To Hussein, Risks of Peace Could Be Worse Than War : Strategy: Uncompromising withdrawal could fatally weaken his claim to being pre-eminent Arab leader.

What is in Saddam Hussein’s mind? Could he fear peace more than war?

As the deadline for war approaches, American experts on the Arab world are grappling with that question--and some are concluding that the Iraqi leader may indeed believe that his interests are better served by going to war than by capitulating to U.S. demands.

“Put yourself in Saddam’s place,” said Phebe Marr, an expert on Iraq at the Pentagon’s National Defense University. “It looks as if the West is determined to weaken Iraq, no matter what. Even if he withdraws from Kuwait, his economy is going to be squeezed. So where is the incentive for withdrawal?

“From his point of view, it’s possible that he may come out of (a war) better than we do,” Marr said. “A war might weaken us before it weakens him. That idea is alive and well in Baghdad.”

According to analysts both inside and outside the U.S. government, Hussein knows that a war with the United States will be bloody and destructive. But he may have decided that he is better off taking a chance on war than on the crushing public humiliation he would suffer if he were to give in to President Bush’s demands.

“He’s told Western diplomats that he can’t withdraw from Kuwait and survive unless he has something to show for it,” said Laurie Mylroie of Harvard University’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies. “It may be that he prefers to deal with the uncertainties of war--uncertainties that may work in his favor--over dealing with the situation that would follow a political defeat.”

These are not irrational calculations, these scholars hasten to add. They’re just based on a different political culture and a different view of the world than those familiar to most Americans.

“Saddam is a survivor,” said Jerrold Post of George Washington University, a psychiatrist and former CIA staffer who has prepared studies of the Iraqi leader’s behavior for the agency. “He’s not going to carry this to the point of his own destruction. . . . He may yet step back. He’s fully capable, at the 11th hour, of doing all sorts of surprising things and confronting us with them.”

But most of the experts quickly acknowledged that they have long expected Hussein to move toward a compromise and were only now reluctantly concluding that the Iraqi leader may have decided that war is inevitable--and survivable.

In speeches and public statements since invading Kuwait in August, Hussein has declared repeatedly that Iraq--hardened by eight years of war with Iran--can withstand a conflict with U.S. forces without flinching.

And Hussein appears to genuinely believe that the U.S. Congress and public will stop a war if Iraqi forces inflict enough casualties on American troops. “He apparently has a strong imprint of the Vietnam mentality,” Post said.

The Bush Administration has attempted to change Hussein’s mind on that issue by building up U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia and publicly advertising their destructive power--including a blunt, direct warning from Secretary of State James A. Baker III to Iraqi Foreign Minister Tarik Aziz in their meeting in Geneva last week.

Aziz responded in kind, warning that Iraq would counter any U.S. offensive by attacking Israel--a move that could paralyze some U.S. allies in the Arab world and send the conflict spiraling out of control.

But there is more to Hussein’s stubbornness than what Baker called a simple “miscalculation” of American power and resolve, Arab experts say.

At least two other factors appear to be guiding the Iraqi leader’s decisions: First, his coldblooded calculation that he might lose less in a war than he would lose by capitulating to the West’s demands, and, second, his well-developed sense of “dignity”--both Iraq’s and his own.

“You have to look at Saddam’s mind-set,” said the National Defense University’s Marr. “If you think there is a conspiracy against Iraq, that the United States is determined to get you no matter what, that if you withdraw, the United States is still going to attack you . . . then it may not make sense to withdraw.”

“And this is not irrational,” she added. “We do plan to keep at him--to isolate him, to squeeze his economy. One of Baker’s messages (in his meeting with Aziz) was that the United States would not attack Iraq after a withdrawal--but Saddam may not believe that,” she said.

Moreover, Marr and others said, if Hussein were to withdraw from Kuwait on the uncompromising terms demanded by the Western powers--including “no face-saving,” as President Bush put it--his claim to pre-eminence as an Arab leader and even his ability to keep his job at home could be fatally weakened. “He may not think he can survive politically if he withdraws,” Harvard’s Mylroie said.

In this sense, some Arab scholars said, Hussein may view defeat in war as decidedly less damaging to his political ambitions than a peaceful, but humiliating, surrender--as long as he believes that he, and Iraq, can physically endure the war.

“He simply cannot surrender in the way Bush wants him to,” said Hisham Sharabi, a Palestinian-born scholar at Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. “He simply cannot appear before his people as succumbing at the last moment. He has to play this card to the end.”

Other experts disagree, noting that Hussein has surrendered ground before without suffering much political damage--most recently last Aug. 15, when he abruptly handed back to Iran all the territory that Iraq had won during the eight-year war between the two nations.

“Saddam can still withdraw from Kuwait without losing stature at home,” said Augustus Richard Norton, a fellow at the International Peace Academy in New York. “The Iraqi people are so frightened of the prospect of war that if Saddam can wriggle out of this one, he’ll look like a master.”

But scholars in both camps agree that the question of dignity--a theme that Aziz sounded repeatedly at the talks in Geneva last week--is of real importance to the Iraqis.

“If he wriggles out of it, he needs to wriggle out with some respect,” Norton said. “He wants to be dealt with as an equal. He wants to be treated as a worthy mediator of Arab interests. He wants to be the man of the hour in Arab politics.

“In Arab culture, there’s nothing wrong with giving in to a bully. If Saddam can give in to the United States in a way that allows him to claim that he has advanced Arab interests--and keep his army intact--he will have pulled a rabbit out of a hat.”

In that sense, Norton and others speculate, Hussein may yet seek a way out of war--even after the Jan. 15 U.N. deadline for an Iraqi pullout passes. Indeed, they suggested, he could well seek a negotiated settlement even after a war begins--gambling that Saudi Arabia and the United States will be more willing to compromise. “He’s playing the other hand in a very tough game of Texas stud poker, and he’s doing it with some skill,” Norton said.

In all of this, however, even the American experts who are frequently consulted by the CIA, the Pentagon and the State Department warn that U.S. understanding of Hussein’s thinking and motives is far from precise. “I can’t think of a single person in the United States, in government or out, who has a unique insight on Saddam,” Norton said.

Even the NDU’s Marr, frequently named by her colleagues as the most acute American analyst of Iraqi affairs, confessed: “This is all very tentative. I don’t have much confidence in my own conclusions. I mean, how can we know what’s in his mind?”