The Line in the Sand : The Fate of Kuwait and Beyond : Around the World : Testing Limits of New Global Federalism : In the post-Cold War era, the U.S. and Soviet Union are trying to work together to solve regional conflicts. But that cooperation may lessen their influence on other nations.

As Iraqi troops rolled into Kuwait, Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze and U.S. Secretary of State James A. Baker III were in Irkutsk, enjoying a soft Siberian summer and a fishing holiday while they wrapped up yet another session in their continuing efforts to negotiate an end to the Cold War.

Downtown, on the streets of Irkutsk, the mood was not so relaxed. The city’s 630,000 inhabitants, like those elsewhere in the Soviet Union, were desperate. Earlier that week, riot police had been called to disperse a crowd of about 1,000 shoppers shoving to get into a store that had managed to come up with a shipment of imported men’s boots. Across Uritsky Street, Siberian consumers participated in a kind of lottery in hopes of winning prized items such as razors, cigarettes and toothpaste.

Baker and Shevardnadze were nearing the end of their talks when Lt. Gen. Howard Graves, a representative of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who was in the secretary of state’s delegation, informed Baker of the Iraqi invasion. Baker immediately told Shevardnadze. The Soviet foreign minister was stunned. The previous day, he had told the Americans he was convinced that Saddam Hussein would not invade Kuwait. “This is what 40 years of our policies in the Middle East have come to,” Shevardnadze later would tell an aide.

It was too early to know exactly what was happening. Baker left the Soviet Union for Mongolia, while Shevardnadze flew back to Moscow. Aboard Shevardnadze’s Aeroflot jet were two of Baker’s top aides -- Dennis Ross, director of policy planning, and State Department counselor Robert Zoellick. They had intended to sit down with Soviet officials at a dacha outside Moscow to work out the agenda their two governments should confront in the coming year.

But as their plane soared across the Urals, talk turned quickly to the Iraqi invasion. Ross’ Soviet counterpart, Sergei Tarasenko, bitingly disparaged the brutality of Saddam Hussein, a longtime Soviet ally. Ross and Tarasenko began talking about the possibility of a joint U.S.-Soviet statement condemning the invasion and embargoing arms sales to Iraq. In Moscow, Ross rushed to the American Embassy and called Baker in Mongolia. The Soviets might agree to a joint statement on Iraq, Ross said, if Baker would fly to Moscow and deliver it alongside Shevardnadze.

Baker liked the idea. A joint statement would show the world that a new era had arrived, one in which the two superpowers had a new relationship. Such a statement would make it difficult for the other major nations of the world to lag behind in condemning Iraq. And it would put the lie to any claim by Saddam Hussein that he had international support for his invasion.

Still, ever-cautious, Baker instructed Ross: “Make sure the statement is a good one.”

The idea for a quiet weekend at a dacha was abandoned. Tarasenko invited Ross to an office in an annex of the Soviet Foreign Ministry compound. He told Ross they should get the latest news from Iraq. The American visitor thought his Soviet colleague was about to pick up the phone and call some Mideast specialist in the Soviet Foreign Ministry, or perhaps the KGB. Instead, Tarasenko moved over to an office television and turned on CNN.

Tarasenko phoned Shevardnadze and got tentative approval for a joint U.S.-Soviet statement on the invasion. Ross’ aide, Andrew Carpendale, was assigned to begin work on the drafting. All the typewriters in the Soviet Foreign Ministry offices had the Cyrillic alphabet; finally, after a frantic search, Soviet officials located an electric typewriter with the Latin alphabet, and Carpendale went to work.

His draft included an explicit Soviet-U.S. condemnation of Iraq and a demand that Hussein pull his troops out of Kuwait. But on Aug. 3, as Baker and his party were already flying from Mongolia to Moscow, this draft came under attack. Traditionalists in the Soviet Foreign Ministry thought that the statement was too strong. The Soviet Union had not aligned itself with the United States in the Mideast for decades. Wasn’t this going too far?

The haggling and uncertainty among Soviet officials continued until just before Baker landed. In the end, Tarasenko, Shevardnadze and, ultimately, Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev won out. On Friday night, Aug. 3, soon after Baker’s Boeing 707 touched down at Moscow’s Vnukovo Airport, the Soviet foreign minister and the U.S. secretary of state appeared before television cameras to read the prepared statement.

