NEWS ANALYSIS : Experts, Like Public, Deeply Divided on Course in Gulf : Strategy: Embargo is not enough, the Administration believes. But many in the know want to wait.

With the deadline for Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait now less than six weeks away, the American political and military Establishment, like the nation at large, appears divided over the central policy question facing President Bush:

Can economic sanctions force Iraqi President Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait if the United States has the patience to wait 12 to 18 months? Or should the nation give up on sanctions and prepare for war as soon as next month?

Bush and his aides, in a series of bellicose statements over the last week, have made their position clear.

“By waiting, we will be risking, in effect, a victory for Saddam Hussein,” Secretary of State James A. Baker III told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday.

“This is not going to go on forever,” Bush said in a news conference Tuesday.

But after a week of congressional hearings, waiting is precisely the policy advocated by many leading congressional Democrats and a sizable number of Middle East experts and retired military officials.

That split accentuates the risk that Bush faces in deciding whether to launch a war against Iraq. For if a war goes poorly, critics already will have established a strong position to second-guess the President’s judgments.

“If we have a war, we’re never going to know whether they (the sanctions) would have worked, are we?” said Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and Bush’s most powerful critic.

Whether Bush is really as close to pulling the trigger as his rhetoric implies is unknown. The Administration’s impatient statements may be, at least in part, an attempt to scare Hussein out of Kuwait.

But it is clear that the Administration and its critics disagree sharply on fundamental questions--most important, whether economic sanctions can force Hussein to back down.

“My personal view” is that “he can ride them out,” Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney told the Armed Services panel Monday. “There’s no guarantee,” he added, that even in five years, “sanctions will force him out of Kuwait.”

By contrast, Adm. William J. Crowe Jr., former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, flatly told the committee that “the issue is not whether an embargo will work but whether we have the patience to let it take effect.”

Unfortunately for everyone from the President to citizens at home trying to decide whom to believe, the question of the embargo’s effectiveness appears to have no scientific, verifiable answer.

“We’re all operating on the basis of assessments we cannot prove,” former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger said in his congressional testimony. “. . . we are talking here, for everybody, of 51-49 types of decisions.”

A second disagreement surrounds U.S. objectives. Crowe and his predecessor as head of the joint chiefs, retired Air Force Gen. David C. Jones, both suggested that Americans should settle for prodding Iraq out of Kuwait even if that means leaving the rest of Hussein’s military apparatus in place.

But a much broader set of goals is advocated by some Administration officials, many non-governmental members of the Washington political-military policy Establishment and leaders of several Middle Eastern countries.

Those goals, they say, should include depriving Iraq of its chemical weapons stockpiles and its ability to obtain nuclear weapons.

If Bush embraces those objectives--a question he has left vague--war almost certainly cannot be avoided, Jones testified. “I foresee no circumstances in which Iraq’s leader would accept such conditions, except at the point of a gun,” Jones said.

Polls show the public is even more deeply split than specialists and policy-makers. Roughly one-quarter to one-third of those responding to polls--particularly women, blacks and low-income Americans--appear to oppose any U.S. military involvement in the Persian Gulf at any time. The experts and policy-makers, overwhelmingly male, white and upper-income, include few voices renouncing force altogether.

Among Americans who agree that the United States must ensure an Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait, by force if necessary, polls show considerable disagreement about how quickly a U.S. move should come and its final objectives.

For now, the most controversial question involves time: Which side gains more by waiting?

Nunn and many of his fellow Democrats and their supporters argue that having imposed a nearly leakproof economic quarantine on Iraq, the United States should now sit back and wait, perhaps until the winter of 1992. By that time, Bush will be facing reelection.

The United States and its allies already have absorbed the major cost of the embargo on Iraq--higher oil prices--and now face little extra cost for waiting, James R. Schlesinger, the former secretary of defense and former CIA director, told the Armed Services Committee. “In effect, we can leave Iraq in isolation until it comes to its senses,” Schlesinger said.

The economic sanctions have had a severe impact on the Iraqi economy, reducing overall non-military production by 40%, he noted. And by cutting off nearly all Iraqi oil exports--normally worth roughly $1.5 billion a month--the embargo is draining that nation’s reserves of foreign currencies.

“The probability that the economic sanctions will result in a satisfactory outcome is very high,” he said.

Administration officials accept the numbers but disagree with Schlesinger’s interpretations.

“Many industries have largely shut down” in Iraq because of shortages of spare parts and crucial raw materials, William H. Webster, the current CIA director, told the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Wednesday.

Despite that, however, “we see no indication that Saddam is concerned at this point that domestic discontent is growing to levels that may threaten his regime, or that problems resulting from the sanctions are causing him to rethink his policy on Kuwait,” Webster said.

“Although sanctions are hurting Iraq’s civilian economy, they are affecting Iraq’s military only at the margins,” Webster added.

Administration officials argue that “waiting is not without cost as an option,” as Gen. Colin L. Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified. They have mounted a major effort to convince Americans that a long pause would be bad policy.

“Are we really prepared to let our hostages in Iraq sit there for the next 18 months?” Vice President Dan Quayle demanded in a weekend CBS-TV interview.

”. . . That is not going to be the policy of this Administration--to say we’re prepared to wait for another 18 months.”