Bush Set for Turkey in Desert, Assad Meeting : Mideast crisis: Thanksgiving with troops designed to bolster his gulf policies. And TV will be there to cover it.

President Bush arrived here Wednesday night preparing for a Thanksgiving Day extravaganza designed to shore up support for his Persian Gulf policies, while announcing plans to meet with Syrian leader Hafez Assad, whose past connections with terrorism could undermine Bush’s program.

Bush’s Thanksgiving in the desert, complete with handpicked troops, stirring backgrounds and network anchormen, is a carefully designed television production that the White House hopes will increase public approval for the face-off against Iraq.

Bush’s schedule has been timed to the minute--five minutes to talk, four minutes to walk through the chow line, 25 minutes to eat--all to allow him to “go live” having turkey with the troops on network morning news shows at precisely 8:15 Eastern time (5:15 a.m. Pacific time) Thanksgiving morning.

But even as his aides planned for this major public relations effort, Bush’s announcement that he will meet Friday with President Assad is likely to complicate the image of his anti-Iraq campaign, given Assad’s history of support for international terrorism.

Government terrorism experts blame the Syrians for involvement in the destruction of Pan Am Flight 103 two years ago and in the bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983. The truck-carried bomb in the Beirut attack, which killed 241 American servicemen, was most likely assembled in Syria and driven through Syrian-held territory in Lebanon on its way to its fatal destination.

The juxtaposition of the trip to the desert and the meeting with Assad underline the contradictions that Bush must try to handle to keep both his international and his domestic coalitions together.

U.S. officials insist that the meeting with Syria is necessary to maintain good relations with a key ally in the fight against Iraq.

Syria, which borders Iraq on the north and west, has sent about 4,000 troops to Saudi Arabia. U.S. officials believe that the endorsement of Assad, a militant Arab nationalist, helps blunt Iraq’s claim that only “Western imperialists” support the campaign against Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein over his invasion and occupation of Kuwait.

At the same time, many polls have shown declining support for Bush’s Persian Gulf policy, and experts in public opinion say much of the problem is that many Americans have difficulty seeing the conflict as a clear issue of right versus wrong. Part of that problem is due to the unsavory reputations of U.S. allies in the gulf conflict, most notably Assad, pollsters suggest.

Meanwhile, debate continued about when, and under what conditions, the United Nations might approve a resolution giving the green light to the use of force against Iraq.

Leaving Paris at the end of the three-day Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev told reporters that the U.N. Security Council should consider the “very dangerous” developments in the gulf and “take a decision there.”

But Gorbachev did not detail exactly what sort of decision he would like to see.

French President Francois Mitterrand, also speaking in Paris, said he was in general agreement with the Bush Administration’s desire to see a Security Council resolution approving force against Iraq but differed sharply from the U.S. line in two key respects.

First, he said, a resolution could authorize the use of force, but “as far as its actual implementation is concerned, this cannot be automatic”--implying that a second Security Council vote actually triggering military action would be needed before any attack could be launched.

The Bush Administration has been seeking a resolution that would approve the use of force in advance and leave the United States free to decide for itself the timing of any action.

In addition, Mitterrand indicated that France would not participate in a military action without an explicit U.N. resolution. Bush and his advisers argue that although a resolution would be good to have, military force can be used even if the United Nations does not act as part of Kuwait’s right to summon other nations to assist it in “self-defense.”

“Mr. Bush said to me, ‘Do you think that we need to adopt a new resolution within the Security Council which would authorize the eventual use of force?’ I told him yes,” Mitterrand said.

All that left Secretary of State James A. Baker III, who has been traveling the world seeking to line up Security Council votes for a resolution, somewhat vague.

“It is an ongoing process, and we are in the process of continuing that process,” Baker said when asked by reporters in Jidda about what stage the consultations had reached.

Baker plans to meet today with officials in Yemen, a member of the Security Council and a pro-Iraq neighbor of Saudi Arabia, and will travel Saturday to Colombia, also a member of the council, to consult with that nation’s foreign minister.

The Administration is hopeful that the Security Council can complete work on a resolution sometime next week, before the United States loses its chairmanship of the council Nov. 30 in the normal rotation. But some diplomats at the United Nations have said that timetable may be overly optimistic. Baker was typically elliptical when asked about the timing of a resolution. “This is the 22nd of November, and November has 30 days,” he said.

Baker spoke to reporters in Jidda after Bush held a dinner and a 1-hour, 45-minute meeting with King Fahd of Saudi Arabia. That meeting, and a similar brief talk with Sheik Jabbar al Ahmed al Sabah, the exiled emir of Kuwait, constituted the only diplomatic business on Bush’s Saudi Arabia agenda, most of which will be taken up with the televised Thanksgiving Day dramatics with the troops.

The preparations for that visit, particularly the needs of U.S. television networks, have consumed both U.S. military authorities and Saudi government officials over the last week.

Here, for example, the city’s most visible landmark is a huge fountain that shoots a plume of water into the air the length of a football field. Normally, a Saudi official said, the fountain is turned off at night during winter months, but the government agreed to keep it running so that NBC-TV could use the dramatic sight as a backdrop for its correspondents.

Those same considerations have been very much at the center of the White House’s planning for Bush’s Thanksgiving trip. Access to Bush’s visit has been tightly restricted for reporters who might ask too many questions of the troops, but arrangements for televised coverage of Bush’s remarks have been made on a large scale.

After meeting with the troops, Bush plans to leave Saudi Arabia en route to Cairo tonight and is scheduled to meet with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak there Friday before flying on to Geneva for his meeting with Assad. Bush is expected to return to the United States early Saturday morning, only to leave again on Monday, this time for a two-day trip to Mexico.

Asked if he is at all uncomfortable about the meeting, given Assad’s record on terrorism, Bush said he had “no problems sitting down with him” to discuss “our common objectives in the gulf.”

“It’s important that this coalition stay together,” Bush said. “It’s important that everybody that’s a part of it feel a part of it.”

Many experts on the Middle East, however, have warned that the United States, in trying to get closer to Assad, may be on the verge of making the same sort of mistake with Syria as U.S. officials made with Iraq during the 1980s.

“We looked the other way when we knew that Iraq was carrying out a terrorist operation,” Vincent M. Cannistraro, a recently retired CIA official, told reporters Tuesday in Washington.

White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater said the meeting was “not initiated by either” Bush or Assad but was arranged by other leaders in the region. Administration officials say the President was urged to meet Assad by Mubarak and by Turkish President Turgut Ozal, whom Bush met Tuesday in Paris.