Iraq Tries to Play Trump Card by Attacking Israel : Strategy: Hussein hopes to bring the Jewish state into the war and break Arab-Western alliance against him.

Saddam Hussein attempted to play his grisly trump card Thursday night: a barrage of Scud missiles targeted on Tel Aviv and Haifa but really aimed at touching off another Arab-Israeli war.

Hussein’s strategic goal was not military but political: to bring the Jewish state into the Persian Gulf conflict, and thus, he hoped, to break the Western-Arab alliance arrayed against him.

Whether the Iraqi dictator succeeds, however, now depends Israel’s response and the Arab world’s reaction, U.S. officials and experts said. If Israel replies with massive reprisals against Iraq, the Arab public may rally to Hussein’s side. But if Israel holds back or responds with some restraint, Hussein may lose his gamble yet.

“It’s quite clear that he’s trying to make this an Arab-Israeli war, and you can underline the word Israeli,” said Augustus Richard Norton, an expert on Arab politics at the International Peace Academy in New York. “He wants to introduce cracks in the alliance.

“The result depends not on what he does but on what the Israelis do,” he added. “If it’s a massive Israeli response--if Israel kills thousands of Iraqi civilians--then Saddam may well succeed. But if the Israelis are prudent and good allies of the United States, they will respond much more selectively against military targets.”

In that case, Norton said, the effect on the Arabs might be relatively muted. “It would really have to be a sustained Israeli response to cause the alliance to collapse,” he said. “It would have to be more than a symbolic strike.”

Bush Administration officials said they hoped Israel would stay its hand for exactly those reasons. The Pentagon made an unusual announcement of additional air strikes against targets in Iraq, as though slaking Israel’s anger by proxy.

Members of Congress also appealed to Israel.

“Don’t fall into Saddam’s trap,” said Rep. Dave McCurdy (D-Okla.), urging Israel to act with restraint. “I’m hopeful they will let us do the responding and not let the war spread,” echoed Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Hussein appears to be hoping that Israel will strike back in a big way--counting on two political factors to transform the battlefield in a war that has been running badly against him:

First, the divided loyalty of the Arab countries that have placed their armies alongside U.S. and Western troops in Saudi Arabia. Egypt has about 32,000 troops arrayed against Iraq, and Syria has 21,000 more. But historically, both countries fought Israel before they ever considered fighting Iraq. Indeed, Egypt, Syria and Iraq all contributed troops to the first Arab war against Israel, after the Jewish state declared its independence in 1948.

Syria is the weakest link in the present alliance against Iraq. Syrian President Hafez Assad has long been in conflict with almost all his new allies, including the United States, and his nation’s bitter enmity with Israel could easily overwhelm his blood feud with Hussein.

But Syria, in both military and political terms, is less critical than Egypt.

“Egypt is a stalwart member of the alliance--but if this turns into a slugfest between Israel and Iraq, and a lot of Arab civilians die, then the pressure will build on (Egyptian President Hosni) Mubarak,” Norton warned. “He has already made public statements that he wouldn’t stand by in case of an Israeli attack on the Arab countries.”

Saudi Arabia, the key U.S. ally where American and other Western troops are based, would also feel the consequences of any Israeli military action, said Hisham Sharabi, a scholar at Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies.

“There are already fissures within the Saudi monarchy, and those fissures would become wider,” he said. “Of course, the Saudis can’t withdraw from the coalition, but . . . (they) would have all sorts of second thoughts.”

The second factor behind Hussein’s move is an even worse prospect for the Bush Administration: the possibility that massive retaliation against Iraq by Israel could spark riots and unrest all across the Arab world, followed by a wave of terrorism against American and European targets.

“On the popular level, the effects will be profound,” predicted Sharabi. “This will increase the anger and frustration on the streets. It will mobilize people in all sorts of capitals, with all sorts of explosions of anger.”

“Saddam has been trying to turn this into a war between the United States and the Arabs,” a State Department official explained. “An attack against Israel is designed to make that true.”

