Some Allies Won’t Join Offensive, Cheney Says : Gulf crisis: He calls ‘levels of commitment’ varied and refuses to list France, Syria among stalwart supporters.

CAIRO — Defense Secretary Dick Cheney said Sunday that a number of nations in the 28-nation force arrayed against Iraq would not fight to drive Iraqi troops from Kuwait if they are not withdrawn by the Jan. 15 U.N. deadline.

All the countries agree that Iraq must retreat from Kuwait, Cheney said, but “it is clear that there are varying levels of commitment in terms of willingness to use offensive military action to achieve our objective.”

He would not specify those nations unlikely to participate in military action, but he pointedly refused to include France and Syria among stalwart supporters of U.S. policy.

Cheney made the comments aboard his aircraft en route from Cairo to Washington after spending five days in Saudi Arabia and Egypt talking with officials and visiting U.S. troops.

On Sunday, Cheney met for an hour with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to discuss the Persian Gulf crisis and brief him on allied preparedness for war.

Afterward, Cheney attempted to clarify his statement a day earlier that the United States, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Britain are the nations “that really count” in the coalition against Iraq.

Many of the other nations are unwilling to undertake military action to force Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein to remove his troops from Kuwait, Cheney had said Saturday in response to a question from a sailor aboard the guided missile cruiser Bunker Hill.

“The ones that have the biggest forces and that have the most at stake and the strongest commitments are the Saudis, the Brits, and the Egyptians, alongside the U.S.,” Cheney continued. “And we’re the ones that bring the bulk of the forces to bear in this operation, and I think those will be the key decision makers in terms of how we operate.”

He said many other members of the coalition “are committed only to deterring further aggression”--and not to pushing the huge and well-entrenched Iraqi army out of Kuwait.

But on Sunday, Cheney went to great lengths to try to modify that statement. He said that all of the nations in the coalition “count” and that he would not speculate specifically on who would or who would not participate in offensive military operations.

“You really should not try to create some complex new policy statement out of the response I gave yesterday,” Cheney said. “I was simply having a session with the troops.”

It was unclear whether Cheney’s comments Saturday or his “clarification” on Sunday reflected his true beliefs on the matter.

But they came only three weeks before the U.N. deadline for withdrawal of Iraqi forces and at a time when President Bush is trying to deliver an unambiguous threat to use force if Hussein does not comply.

Cheney’s sessions with U.S. military commanders and Saudi and Egyptian leaders included discussions on which nations would participate in a possible war with Iraq and what role they would play and who would command them, he said.

Asked Sunday whether he would add any other nations to his list of those firmly committed to using their troops in offensive operations, Cheney declined. He said those governments would have to speak for themselves.

He refused to include France and Syria, which have sent thousands of troops to Saudi Arabia to join the multinational force.

Among the other nations that have sent troops or ships to the region are Canada, many of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bangladesh and Morocco. Pakistan announced over the weekend that it is adding several thousand troops to the 2,000 it has already dispatched to Saudi Arabia.

The United States has nearly 300,000 land, sea and air forces in the Persian Gulf region with another 130,000 on the way. The Saudi army and air force number about 65,000, the Egyptians have promised to send 40,000 ground troops and Britain has about 15,000 mechanized troops in the theater.

The 24 other nations, as a group, have provided fewer than 100,000 troops.

Cheney stressed over and over during his visit to Saudi Arabia that the United States will accept nothing less than the withdrawal of all Iraqi troops from all of Kuwait.

“Allowing him (Hussein) to keep even 10% of what he stole,” Cheney said, would be nothing short of “appeasement.”

But Administration officials are clearly concerned that the coalition will splinter if Hussein removes most, but not all, of his troops. It will then be far more difficult to justify military action without a united multinational front, officials have said privately.

Earlier Sunday, before leaving Saudi Arabia, Cheney said war with Iraq is not inevitable but warned that hostilities are becoming more likely every day as the Jan. 15 deadline approaches. “The clock,” he said, “is ticking.”

He said he sees no indications that Hussein is willing to abide by the U.N. resolution. To the contrary, Hussein’s soldiers are still digging in, Iraq continues to insist that Kuwait is one of its provinces and the Washington-Baghdad talks proposed by President Bush are stymied by Iraq’s intransigence, he said.

Although he sidestepped questions about Washington’s timetable for launching attacks after Jan. 15, Cheney said the United States is prepared to use “the full spectrum” of its military capabilities in the event of war. “If he (Hussein) uses weapons of mass destruction,” the secretary said, “the United States’ response will be overwhelming and absolutely devastating.”

Cheney’s remarks to American and Saudi journalists came at the end of five days in the gulf region, during which he and Gen. Colin L. Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, conferred with senior U.S. and Saudi commanders and visited with troops in the field.

During a news conference, Cheney, flanked by Powell and Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, commander of Operation Desert Shield, declined to rule out the use of nuclear or chemical weapons against Iraq. He said that in both cases he does not want to speculate what the U.S. response would be and referred the questions to his previous comment that the United States would use the full spectrum of its capabilities.

U.S. Navy ships in the gulf are known to carry nuclear weapons but it is not known whether the United States has chemical weapons in the region. Cheney refused to say when asked.

Iraq used chemical weapons against Iranian troops during the Iran-Iraq War and against its Kurdish minority, and a senior Iraqi official has been quoted as implying that Iraq would use them again if necessary.

“We will use all weapons in order not to give our country to the enemy,” Parliament Speaker Saadi Mahdi Saleh was quoted Saturday as saying in an interview with the British news agency Reuters. “I say, all kinds of weapons which we possess. . . . Kuwait is our territory.”

Iraqi Defense Minister Saadi Tuma Jubouri told the official Iraqi news agency Sunday that “Cheney and his aides will see how the land will burn under their feet not only in Iraq but . . . also in eastern Saudi Arabia” in the event of hostilities.

Cheney also told journalists he sees no need for the United States to advise the 7,000 or so Americans in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern province to leave the country for security reasons. Some other countries are telling their nationals, especially dependent women and children, to leave before the Jan. 15 U.N. deadline.