How to Avoid War and Win Saddam Hussein’s Heart? Honor Him : Iraq: In the Middle East, what one does or says is often less important than how the viewer sees it--even when the cause is misdirected.

An Arab is a man who will pull down a whole temple to have a stone to sit on. --Arab proverb

Iraqi President Saddam Hussein is facing what could be the biggest military offensive since the D-Day invasion of Normandy, 47 years ago. He has been cut adrift by even his closest allies. There are reports that support within Iraq may be eroding. Yet, utterly alone, he remains defiant, a victim of the Arab culture that values honor more than pragmatism.

“We are a proud nation,” said Iraq’s foreign minister, Tarik Aziz, during his press conference in Geneva following Wednesday’s failed talks with Secretary of State James A. Baker III.

“We have our history, we have our contribution to human civilization, and we would like to be treated in a dignified and just manner.”

To an Arab in the Middle East, honor is often less a matter of what one does or says than of how he thinks others view him. Honor is showing strength even when the cause may be misdirected. Honor is the ability to inflame passions with fiery rhetoric, even if the words cheat one’s sensibilities.

“The Iraqi forces,” said Hussein’s defense minister, “are ready to crush any aggression against great Iraq, the land of pride and faith.”

The fact that Arabs do not believe that is immaterial. They know Hussein has violated every Islamic and Arab standard by invading Kuwait, and they understand that for him to waiver or show weakness now would be to deny the very essence of his Arabness.

Though Hussein may well be willing to risk his temple to salvage one stone of honor, it seems evident that the last thing he wants is confrontation with the 28-nation coalition facing him.

His order--transmitted personally via radio--telling Iraqi captains to allow Americans to board the vessels they interdict in the Persian Gulf was not the mandate of a man seeking provocation. Nor was the release of Western hostages the act of a country wanting war. “Iraq certainly seeks a peaceful solution and is willing to pay the price for it--but not any price--and it will not accept any settlement that sullies its honor,” said Sid Ahmed Ghozali, the Algerian foreign minister.

Because he is beyond the influence of everyone, apparently oblivious to advice from Arab leaders or Iraqi confidants, the course Hussein follows between now and the expiration of the U.N. deadline on Jan. 15 may be defined more by primitive instincts than by deduction. In his world, there are no fine shades of life, only black and white, and in his justification for dismantling Kuwait he seems to exemplify the Arab characteristics that once mystified T.E. Lawrence.

“Their thoughts,” Lawrence wrote of the Arabs in 1926, “were at ease only in extremes. They inhabited superlatives by choice. Sometimes inconsistencies seemed to possess them at once in joint sway; but they never compromised. They pursued the logic of several incompatible opinions to absurd ends, without perceiving the incongruity.”

Certainly, there is incongruity in Hussein’s call linking the invasion of Kuwait with Palestinian rights and a redistribution of Arab oil wealth and a holy war in defense of Islam. Although all strike responsive chords in the hearts of frustrated Arabs, the concerns of the secular Hussein traditionally have been directed inward, toward Iraq, and his invasion of Kuwait, an Islamic country, directly violates at least three verses from the Koran, the holy book that governs the lives of true Muslims:

“Fight in the way of Allah against those who fight against you, but begin not hostilities. Lo! Allah loveth not aggressors.” (Surah II, verse 190);

“It is not for the believer to kill a believer.” (Surah IV, verse 92),

“Whoso slayeth a believer of set purpose, his reward is hell for ever.” (Surah IV, verse 93).

Ever since taking absolute power in 1979, Hussein has been a master at finding face-saving ways to explain his miscalculations and unpredictable actions to his people. He gave back, for example, everything gained in his wasteful eight-year war with Iran--a war that dragged on so long that most Iraqis could not even remember what was at issue between the two countries--in order to keep Kuwait.

There was hardly a murmur of surprise in the Arab world when that occurred. He had merely traded a smaller prize for a bigger one.

If he does want to avoid war, there is every reason to believe he could conjure up a face-saving rationale to explain his withdrawal to the Arab masses. He could say the framework for an international conference on Palestine had now been laid or that a deal with Kuwait for access to the Persian Gulf was in the works or that he was responding to the will of the Iraqi people. He could go home with his power and military intact, having achieved a sort of honor merely by having stood up to the West as no Arab had done since Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser.

But Hussein is no fool. He knows the list of enemies he has made would fill a scrapbook, and he realizes the consequences of showing weakness. “If I die,” he told King Fahd of Saudi Arabia last year, according to a Saudi at the meeting, “you will not find much of my body left because it will be chopped into little pieces.”

1914: Looking Back to the Future

“The Guns of August,” Barbara Tuchman’s landmark history of the start of World War I, offers eerie parallels to the Persian Gulf crisis--hopes for diplomacy, failure to stop an avertable war. And diverging opinions on the length of the war:

Quick, decisive victory was the German orthodoxy; the economic impossibility of a long war was everybody’s orthodoxy. “You will be home before the leaves have fallen from the trees,” the Kaiser told departing troops in the first week of August. A German officer leaving for the Western Front said he expected to take breakfast at the Cafe de la Paix in Paris on Sedan Day (Sept. 2). Russian officers expected to be in Berlin about the same time; six weeks was the usual allowance. One officer of the Imperial Guard asked the opinion of the czar’s physician whether he should pack at once his full-dress uniform to wear for the entry into Berlin or leave it to be brought by the next courier coming to the front. An English officer who, having served as a military attache in Brussels, was considered au courant was asked . . . his opinion. He did not know, the officer replied, but he understood there were “financial reasons why the Great Powers should not continue for long.”

. . . Whether from instinct or intellect, three minds, all military, saw the dark shadow lengthening ahead into years, not months . . . . (One was Great Britain’s) Lord Kitchener, who . . . brought forth from some fathomless oracular depths of his being the prediction that the war would last even longer, but “three years will do to begin with. A nation like Germany, after having forced the issue, will only give in after it is beaten to the ground. That will take a very long time. No one living knows how long.”

1962, Barbara W. Tuchman. Reprinted with permission from Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc.