Will Release All Hostages--Iraq : Gulf crisis: Baghdad announces it will start freeing Western ‘guests’ Christmas Day. Process is to take three months ‘if nothing happens to disturb the . . . peace.’

The Iraqi government will begin releasing all American and other foreign hostages on Christmas Day “if nothing happens to disturb the atmosphere of peace” in the Persian Gulf crisis, Baghdad Television announced Sunday night.

The surprise decision of President Saddam Hussein’s ruling Revolutionary Command Council said that the hostages--which the regime calls “guests”--would be released in groups over a three-month period ending March 15.

“This is to give joy to the families of the guests” on the Christmas and New Year’s holidays, the Command Council statement said. Scheduled television and radio programs were interrupted to air the report.

Pushing its peace line hard, the government said the decision was made as “a response to efforts by good people from different countries and to foil the factors of evil and aggression for the wicked powers of the world.”

Top U.S. officials, in Paris for a European summit, dismissed the move as another ploy by Hussein and repeated demands that all captives be unconditionally freed.

In Washington, U.S. experts called Hussein’s latest hostage offer a clever ploy designed to delay a Western military attack and perhaps to open talks with the United States on a negotiated deal to end the crisis.

The Revolutionary Command Council’s statement did not say what action might upset the announced phased release of the foreigners. That omission left open the possibility that Baghdad could stop the flow--or never start it--if any development in the crisis displeased the government here.

However, release of the thousands of hostages held in Iraq and Kuwait would remove an emotional element of the crisis and a possible justification for an American-led attack on Iraqi forces.

Speaking before the announcement was made, a European diplomat said Sunday that releasing hostages “is a card that doesn’t cost anything, and it can pull the rug out from under any public motivation for war.”

The time period announced for the releases appeared significant not only for the calculated bid to win goodwill for Iraq over the holidays. The end date, March 15, would fall near the beginning of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which military analysts say would be an inauspicious time for Western forces to begin a military campaign.

By hanging on to the last of his hostages until March, Hussein could use the issue to upset a Western timetable.

Augustus Richard Norton, a senior fellow at the International Peace Academy in New York, said Sunday that “up to now, Saddam has played the hostages with great skill, slicing them off in small bits like salami, with just enough slices to keep the taste of peace in the minds of people around the world.

“If he will begin releasing the hostages on Christmas Day, this is no guarantee that we will see all the hostages out of Iraq any time soon,” Norton said. “Perhaps he will use slightly bigger slices, but he can still play this out for a very long time.”

Norton called the proposed completion date of the hostage releases “a shrewd move,” coming as the Islamic holy month is about to start. Later, in April, the weather turns increasingly inhospitable for military operations, he said. Then, in June, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca occurs, a period when a large-scale Western military operation in Saudi Arabia is considered impossible.

“So, presto, Saddam is attempting to push things into next fall. He bought himself six months. It’s very clever,” Norton said.

L. Paul Bremer, former head of the State Department’s counterterrorism office and now a consultant with Kissinger Associates, called the offer another “cynical” attempt by Hussein to manipulate American policy and public opinion.

“I don’t think it should have any impact on U.S. policy,” Bremer said.

U.S. diplomats here in Baghdad made no immediate comment on the development, which came four days before President Bush’s Thanksgiving visit with American troops in Saudi Arabia.

The hostage issue has hurt Iraq’s image abroad. Even past releases of hostages have been condemned as a cynical “dealing in bodies” by Western officials.

Over the past month, the regime has freed several hundred hostages into the hands of visiting foreign political figures who have supported Iraq’s call for a peaceful solution to the crisis that began with the Aug. 2 invasion of Kuwait.

But thousands still remain here. More than 2,000 Westerners and Japanese are barred from leaving Iraq and occupied Kuwait. Included are more than 100 Americans held as human shields. Others have been sheltered at various diplomatic premises around the city.

Many diplomats here believe the government is convinced that hostages have forestalled an attack so far, but the issue has damaged Iraq’s image in the West, where Hussein is seeking support, or at least division, for a political way out of the crisis.

The Iraqi president, however, has so far refused to countenance a withdrawal from Kuwait, despite the mounting U.S.-led forces deployed in the gulf region.

The hostage announcement came just hours after a chartered Iraqi Airways jetliner arrived here from Kuwait, the latest and possibly last American-sponsored refugee flight from the beleaguered sheikdom. It carried 123 passengers, including 71 American women and children.

More passengers joined the flight here, including an American family of four, and the plane flew on to London, where it arrived early today with 136 passengers aboard. It was the 10th refugee flight from Kuwait since the invasion and the first in more than a month.

Also Sunday, about 40 Soviets left Iraq on board a separate Aeroflot flight.

Under Iraqi regulations, foreign women and children and men of Arab descent can leave Kuwait and Iraq, but other foreign men are denied exit visas, becoming, in effect, hostages. No Iraqis can leave their country now, and that includes Kuwaitis, whom the government considers to be Iraqi nationals.

The American and European women aboard Sunday’s flight, many with infants in their arms, painted a grim picture of occupied Kuwait.

One American, a woman from San Clemente, Calif., with three children who was forced to leave her Kuwaiti husband behind, said: “I hate to say I want war to come to any country, but there were times I wished the Marines had come.

“Kuwait went from the top to destruction. I was scared. I didn’t believe this could happen to Kuwait. The country was a utopia.”

She refused to disclose her name for fear of endangering her husband.

Another refugee, 21-year-old Antoinette Rogers, an Irish citizen, said the situation in Kuwait city is worsening day to day. “You drive through town and there’s nothing,” she told reporters as she waited to board the London flight. “The stores are empty. You drive through the streets and it just breaks your heart.”

She and several others on the flight said that shooting can still be heard at night in the city but that they could not gauge the strength of the resistance. Most of them had been in hiding in their homes for months.

“If it means war, then this is what it will have to be,” said a British woman who identified herself only as Julie. “You know you lose hope. It’s as simple as that. You just think, ‘What the hell am I staying here for?’ ”

Julie, also married to a Kuwaiti, said that the occupying Iraqi troops are near panic over the possibility of war.

“We had a blackout in our neighborhood, and the Iraqis ran into our building saying, ‘Hide us, hide us, the Americans are coming.’ I mean this is the Iraqi soldiers. I’m not lying. They don’t want to be there.”

Joseph C. Wilson IV, charge d’affaires at the American Embassy in Baghdad who went to the air terminal to oversee the refugee flight, was asked whether there were any other Americans he would like to see leave the region.

“Yes,” he responded. “Those people at the sites (hostages held at military targets) and our diplomatic personnel who came up from Kuwait.” The diplomats from the Kuwait city embassy, still manned by Ambassador W. Nathaniel Howell III and eight staff members, are forbidden to leave Iraq.

Times staff writer John M. Broder contributed to this story from Washington.