Regional Outlook : The Arabs: Divisions Beyond the Stereotype : The war to liberate Kuwait has splintered the region. The result may ultimately be a wider Arab civil war.

Shortly after being deposed in a military coup, the late King Farouk of Egypt was said to have remarked that one day there would be only five kings left in the world: “The king of hearts, the king of diamonds, the king of clubs, the king of spades and the king of England.”

Today, nearly four decades later, the cataclysmic events unfolding in the Persian Gulf suggest that, for the Middle East at least, King Farouk’s rueful prophecy may yet come true.

The titanic struggle between Saddam Hussein, a man who would be king, and the U.S.-allied monarchies and sheikdoms of the Persian Gulf has inflamed passions and unleashed forces that ultimately may destroy them both.

There is little doubt in anyone’s mind that Iraq will eventually lose the Gulf War. But in trying to peer beyond the fog of war to the changes that lie ahead, government officials and diplomats throughout the region forecast a period of uncertainty and turmoil--a period in which many of the region’s autocratic monarchies and military regimes could become casualties of the ensuing peace.

Polarization stemming from the Gulf War has already challenged the strengths of some pro-Western Arab regimes and exposed the weaknesses of others. It has broadly split the Arab world between the haves and the have-nots, and widened the divisions between the rulers of the region and those they rule.

Indeed, some analysts suggest that the war to liberate Kuwait has so deeply divided the region that it may only be the opening battle in a wider Arab civil war. If they are right, it will not be a war in the usual sense, with Arab armies clashing on the vast plains of great deserts. But it could be a war of terrorism and subversion and, ultimately, an East European-style revolution against some of the more fragile regimes in the region.

Not everyone, of course, holds such apocalyptic visions of the future. But even those with less alarmist views agree that the Arab world is in for major change.

“We are not sure all the changes will be as profound as some people think,” said Osama Baz, a senior adviser to Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak. “But we are certain that, in the aftermath of this earthquake, the Arab world will never be the same.”

Some believe that, in much the same way that World War I brought sweeping changes to Europe, drawing down the curtain on the great empires of the day, so too has the Gulf War set into motion a series of events destined to transform the political map of the Middle East.

“Of the future I am sure of only one thing: We will never return to the status quo ante. The old order is over and cannot be restored,” said Cairo University political scientist Ali Hillal Dessouki. A “new map” will have to be drawn for the postwar Middle East, Dessouki added, noting that strategists throughout the region are already “starting to plan for this.”

What will the map of the new Arab order look like?

If the anti-Iraq coalition holds together, it will be a map whose political contours are likely to be shaped by a new alliance among Egypt, Syria and Saudi Arabia. A recent decision to establish a trilateral commission to coordinate relations marked the first step toward cementing this new alliance, which represents a remarkable shift in the strategic geometry of the Arab world.

As late as last year, Syria was still castigating Egypt for signing a separate peace agreement with Israel; now it is denouncing Iraqi Scud missile attacks on Tel Aviv. While it remains to be seen how long this new alliance will last, the combination of Saudi money and Egyptian and Syrian military manpower should dominate the region in at least the early postwar years.

“It will be the basic foundation for the future,” said Egypt’s foreign minister, Esmat Abdel Meguid.

“The Egyptians see it as the axis around which the Arab world can revolve and maintain stability,” a senior Western diplomat added.

Yet even the most optimistic analysts doubt that stability can soon be restored to a region recovering from its greatest shock since the creation of Israel in 1948.

“The first thing we will see after the immediate crisis is a period of accounting, a period in which different countries will try to settle scores with each other,” Dessouki said.

Saudi Arabia, for instance, can be expected to make life difficult for the pro-Iraqi government of Yemen, while Egypt could seek to influence a change of government in Sudan. “It will be a very unstable time, and the most we can do is to exercise a strategy of damage limitation,” Dessouki said.

The extent of the damage the Arabs will have to limit cannot be easily predicted. How long the war lasts, whether Israel becomes involved, whether the coming ground offensive is taken into Iraq itself and whether Hussein somehow survives defeat--the answers to these and other open questions will all bear upon the final outcome.

What is already clear, however, is that the Arab world is more deeply divided than ever before and that the most serious divisions are not the ones between Arab rulers themselves--though they obviously exist--but the ones between the rulers and those they rule.