Hussein apparently hopes that if he can draw Israel into an attack on Baghdad, he can make his rhetorical threats of an Arab “holy war” against the West come true.

“This is such an emotional issue (in the Arab world) that rationality can be blown away,” warned Edward Peck, a former U.S. diplomat in Baghdad.

Peck, Norton and others suggested that if Israel were to retaliate against purely military targets in Iraq--and, perhaps, to retaliate in kind, with missiles rather than manned aircraft--the Arab public could tolerate such a response.

The sudden Iraqi escalation came as a surprise, largely because there had been no sign of any Iraqi missiles during the first 24 hours of war on Thursday and because U.S. military officials were optimistic that most of Baghdad’s missile launchers had been destroyed.

But Hussein had long threatened to turn his guns on Israel if his country were attacked.

“Tel Aviv will receive the first blow,” he told a Spanish interviewer last December. And last week, Iraqi Foreign Minister Tarik Aziz told reporters in Geneva, after his abortive talks with Secretary of State James A. Baker III, that Israel would “absolutely” come under attack if war began.

“That Saddam wanted to do it was well known,” Peck said. “That he did it was a surprise.”

In recent weeks, U.S. officials attempted to prepare for such an attack--and, especially, to blunt the Israeli response. Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence S. Eagleburger, who has been dealing with Israelis since his days as a close aide to former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, rushed to Jerusalem twice in three weeks to urge restraint.

Eagleburger failed to win an ironclad promise. Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir reportedly told him no Israeli leader could refrain from responding in kind if the country’s civilian population were hit by weapons of terror.

Now, the close and tangled U.S.-Israeli relationship stands in the balance, as much as the outcome of the military conflict in Arabia’s desert does.

“The United States will clearly put a lot of pressure on Israel not to react,” said W. Seth Carus of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “The one hope that Israel will not respond will depend on whether it decides that everyone involved in this crisis is asked to pay a price--and the price for Israel is absorbing this attack. And that’s part of the chit Israel (will) bring to the table when this is over.”

Israeli Ambassador Zalman Shoval made that point almost as bluntly Thursday evening. “So far, the State of Israel has paid the dearest price of any of the countries in the Middle East which have faced Iraqi aggression, except Kuwait itself,” he said.

Shoval said Israel “reserved the right to respond in any way it would deem fit,” but he appeared to suggest that his government might bow to the Administration’s wishes.

The almost-trivial damage caused by Iraq’s missiles--seven Israelis received only minor injuries--could make such a decision much easier, officials noted.

Baker spent Thursday night on a telephone at the White House, attempting to shore up the coalition with telephone calls to the foreign ministers of Syria, Egypt and the other allied countries, a State Department source said.

But there was no immediate word on the results of his appeals.

Baker discussed the prospect of Israeli military action in the conflict with Syria, Egypt and Saudi Arabia during his journeys through the Middle East in December and this month.

Saudi and Egyptian officials said they could probably tolerate Israeli retaliation against Iraq if it came in response to an unprovoked attack, officials said.

But Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk Shareh told reporters last week: “We in Syria cannot accept an Israeli intervention in this crisis.”

Shareh said an Iraqi attack on Israel would be an attempt to “reshuffle the cards” in the conflict, and he advised Israel to ignore it. If Israel felt compelled to attack Iraqi, Shareh warned, Syria would find it extremely difficult to fight on the Israeli side.

Syria has fought against Israel in all previous Arab-Israeli wars.

Egyptian President Mubarak was quoted by Cairo newspapers earlier this month as saying that Egypt would have to reassess its position if Israel was involved. But an official who traveled with Baker on his trip to the Middle East said Mubarak’s position was not that stark.

Asked if it would make a difference to Egypt how Israel was drawn into the war, the senior official said, “It matters how, yes.”

U.S. officials said Saudi Arabia, while also skittish about being on the same side as Israel, also indicated that it could tolerate Israeli retaliation for an Iraqi attack.

Times staff writers Norman Kempster, Jim Mann, Dwight Morris and Robin Wright also contributed to this article.