leader has apparently calculated, not without good reason, that he might outlast the United States and its allies.

By accelerating the clock and assembling what--by almost any conceivable standard--is a truly remarkable fighting force, the United States has raised what soldiers like to call the “pucker factor” for Hussein. But--and here the dilemma thickens for Washington--these substantive and psychological gains are unavoidably offset by a narrowing of options in concert with the allies.

The ad-hoc coalition of forces in the gulf, now numbering more than 300,000, may remain intact only as long as it is not called to action. As the United States strides boldly to the brink of war--what would be the first Arab-American war--its allies, for the most part, are content to march in place.

Though they would apparently be happy if the United States decided to crush Iraq, the Egyptian and the Syrian governments know there are limits to what their domestic constituencies will tolerate vis-a-vis another Arab state. Presidents Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and Hafez Assad of Syria have emphasized that they have not deployed forces in order to invade Iraq or Kuwait, but to defend Saudi Arabia. Egypt wants to give the embargo at least two to three months more time to work before upping the ante. Even then, it will move into Kuwait only as part of a U.N. force. The European allies, with the notable exception of Great Britain, remain committed to a diplomatic rather than a military solution.

Yet it is difficult to imagine a diplomatic settlement that would satisfy both Baghdad and Washington. Hussein says “Let’s talk,” but aggressively reiterates that Kuwait is an inextricable part of Iraq. If Bush has painted himself into a corner by refusing to entertain any outcome short of an unconditional Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait, Hussein, by making peace with Iran and conceding Tehran all its war objectives, has done the same thing. If the Iraqi army withdraws unconditionally from Kuwait, the Iraqi leader will not only have lost his war with Iran but his confrontation with the world as well. He is too shrewd and wily to think that he could survive in power after such a double loss.

It is increasingly recognized in Washington that the costs of unilateral action are likely to be high, and thus it is essential for the United States to remain under the U.N.’s umbrella of legitimacy. Secretary of State James A. Baker III has emphasized that the gulf crisis is a test of the U.N.’s capacity to cope with serious challenges to the international order in the 1990s. But even if nine or 10 members of the Security Council could be persuaded to vote in favor of a large-scale attack to push Hussein out of Kuwait, the risk is that the price of military “victory” may be so high that this experiment in U.N. action would become a negative model. For nearly three decades, the 1960 U.N. intervention in the Congo crisis inhibited any suggestion that offensive military actions should be taken under the U.N. banner.

If the gulf crisis erupts into a maelstrom of combat, the real danger is not that the United States or its allies will lose on the battlefield, but that a Pyrrhic victory will be won. This is why the war option makes many policy-makers uneasy: It opens up too many routes to subsequent disasters.

The logic of geopolitics--the maintaining of a balance of power between Iran and Iraq--also argues against a massive military assault on Iraq. Any sensible military plan for action against Hussein and his army must be reconciled with the axiom that a weakened Iraq necessarily produces a strengthened Iran. As William G. Hyland, editor of Foreign Affairs, notes: “It would be a supreme irony if the United States destroyed Iraq, thus permitting Iran to re-emerge as the strongest power in the gulf and, in passing, also strengthen Syria.”

Some experts argue that Iran is currently weakened by internal problems--economic chaos, political disorder and waning popular support--and that the last thing Tehran wants to do is embark on ambitious efforts to extend Iranian influences and power. This may all be true. But a power vacuum in the gulf would create new realities, sucking in Iran despite its disclaimers.

In its complexities, its dangers, its diverse effects on the world economy and its ramifications for the international system, the gulf crisis is without historical precedent. But the crisis, and especially its denouement, will become a precedent for world politics in the 1990s--and probably beyond. If it all comes down to war, the dead will overwhelmingly be Iraqi--and American. History strongly hints that both sides, in retrospect, will wonder whether war really was the only option. In retrospect, it seldom is.