NEWS ANALYSIS : Bush Risks Losing the High Ground by Engaging Hussein in Debate Over Dates : Diplomacy: He must find other ways to show he wants to avoid war. The peace initiative may pass to other nations.

By getting into a test of wills with Saddam Hussein over dates for talks, President Bush risks losing the diplomatic high ground and now must search for other ways to show the nation and the world that he is not rushing into war.

A State Department official said Friday that no other initiatives are presently planned if Hussein refuses to budge in his refusal to meet Secretary of State James A. Baker III before Jan. 12--a date that Bush considers too close to the U.N. deadline of Jan. 15, 1991, for Iraq to get out of Kuwait.

“The only thing that is being kicked around is a public diplomacy effort to show both the domestic and the international audience that we made a good faith effort and the Iraqis blocked it,” the official said.

Nevertheless, the deadlock over dates could pass the initiative to other nations. For instance, French officials have said that Paris may attempt to talk with Hussein if the United States is unable to do so. And Algerian President Chadli Bendjedid visited Baghdad this week in search of a negotiated end to the crisis.

If Bush is correct in his assessment that Hussein is stalling in an effort to delay for as long as possible the use of force against him, the Iraqi dictator can be expected to produce a flurry of diplomatic activity as the Jan. 15 deadline draws closer.

If, as seems likely, Hussein proposes a settlement that falls short of U.S. objectives, the Bush Administration would be better positioned to reject it if the proposal is given to Baker instead of a representative of some other country.

When the U.N. Security Council voted Nov. 29 to authorize the use of force against Iraq, most members of the council insisted on giving Hussein until Jan. 15 to pull his forces out of Kuwait, creating what members called a six-week “pause for peace.” But it became clear almost immediately that no one really had any idea about how to use the time to end the crisis peacefully.

Bush stepped into the vacuum the next day, proposing that Iraqi Foreign Minister Tarik Aziz visit Washington and that Baker travel to Iraq. At the time, Bush said Baker was ready to travel on any “mutually convenient” day between Dec. 15 and Jan. 15. But when Baghdad suggested Jan. 12, the President decided that was too late and demanded that the visit take place no later than Jan. 3.

The difference between the two proposals is only nine days. But in diplomatic terms, it is an eternity.

“If Hussein backs off Jan. 12 or Bush backs off Jan. 3, then one will have blinked,” said Geoffrey Kemp, a National Security Council expert on the Middle East during the Ronald Reagan Administration.

Kemp, now a senior associate of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said the President “is now paying the price for a strategically brilliant but tactically inept statement on Nov. 30. He should never have allowed the Iraqis such a wide window. It was clear from the beginning that the Iraqis were going to play games with it, and that’s what happened.”

Robert Hunter, a National Security Council staff member in the Jimmy Carter Administration, said he sympathizes with Bush’s pique at Iraq’s delaying tactics.

But he said Bush’s statement Friday “does not make war any more politically acceptable to the American people.”

When Bush first proposed the exchange of foreign envoys two weeks ago, Administration officials conceded that the President did not really expect to be able to persuade Hussein to comply with the U.N. resolutions. But the officials said Bush had to show the American public and the world that he had made every reasonable effort to avoid war if he hoped to gain needed support for a decision to order U.S. troops into combat.

If the impasse continues over dates for the Aziz and Baker trips, Bush may find it more difficult to show that he exhausted all peaceful measures.

In place of Baker’s trip to Baghdad, the Administration would hold high-level consultations with other members of the international coalition opposing the Iraqi invasion. But these talks would be intended primarily to avoid defections from the coalition.

Baker will be in Brussels on Monday and Tuesday to confer with other foreign ministers of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. As an alliance, NATO has taken no action in the Persian Gulf crisis. But most members have contributed money or troops or both.

Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and Gen. Colin L. Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, are scheduled to visit Saudi Arabia next week to confer with Saudi authorities.

Administration officials also have said Baker hopes to meet in Europe soon with the foreign ministers of Britain, France, the Soviet Union and China--the four other permanent members of the U.N. Security Council. The British and French ministers will be at the NATO meeting, but the State Department has announced no new contacts with Soviet or Chinese officials.

However, contacts with allies are not expected to persuade the public that Bush has “gone the extra mile,” as he put it earlier.