The two superpowers made clear that their efforts would extend beyond the mere rhetoric of condemnation. “The United States and the Soviet Union believe the international community must not only condemn this action,” the two superpowers said, “but also take practical steps in response to it.”

The gulf crisis shows how the superpowers hope, in the future, to work together to solve conflicts, and why the Soviet Union has become a staunch champion of a stronger U.N. Security Council--even one able to deploy multinational forces against aggressors.

In seeking to restrain Iraq, the United States and the Soviet Union are working together in an area of the world where Americans and Soviets have been at odds for more than three decades, virtually since the beginning of the Cold War.

“A major event in the Near East is no longer a subject for confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States, whereas before now it had always been a subject of confrontation,” observes former French President Valery Giscard d’Estaing. A senior Bush Administration official terms the gulf crisis “the first major military operation or conflict which hasn’t almost immediately taken on East-West overtones.”

But the crisis also has underscored one of the paradoxes inherent in what President Bush and others call the “new world order:” As the two superpowers cooperate, they may have less influence on the clients they subsidize and support around the world. “The end of the fear of a global conflict may have lifted a restraining force on regional disputes,” says UC San Diego professor Lawrence B. Krause.

At the same time, the crisis illustrates how a strengthened Security Council could serve the interests of Soviet foreign policy.

“The Soviet Union has learned firsthand the dangers of military overextension, particularly because of serious economic crises at home and in Eastern Europe,” wrote Thomas G. Weiss and Meryl A. Kessler in Foreign Policy magazine last summer. “As a result, the Kremlin has become perhaps the most active and vocal advocate for a more dynamic United Nations.”

Gorbachev and other Soviet leaders have been motivated by more than a belief in world federalism, Weiss and Kessler say. By relying on the United Nations, they argue, “the Soviets are able to extricate themselves abroad and cut the costs of military assistance elsewhere, while using multilateral diplomacy to prevent the United States from taking advantage of this retreat.”

A stronger United Nations, they conclude, could help give the Soviet Union “an increased diplomatic role in Central America and the Middle East,” two areas from which the Soviets have long been excluded.

Throughout the gulf crisis, Soviet officials have been reluctant to authorize the use of force by the U.S.-led forces in the Persian Gulf. When President Bush met with Gorbachev in Paris early last week, the Soviet leader balked at approving a United Nations resolution that would explicitly authorize military action against Iraq.

Instead, Gorbachev said he felt the solution to the gulf crisis “must be political.”

The need for Mideast oil prompted both the quick American response and the determined U.S. effort to enlist Soviet backing.

“While we are concerned about aggression or violation of the U.N. charter and the rest of it, if it were only carrots or wheat that were being produced in the Middle East, rather than the oil on which the world depends, I’m not sure that our reaction would have been as immediate, “ says James R. Schlesinger, a former secretary of defense, energy secretary and CIA director.

INSIDE CHINA

While Baker and Shevardnadze were reading their joint denunciation of the Iraqi invasion, Assistant Secretary of State for Asia Richard H. Solomon sat furtively with U.S. Ambassador to Moscow Jack F. Matlock in a small reception room at Vnukovo Airport, hidden from the reporters in Baker’s traveling party.

Solomon had been aboard the secretary of state’s plane from Mongolia; now he was waiting for a midnight flight that would carry him back across the Urals.

He was about to make a hurried, secretive visit to China.

Only a few minutes before Baker’s plane landed in Moscow, the airborne secretary of state had gotten a call from the White House, giving the President’s approval for Solomon’s trip. Its principal aim was to ensure the Chinese government’s cooperation, or at least its tacit acquiescence, in the diplomatic effort against Iraq.

China had an extremely active policy in the Mideast and had, in recent years, been one of the most important arms suppliers to Saddam Hussein.

More important, China was one of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, meaning that Beijing would have the power to veto any resolution imposing an embargo or other collective international action against Iraq.