“Saddam Hussein derives his strength from the weakness of the system opposing him. He is winning on the Arab street not because people love him, but because they hate the system he is challenging,” an Arab diplomat said.

Indeed, there is a widespread perception that the crisis precipitated by the invasion of Kuwait marks the final stage in the moral and political collapse of the whole Arab order--exposing, as it does, the flaws in a system that for more than 40 years has been unable to satisfy the aspirations of its people, to equitably distribute its wealth, to permit the evolution of democracy or to keep from squandering its vast resources.

“Even people who are against Saddam feel angry and humiliated by the sight of foreign forces destroying a fellow Arab nation,” the Arab diplomat said. “They are asking why their leaders have been so helpless, why they have once again been forced to surrender control of their destinies to outsiders. People feel this is not so much the fault of Saddam Hussein as it is the system that created him.”

Already the divisions are dangerously apparent in places like Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. They might already have claimed at least one victim--King Hussein of Jordan--had he not early on sized up the threat to his throne and chosen to side with the overwhelmingly pro-Iraqi feelings of his people. Last week, that stance put the Jordanian monarch on a collision course with Washington, which has been one of his principal Western backers.

In Egypt, Syria and Saudi Arabia, the key Arab members of the U.S.-led coalition, the divisions are less apparent. But even in these more stable countries signs of unease, if not outright opposition, are appearing.

“What many people in Egypt cannot understand is why the United States is so quick to oppose the occupation of Kuwait when for years it has condoned, even supported, the Israeli occupation of Palestinian Arab lands,” said a normally pro-Western businessman. “We see hypocrisy in the fact that you have sent hundreds of thousands of troops to the Gulf to enforce a U.N. resolution against Iraq, but have never done anything to enforce the many U.N. resolutions calling on Israel to give up the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.”

The West’s record of double standards, together with sensitivities about the recent colonial past, make many Arabs suspicious of Washington’s stated aims in the Gulf. “Many people think all this talk about international legitimacy is just a bunch of blah, blah, blah,” said Mohammed Sid Ahmed, an Egyptian political columnist. “They suspect Americans are just there for neocolonial oil interests. In Egypt, these sentiments are not so crudely expressed as they are elsewhere, but you do find people talking that way.”

The suspicion that once more the Arabs are allowing their fate to be manipulated by foreign powers pursuing their own narrow interests is compounded by the fact that the Arab world is bereft of inspired leadership of its own.

“When you look around the region, there are no real democracies to speak of,” notes a Western diplomat. Some regimes are worse than others, but from dictatorships like Syria to the more benevolent but corrupt autocracies of the Gulf, there is not much to choose from. Even the region’s best leaders--men like Egypt’s Mubarak--are uninspiring. “Our leaders are caretakers, not visionaries,” said Sid Ahmed.

Unable to overcome their own deep malaise, many Arabs have watched in frustration and envy as democracy has flowered in East Europe’s political spring. Now, in what the Middle East scholar Fouad Ajami calls “the summer of Arab discontent,” Iraq’s Hussein is seen as a catalyst for sweeping change.

“A man who is dying of thirst does not stop to ask if the drink you offer him is poisoned. It is enough, for the moment, that it satisfies his thirst,” said an Arab diplomat explaining the Iraqi leader’s appeal. “Saddam Hussein may be the wrong man to lead the Arab world, but he has come along at precisely the right time. He has awakened the Arab street.”

Thus, while the stature of the Arab states opposing Iraq may be temporarily enhanced by an allied victory in the Gulf War, many analysts believe that over time these same states will be weakened unless real efforts are made to shore up the vulnerabilities and structural weaknesses that have been so clearly exposed by the current crisis.

“We will have to move quickly, in the aftermath of this crisis, to deal with the two main problems of the Arab world, the lack of democracy and the uneven distribution of wealth,” said Fahmy Hueidy, an Egyptian expert on Islamic trends.

“We must focus the attention of the world on the underlying causes” of instability in the region, added Rami Khoury, a Jordanian political analyst. “The whole concept of the modern state has been a failure here,” Khoury said. “We’re groping for answers . . . we’re angry, we’re fired up.”

Arab officials stress that, if a stable new order is to emerge, serious efforts must also be made to resolve the Arab-Israeli dispute that lies at the core of the region’s chronic instability.

