Arab Leaders Hold 11th-Hour Talks in Iraq : Diplomacy: ‘There seems to be no alternative now to war,’ a senior Egyptian official says.

Arab governments launched last-minute bids Monday to avert catastrophe in the Persian Gulf, but senior Egyptian officials said war now seems all but inevitable.

Algerian President Chadli Bendjedid and Yemeni Prime Minister Haider abu Bakr Attas flew to Baghdad for hurried consultations with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. The Yemeni leader was reported to be carrying a six-point peace plan that he said had received the backing of Egypt and several other key Arab states.

The Libyan news agency said Col. Moammar Kadafi also had dispatched a senior envoy to Baghdad in a “final attempt to avoid the catastrophe of war.”

However, senior Egyptian officials indicated that Egypt and other Arab members of the anti-Iraq coalition have resigned themselves to war. They said they hold out little hope for the success of these 11th-hour peace efforts after the failure of U.N. Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar’s weekend mission to Baghdad.

U.S. officials also quickly dismissed the Yemeni peace plan, which reportedly would link an Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait to an international peace conference on the Middle East.

“There seems to be no alternative now to war,” a senior Egyptian official said, adding that Egypt expects the U.S.-led coalition to launch an attack against Iraq very soon after the U.N. deadline for an Iraqi withdrawal expires at midnight tonight Eastern time--8 a.m. Wednesday in the Persian Gulf region.

Western and Arab diplomats said they still consider it likely that Hussein will attempt to “pull back from the brink,” in one envoy’s words, by offering at least a partial or conditional withdrawal from Kuwait shortly after the deadline expires. Any such offer at this point would undoubtedly be tactical in nature, the envoy added--a maneuver aimed at delaying a U.S.-led attack and splitting the coalition arrayed against Iraq.

If that is Hussein’s aim, then he may try to surprise the coalition by seizing the opportunity that the Yemenis, who have allied themselves with Iraq in the gulf crisis, are trying to create for him.

In Sana, Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh asserted that the United States and Egypt have both accepted the plan. It calls for the simultaneous withdrawal of Iraqi forces from Kuwait and American troops from Saudi Arabia, their replacement with an Arab and U.N.-organized peacekeeping force and the convening of an international peace conference to settle the Arab-Israeli dispute.

However, U.S. officials quickly denied accepting the plan. They noted that it fell short of the U.N. Security Council’s repeated demand for Iraq’s unconditional withdrawal from Kuwait.

Egyptian officials withheld public comment. But privately, they, too, dismissed the Yemeni plan, suggesting that they viewed it as little more than a ploy.

A senior Egyptian military source added that Hussein seems to be underestimating both the resolve of the coalition arrayed against him and its ability to inflict a devastating military defeat on Iraq.

“Saddam is basing his thinking on Vietnam and Beirut. . . . He thinks that if it’s a long war, with many casualties, he’ll defeat (President) Bush” because American public opinion will not support a drawn-out, costly war. However, the official said, Hussein may also be overestimating the ability of his forces in Kuwait to withstand American saturation bombing.

“Saddam has never seen a 1,000-pound bomb go off,” the Egyptian official said. “In the Iran-Iraq War, the heaviest bomb used was 250 pounds. Saddam believes Iraqi soldiers will hold their positions. We have our doubts about that.”

The senior official, who has access to classified military information, said the U.S.-led multinational forces--which include Egyptian troops--have completed their offensive deployments and will be ready to go to war at “one minute past midnight” Wednesday.

In effort to dispel doubts about his commitment to the coalition, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was quoted Monday as saying that the 45,000 Egyptian troops in Saudi Arabia will take part in the fighting even if Iraq launches a missile attack against Israel and Israel retaliates by bombing Iraq.

Mubarak had earlier been quoted as saying that Egypt’s position in the conflict would “change” if Israel became involved.

In contrast to Jordan, where pro-Iraqi demonstrators surged into the streets of Amman, the mood in Cairo, on what may be the eve of war, was anxious but reasonably calm. Notwithstanding newspaper headlines such as “Tomorrow Is Doomsday,” many Egyptians still have difficulty believing that war will really erupt.

Nonetheless, the tension is palpable in the nervous tones in which people constantly discuss the crisis and the intensity with which they read the morning newspapers and listen to newscasts throughout the day.