International revulsion against the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait has marked a significant turning point in China’s campaign to restore ties with the West. Although few could have predicted it, the invasion has offered a possibility for China’s gradual return to a modicum of global respectability.

Ever since its crushing of the democracy demonstrations at Tian An Men Square in 1989, China had been treated virtually as an outcast.

Sending Solomon to Beijing itself marked a small step forward for the Bush Administration. After two unsuccessful trips to Beijing by National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft the previous year, the Bush Administration had maintained a ban on official contacts with Beijing at the level of assistant secretary or higher. Nonetheless, Solomon was not part of the top inner circle of the Administration’s foreign policy team. And the United States kept his contact with the Chinese government at a relatively low level, requesting a meeting only with Deputy Foreign Minister Tian Zengpei.

In Beijing, following his all-night flight, Solomon rested and showered at the residence of U.S. Ambassador to China James Lilley. Then he went to see Li Peng. Solomon pointed out that not only the United States and the Soviet Union, but also other major countries, including Japan, already had condemned Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. China should not be left out, he argued.

Over the next few days, China joined in the U.N. Security Council resolutions condemning Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and imposing international sanctions against Iraq. In September, China also went along with the crucial Security Council resolution that implicitly authorized the use of force on behalf of the U.N. embargo.

Thus, China joined in the diplomatic effort. And its cooperation won results.

A few months after the Iraqi invasion, the European Community lifted some of its economic sanctions against China. The World Bank prepared to clear the way for some new loans to China. And Secretary of State Baker met twice this fall with Chinese Foreign Minister Qian Qichen--thus increasing significantly the frequency of high-level talks between the United States and China.

INSIDE JAPAN

If it weren’t for the curtain of thick clouds, Japan’s famed Mt. Fuji would have formed a majestic backdrop to a very odd ceremony. On Sept. 8, in the town of Gotemba, Japan’s defense Establishment was celebrating the 40th anniversary of the founding of its postwar military--taking time off on a Saturday morning for target practice with tanks, helicopters, 203-millimeter artillery and Stinger missiles.

In any other nation, such troops would be called an army. In Japan, which has the third-largest military budget in the world, they are labeled the Self-Defense Forces (SDF), a name intended to underscore the passive nature of their mission. But at these ceremonies in Gotemba, the Japanese troops were flaunting their destructive abilities before an enthusiastic crowd of more than 20,000 civilian spectators.

The crowd cheered as formations of tanks roared across the foreground, swiveled their turrets and blasted small targets stuck to the hills some 10 football fields distant. A narrator with a loudspeaker described the hardware as it rolled onto the field, and in the background a high-pitched voice screamed commands to fire.

The shooting went on for nearly two hours. There was a short intermission so the spectators could buy beer, box lunches and military souvenirs--SDF key chains, posters and tractor caps--from stands behind the bleachers. Soldiers in green fatigues milled about.

Sgt. Yuka Komiyama, 26, said she enlisted six years ago and wants to make a career out of the military, even if she marries and rears children. She said it never occurred to her that she might be sent overseas, but added that many of her colleagues are disappointed that Japan had all but ruled out any form of SDF deployment in the Persian Gulf until laws can be revised.

She was ambivalent about the idea herself.

“If I was ordered to go, I’d go. Maybe I should say I’d be glad to,” she said. “A lot of the others would like to go, but we’re aware that there are voices in the public that would be opposed.”

The crisis in the Persian Gulf casts new doubt upon the seriousness of Japan’s professed aspirations to be a major power, to exert its own independent influence in international affairs. And, more than ever, the crisis calls into question the future stability of Japan’s alliance with the United States.

In the process, it has exposed all the underlying contradictions of Japan’s role in the world and in its relations with the United States:

* Japan’s economy, now the world’s second-largest, obtains 70% of its oil from the Persian Gulf, yet Japan long has relied on the United States to safeguard such supplies.

* Japan’s pacifist constitution, which says the Japanese people “forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation,” had been all but imposed upon it by the United States. Yet now, 44 years later, the United States was asking Japan to send its own military forces--minesweepers, military transports, SDF logistic personnel--to help out in a possible war against Iraq.