The Bush Administration insists there can be no “linkage” between an Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait and a resolution of the Palestinian problem. Yet such linkage already firmly exists throughout the Arab world in the form of what many see as a moral equivalency between the occupation of Kuwait and Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

(The comparison is rejected by both Washington and Jerusalem on grounds that Israel captured the West Bank and Gaza Strip during the 1967 Middle East War while Hussein was clearly the aggressor in seizing Kuwait.)

“The Palestinians in the Arab body are like the Jews in the Western world. They carry the moral cross,” said Tahseen Bashir, a former adviser to the late President Anwar Sadat of Egypt.

Unless major efforts are made to solve the Palestinian problem, the Arab nations opposing Iraq run the risk of being seen as having sided with the United States only to maintain a much despised status quo. If that happens, then these regimes will begin to lose their legitimacy, Islamic fundamentalism will become a more formidable challenge and anti-Americanism will rise alarmingly throughout the region, Egyptian officials warn.

“America will ultimately be judged by its behavior in the aftermath of this war,” Baz said. “Will it exert serious efforts to help us solve the Palestinian question or not? What is the American vision of a future Middle East? A lot will depend on the answers to these questions.”

Some analysts see a unique opportunity in the wake of the war. With the Iraqi threat defused and with moderate forces at least temporarily on the ascendancy, the Arabs may finally be strong enough to make peace with Israel, they argue. The massive destruction being wrought in the Gulf War has taught even Arabs who support Iraq “the folly and humiliation” of squandering their resources on high-priced weapons, Khoury said.

Yet if some of the barriers have been broken, others that seemed formidable before look nothing short of insurmountable now.

If Israel’s hard-line Likud government was unwilling to cede the West Bank and Gaza to Palestinian control before the Gulf War, it is certainly not likely to change its mind now that its cities have been subjected to Iraqi Scud missile attacks cheered by the Palestinians themselves.

Even if a peace process can be revived, the question of who will represent the Palestinians at the negotiating table remains far from resolved. In the eyes of the Bush Administration and even some moderate Arabs, the pro-Iraqi position taken by Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat has disqualified the PLO from any future negotiating role. But following the collapse of the U.S.-PLO dialogue last year, that position largely reflects Arafat’s need to get into sync with the overwhelming mood of his constituents in the occupied territories who, despairing over the failure of their uprising against Israeli rule, embraced Hussein as their savior of last resort.

It was always unlikely that a more moderate alternative to the PLO would emerge from the West Bank to speak for the Palestinians. It is quite unimaginable now. “Arafat as an effective leader of the PLO may be finished,” Bashir said. “But Arafat the flag is very much alive and well.”

Baz, Mubarak’s key strategist on the peace process, warns that it would be a “waste of time” to search for an alternative to the PLO because “regardless of our anger at the position it has taken, no other organization can claim to represent the Palestinians.” It is, he added, “a fact of life we must deal with.”

It can be argued that the manipulative way in which the key players in the Middle East have dealt with the Palestinian issue in the past is a major reason they now find themselves on opposite sides of the line that President Bush has drawn in the desert sands of Saudi Arabia. Hussein may have created the crisis, but he himself is “the creation of past Arab defeats,” Bashir said.

To beat him, the moderates must not only win the war against Iraq but also the peace that follows. Otherwise, added Bashir, “everybody will eventually forget how the war started, and all they will remember is that Arab killed Arab. Then the conspiracy theories will start about how the Americans lured Iraq into Kuwait in order to attack the Arabs and establish their hegemony over the region.”

Victory, he warned, “will not automatically follow Iraq’s defeat, for the real battle is not over Kuwait. The real battle is over the shape of things to come.”

Ross is on temporary assignment in Cairo where he was the Times’ bureau chief from July, 1985, to July, 1989. Times staff writer Nick B. Williams Jr. in Amman, Jordan, contributed to this report.

* There are 20 Arab countries with a total population of 225 million.

* Populations of these countries range from 337,000 in Djibouti to nearly 55 million in Egypt

* Life expectancy ranges from 46 in Somalia to 73 in Kuwait.

* Annual per capita gross domestic product ranges from $210 in Somalia to more than $17,000 in Qatar.

Literacy rates range from 12% in Somalia to 75% in Lebanon.

The Arab World: A Look at the Pieces of the Puzzle

ALGERIA Population: 25.6 million Government: Republic Life expectancy at birth: 63 Per capita GDP: $2,235 (1988) Literacy: 52% Religion: 99% Sunni Muslim; 1% Christian and Jewish

BAHRAIN Population: 520,186 Government: Monarchy Life expectancy at birth: 71 Per capita GDP: $7,550 (1987) Literacy: 40% Religion: Muslim (70% Shite; 30% Sunni)

DJIBOUTI Population: 337,386 Government: One party rule Life expectancy at birth: 47 Per capita GDP: $1,070 (1986) Literacy: 20% Religion: 94% Muslim; 6% Christian

EGYPT Population: 54.7 million Government: Republic Life expectancy at birth: 62 Per capita GDP: $700 (1989) Literacy: 45% Religion: 94% Muslim, mostly Sunni; 6% Coptic Christian and other.

IRAQ Population: 18.8 million Government: One party dictatorship Life expectancy at birth: 65 Per capita GNP $1,940 (1989 est.) Literacy: 55-65% Religion: 97% Muslim (60-65% Shite, 32-37% Sunni); 3% Christian and other.

JORDAN Population: 3.1 million Government: Monarchy Life expectancy at birth: 67 Per capita GNP: $1,760 (1989) Literacy: 71% Religion: 92% Sunni Muslim, 8% Christian

KUWAIT Population: 2.1 million Government: Monarchy Life expectancy at birth: 73 Per capita GDP: $10,500 (1988) Literacy: 71% Religion: 85% Muslim (30% Shite, 45% Sunni, 10% other); 15% Christian and other.

LEBANON Population: 3.3 million Government: Republic Life expectancy at birth: 68 Per capita GDP: $700 (1989) Literacy: 75% Religion: 75% Muslim; 25% Christian

LIBYA Population: 4.2 million Government: Military dictatorship Life expectancy at birth: 62 Per capita GNP: $5,410 (1988) Literacy: 50-60% Religion: 97% Sunni Muslim

MAURITANIA Population: 1.9 million Government: Islamic Republic Life expectancy at birth: 47 Per capita GDP: $520 (1988) Literacy: 17% Religion: Nearly 100% Muslim

MOROCCO Population: 25.6 million Government: Monarchy Life expectancy at birth: 62 Per capita GDP: $880 (1989) Literacy: 28% Religion: 98.7% Muslim; 1.1% Christian; 0.2% Jewish

OMAN Population: 1.5 million Government: Monarchy Life expectancy at birth: 57 Per capita GDP: $6,006 (1987) Literacy: 20% Religion: Predominately Muslim

QATAR Population: 490,897 Government: Monarchy Life expectancy at birth: 69 Per capita GDP: $17,070 (1987) Literacy: 40% Religion: 95% Muslim

SAUDI ARABIA Population: 17.1 million Government: Monarchy Life expectancy at birth: 64 Per capita GDP: $4,720 (1988) Literacy: 52% Religion: 100% Muslim

SOMALIA Population: 8.4 million Government: Interim, following Jan., 1991 coup Live expectancy at birth: 46 Per capita GDP: $210 (1988) Literacy: 12% Religion: Almost entirely Sunni Muslim

SUDAN Population: 24.9 million Government: Military Life expectancy at birth: 51 Per capita GDP: $340 (1987) Literacy: 31% Religion: 70% Sunni Muslim; 20% indigenous beliefs; 5% Christian

SYRIA Population: 12.5 million Government: Ba’ath Socialist Republic Life expectancy at birth: 66 Per capita GDP: $1,540 (1989) Literacy: 49% Religion: 74% Sunni Muslim; 16% other Muslim sects; 10% Christian

TUNISIA Population: 8.1 million Government: Republic Life expectancy at birth: 66 Per capita GDP: $1,105 (1989) Literacy: 62% Religion: 98% Muslim; 1% Christian; less than 1% Jewish

UNITED ARAB EMIRATES Population: 2.3 million Government: Federation of skeikdoms Life expectancy at birth: 71 Per capita GNP: $11,680 (1988) Literacy: 68% Religion: 96% Muslim (80% Sunni, 16% Shite); 4% Christian, Hindu, and other

YEMEN Population: 9.8 million Government: Republic Life expectancy at birth: 52 Per capita GDP: $683 Literacy: 18% Religion: Muslim

Notes: Population figures are mid-year 1990 estimates. Palestine, which is not included in this list, is considered an independent state by the Arab League Charter and is included in that organization’s membership.

SOURCE: THE WORLD FACT BOOK 1990, CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY; Human Development Report 1990, United Nations Development Program