* Recently, as Japan has grown into one of the wealthiest nations in the world, the United States has encouraged Tokyo to develop its own, more assertive and independent foreign policy. Yet in the gulf crisis, U.S. officials scathingly criticized Japan for not following the American policy line.

During the 1980s, the United States and Japan worked in tandem. The United States supplied troops, security and diplomatic leadership, while Japan provided money. The aftermath of Saddam Hussein’s invasion shows that in cases where there is a potential for war and American casualties, the United States will ask Japan to share a new, different, non-financial burden--the burden of risking the loss of life.

From the outset of the gulf crisis, Administration officials had made it plain that cash would not be enough. The United States wanted Japanese personnel and equipment--personnel for support, logistics and other noncombat roles; equipment to transport troops and supplies. Otherwise, U.S. officials said, the American forces might be seen as mercenaries, defending Japanese interests in exchange for payment.

“We’re the ones whose asses are on the line, and they’re getting 70% of their oil from the area,” said one State Department official.

But in Japan, there was intense resistance.

One nationwide poll by Tokyo Television indicated that 78% of the Japanese public opposed sending any SDF forces to the Persian Gulf. Ultimately, none were sent.

The dispute about the use of SDF personnel undermined Japan’s position in Washington. And Japan’s standing with the Bush Administration was further eroded by additional wrangling and delays about the amount of money Japan should contribute.

When the Bush Administration first asked Tokyo for financial help toward the effort against Iraq, Japan seemed to act as though it were in the midst of yet another business negotiation. Tokyo made some initial low bids, tested the reaction, then came up with a new, higher offer.

Prime Minister Toshiki Kaifu initially offered $10 million toward the relief effort in Jordan. A day later, Japanese officials volunteered $1 billion toward the costs of the multinational forces in Saudi Arabia.

Quickly, President Bush dispatched Treasury Secretary Nicholas F. Brady to Japan to ask for more money. But Brady seemed to get nowhere. Kaifu made no commitments or promises of any kind.

Finally, on Sept. 13, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution demanding that Tokyo pay more money or risk a pullout of 5,000 U.S. troops a year from the American bases in Japan.

A day later, Japan found more money. Kaifu’s government offered another $1 billion for the multinational forces in the Mideast and $2 billion to help countries such as Egypt, Jordan and Turkey. That brought Japan’s total financial contribution to $4 billion.

The White House said it was satisfied. Others were not. For the first time in years, biting criticisms of Japan could be heard not only in Congress but also in the State Department and the Pentagon.

If sufficiently irked by continuing American criticisms and pressure, Japan could reduce its reliance on the United States and bolster its own independent military power. Such a development would alarm Japan’s neighbors in Asia, including China, South Korea and the nations of Southeast Asia.

INSIDE EUROPE

On Aug. 2, the day of Iraq’s invasion, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher happened to be in Aspen, Colo., preparing to give a speech to the Aspen Institute on the subject of “Shaping a New Global Community.” President Bush, too, flew to Colorado to address the symposium.

Inevitably, as the two leaders stood on the grassy lawn of a ranch owned by U.S. Ambassador to Britain Henry Catto, reporters asked them about the unfolding events in Iraq and Kuwait.

Bush temporized. He listed the foreign leaders that he had telephoned. He said he was “concerned about the situation” and was “hoping that a peaceful solution will be found.”

Thatcher was much more forceful. What Iraq had done, she said, was “totally unacceptable--and if it were allowed to endure, then there would be many other small countries that could never feel safe.”

To onlookers, it appeared as though Thatcher knew that the Iraqi invasion would require a tough response, while Bush still wasn’t sure.

Afterward, Bush would say he had been “comforted” by the fact that, in the first days of the invasion, “the prime minister was there with me, answering the tough questions and standing shoulder-to-shoulder.”

Iraq’s invasion has changed relations between the United States and Europe.

Throughout most of the Cold War, Europe had been the prime battleground, and the United States and its Western European allies had worked primarily on joint endeavors in Europe itself. Now, in this first post-Cold War crisis, the battleground is outside Europe--in the Middle East.

And what counts most is the extent to which Western European countries are willing to support and join American military initiatives.

The Europeans have lined up alongside the Americans to an extent that would have been unimaginable during the Vietnam War era. At the same time, the gulf crisis has spurred efforts by the European powers to develop their own, united foreign policy in the future.

Britain has led the way among the Europeans in supporting the American military effort against Iraq, in effect reviving its old special relationship with the United States. In the first weeks after the invasion, the British sent naval and air units to the gulf, and by mid-September, it agreed to send ground forces.

Such efforts put Britain once again in a leadership role within Europe. Britain’s old rival, Germany, had no desire or ability to play a leading role in the European efforts in the gulf crisis.

No one in Europe wants to spur the remilitarization of Germany. And the Germans can plausibly argue that they have been preoccupied, both emotionally and financially, by the changes in Europe over the past year.

Germany--which eventually donated $2 billion to the gulf effort--has been wrapped up in the very first stages of reunification. Moreover, earlier this year, it pledged to contribute more than $10 billion to get Soviet troops out of Germany and to build housing for them back home. And Germany has promised other, smaller amounts to the new governments of Eastern Europe.

In the year before the Iraqi invasion, Thatcher and other British officials had looked on with dismay as the Bush Administration devoted ever-increasing attention to Germany. The gulf crisis, a British diplomat recently observed, “has given us a chance to be blue-eyed in Washington once again.”

And support has come from other European nations, as well.

Last week, after a meeting with President Bush, French President Francois Mitterrand announced that he would support a United Nations resolution that explicitly authorizes the use of military force against Iraq, and he predicted that such a resolution will be approved by the Security Council by mid-December. Since August, France has contributed about 15,000 troops to the Persian Gulf forces, including 5,500 in Saudi Arabia.

“In Europe, we’ve seen a level of support for the American activities in the Mideast that is unprecedented. It’s not just the British, but the French, the Italians, the Dutch,” says David P. Calleo, a specialist on Europe at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.

INSIDE THE THIRD WORLD

On Thursday, Aug. 16, two weeks after the Iraqi invasion, the lights in Ramna Park in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, went off early in the evening. They would do so for the foreseeable future. “It looks as though we are at war or in some kind of emergency,” said one unhappy stroller as he headed for the gates.

Hundreds of drivers lined up outside gas stations to fill their cars in advance of a newly imposed nationwide ban on oil and gas sales each Friday, the Muslim holiday. That Thursday night, and on succeeding nights, the shops in Dhaka and other cities in Bangladesh closed their doors at 8.

Bangladesh President Hussain Mohammed Ershad had ordered these new austerity measures to conserve energy. Ershad and his government were desperate, because they knew that for countries like Bangladesh, the crisis in the Persian Gulf was a crushing economic disaster.

Bangladesh had about 85,000 workers in Kuwait and Iraq, from among its 400,000 Bangladeshis employed throughout the Middle East. The earnings these Middle East workers sent back home was Bangladesh’s largest single source of foreign exchange, about $477 million a year. Bangladeshi workers in Kuwait sent home $89 million last year, and those in Iraq sent home another $9 million.

As if all of this were not enough, Iraq and Kuwait had served as one of the principal markets for Bangladesh’s two leading exports, jute and tea. Iraq alone had bought a quarter of the 40,000 tons of tea auctioned in Bangladesh each year.

Now, this valuable export income was gone. Even if the crisis were short, the government estimated that Bangladesh would lose $17 million in sales to Iraq and Kuwait.

The gulf crisis raised other costs as well--higher rates for shipping and insurance, loss of income from air flights to Kuwait and Iraq.

When the Bangladesh government added it all up, it figured that even a short-term crisis, without a war, would cost Bangladesh from $1.5 billion to $2 billion.

The gulf crisis is proving once again the hard lesson that the Third World learned during the oil crises of the 1970s: When the rich get a little poorer, the poor get much poorer.

At times of world crisis, the most impoverished nations in the world find themselves paying higher prices for oil. They are forced to move ever further into the future their slim hopes for paying off their international debts.

Bangladesh cannot afford the luxurious, tree-lined surroundings of Washington’s Embassy Row. Its embassy in Washington is perched on the third floor of a functional office and residential complex, just above the Gold Star Cleaners and the A & A Fine Wine & Spirits. Inside, Ambassador A. H. S. Ataul Karim and his staff of 15 spend their days trying to find the money and resources to keep their homeland afloat.

Before the gulf crisis, Karim admits, he and other Bangladeshi officials had hoped that the end of the Cold War would bring about a series of changes that might benefit the poorest nations in the world. There might be some sort of worldwide peace dividend, he thought. “If the world spent less on armaments, there may be more for development.”

In retrospect, that was only a fond hope.

Bangladesh had been working hard to promote an international meeting known as the United Nations Conference on Least Developed Countries, the first session of its kind in nearly a decade. Its purpose would be to draw attention to and, perhaps, some new financial help for what are called the LDCs--the least developed countries in the world, those at the very bottom of the heap.

The U.N. conference began Sept. 3, just a month after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. And delegates from the LDCs quickly found that the gulf crisis had wrecked whatever chance they had of getting more economic help.

A delegate from Saudi Arabia bluntly warned that there would be less Arab aid available for the poorest nations. The Iraqi invasion had wiped out any possibility of money from Kuwait, he noted, and Saudi Arabia would be required to pay billions of dollars toward the cost of multinational troops in the gulf.

Richard McCormack, Undersecretary of State for Economic Affairs, told the conference that the United States would resist committing itself to a specific target for aid to the poorest nations. The most important factor, McCormack said, was not the level of aid but having “democratic, accountable governments and market-based economies.”

At midpoint in the conference, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein publicly offered the poorest nations free oil--so long as they could collect it themselves.

Hussein apparently intended his offer as little more than a joke and a political ploy. However, officials from the poorest nations, desperate for cheap oil, took Hussein’s offer literally--and were outraged by it.

“How do you bring the oil back through a blockade?” asked Thomas Chery, Haiti’s delegate.

“Did Saddam Hussein not know before that we needed oil?” asked Botswana’s representative, F. G. Mogae. “If he wanted to help developing countries, he should not have attacked (Kuwait) in the first place.”

The Consequences What Next Around the World Look for: More discussion about cooperation in regional conflicts by the superpowers. More support for the United Nations Security Council by the Soviet Union, which has learned that a stronger U.N. can help them. China’s return to more normalized relations with the rest of the world. More testiness in the U.S.-Japan relationship. “A Global Effort”

In the most extraordinary exercise of global cooperation since the second World War, countries large and small, rich and poor, have joined in the effort to repel the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. The map below shows when and what each has pledged.

1) ARGENTINA--9/19 (date pledged) First Latin nation to join the gulf buildup. 1 destroyer, 1 corvette, 2 air force transport planes. 125-150 troops. Will send 2 more ships and 450 personnel 2) AUSTRALIA--8/10 $1.75 million humanitarian aid. 2 guided missile frigates, 1 support ship, 2 surgical teams. 720 military personnel

3) BANGLADESH--8/15 5,000 troops

4) BAHRAIN--8/19 Allowed the deployment of Arab and all “friendly”, including U.S., forces on its territory. 2,300 soldiers, air force of 450 and navy of 600.

5) BELGIUM--8/13 2 minesweepers, 1 supply ship, 4 military transport planes. Another frigate reported en route. (4 naval vessels)

6) BRITAIN--8/7 15,000 military personnel. 12 ships, including 1 missile destroyer, 2 missile frigates and 3 minesweepers. 4 squadrons of interceptors and ground attack jets, 3 maritime reconnaissance aircraft, 120 Challenger tanks. at least 2 squadrons of fighter bombers, 2 destroyers, 6 frigates, 1 oiler, 1 ocean survey ship. 2 fleet auxiliaries. 3 minesweepers. Britain’s biggest military operation since the 1982 Falklands war.

7) BULGARIA--9/28 400 soldiers. Forming voluntary military medical unit with chemical weapon specialists and equipment.

8) CANADA--8/10 2 destroyers. 1 supply ship. Pledged to send 18 fighter jets and 500 military personnel.

9) CZECHOSLOVAKIA--9/28 First eastern European country to back the international effort in the gulf. 200-man army unit with anti-chemical warfare equipment army volunteer chemical defense unit.

10) DENMARK--8/31 1 corvette, Danish merchant ships helping in U.S. sealift. $3.2 million for refugee aid. About 98 men, no ground troops.

11) EGYPT--8/11 30,000 troops with tanks and heavy artillery.

12) ETHIOPIA--9/6 Offers to send around 200 troops.

13) EUROPEAN COMMUNITY--10/3 $2 billion to front-line states of Turkey, Egypt, and Jordan to help compensate them for costs associated with the crisis.

14) FINLAND--9/4 Pledged $2.5 million.

15) FRANCE--8/9 13,000 troops. About 14 ships, 1 guided missile cruiser, 2 missile destroyers, 2 frigates and 1 corvette. 3 squadrons of interceptors and fighter-bombers. Biggest overseas operation since the Algerian war in the early 1960s.

16) GREECE--8/21 1 frigate.

17) NETHERLANDS--8/13 2 frigates, 18 aircraft squadron of fighters, combat supply ship expected in November.50,000 gas masks to Turkey.

18) HUNGARY--8/17 Relief supplies for refugees. Forming volunteer medical team.

19) ICELAND $4 billion. 20) IRAN--9/26 Pledged not to buy embargoed Iraqi oil or help Iraq export crude, but it did not promise to withhold food and other essentials.

21) ITALY--9/2 3 frigates, 1 support, 2 corvettes, 8 fighter planes, 4 helicopters. 1,500 troops.

22) JAPAN--9/15 $4-billion aid package includes $2 billion to countries most seriously affected economically by the crisis. 100-member medical team. 23) JORDAN--10/21 Under pressure to apply UN sanctions more rigorously, halted sales of medicine to Iraq.

24) KUWAIT (exiled government.)--9/8 $5 billion cash and economic aid. About 7,000 soldiers joined Saudi forces after escaping Iraqi forces.

25) MORACCO--8/7 6,200 ground troops

26) NORWAY--9/10 Humanitarian aid. 1 cutter, 1 corvette. Offered anti-chemical warfare equipment.

27) PAKISTAN--8/13 Pledged to send 5,000 troops

28) POLAND--9/28 500 medical personnel. Military field hospital. Hospital ship.

29) PORTUGAL--9/8 1 naval transport. Offered cargo ships.

30) ROMANIA--9/28 Pledged medical facilities.

31) SAUDI ARABIA 4 armored and mechanized brigades on the front line, totaling about 65,700 troops. 550 tanks, 180 combat planes, 8 frigates.

32) SCANDANAVIA (Sweden, Denmark, and Norway)--9/5 Together pledged $14 million.

33) SENEGAL 480 troops.

34) SOUTH KOREA--9/24 Pledged $220 million.

35) SOVIET UNION--8/7 1 guided missile destroyer, 1 anti-submarine warfare ship, 2 supply ships, 2 warships in gulf. Moscow has indicated it would send ground forces but only under U.N. command.

36) SPAIN--8/21 About 500 troops 1 frigate, 2 corvettes.

37) SYRIA--8/14 About 21,000 troops. Has 50,000 troops on the Iraq-Syrian border. 420 tanks and heavy artillery.

38) TAIWAN--9/29 Bush rejected an offer to contribute $100 million to the gulf military build-up fund because the administration fears it would jeopardize U.S. ties with China, but urged Taiwan to provide assistance instead to “front-line” nations that have been hit hard by the embargo.

39) TURKEY--9/26 5,000 troops. Has about 100,000 defending its borders. Sending 2 frigates.

40) UNITED ARAB EMIRATES--8/19 Allow the deployment of Arab and “friendly” including U.S. forces on its territory. Along with Saudi Arabia and Kuwait pledged $12 billion. 40,000 army with more than 200 tanks. 1,500-member navy with 15 ships.

41) UNITED STATES--8/28 Bush Administration decides to sell $6-8 billion of military equipment to Saudi Arabia to fortify its defense. 430,000 troops

42) WEST GERMANY--9/15 $2-billion to the multinational force. German constitution prohibits it from sending military forces outside its borders. Gave about $500 million worth of east German military equipment.

43) YEMEN--9/20 Agrees to abide by the embargo

Source: Brookings Institute