President Tells Iraqis to Lay Down Weapons : Diplomacy: Bush scornfully rejects Hussein’s effort to save face. His tough stand is criticized by the Soviets but is supported by Congress and the allies.

President Bush vowed Tuesday that Saddam Hussein will fail in his attempt to “save the remnants of power and control” and ordered Iraqi troops to “lay down their arms” to avoid annihilation.

Bush’s statement, coming shortly after the Iraqi president tried in a radio broadcast to claim a shred of victory in retreat, amounted to a demand for unconditional surrender and was clear notice that Iraq will not be able to withdraw from Kuwait on its own terms.

Hussein, announcing his army’s withdrawal from the occupied sheikdom, argued that his “brave forces” have withstood an unprecedented assault by 30 nations and praised his soldiers, declaring they have “planted seeds” in the “mother of battles” that would be “harvested within the coming period.”

Bush scornfully rejected the Iraqi leader’s attempt to save face, saying that Hussein “is trying to claim victory in the midst of a rout.” Hussein “is not interested in peace, but only to regroup and fight another day,” Bush said.

Bush’s uncompromising stand drew criticism from the Soviet Union but support from members of Congress and from key allies.

On a visit to the western Soviet Union, Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev warned that superpower relations could suffer unless “responsible behavior” guides U.S. efforts to end the war.

“It is vital to end this conflict and put on the agenda of the world community resolution of the broader question of the Middle East,” the Tass news agency quoted Gorbachev as saying. “There must be no more bloodshed.”

But with some U.S. military officials privately predicting that the remainder of Iraq’s army would be smashed within 48 hours, a majority of the 12-member U.N. Security Council meeting in closed session backed the United States in rejecting a cease-fire for now.

No cease-fire should be offered until Hussein’s government provides a written acceptance of all U.N. resolutions regarding Kuwait, including the resolutions calling for payment of reparations, Security Council members agreed.

And at a meeting with congressional leaders in the Oval Office, both Democrats and Republicans offered support for Bush’s position.

“Don’t let Saddam Hussein off the hook,” Senate Republican leader Bob Dole of Kansas told reporters he had advised Bush. “I think that’s the view of most American people.”

“There is no room for half-measures that allow the Iraqi leadership to avoid accepting military defeat. I support the President,” said Sen. Bill Bradley (D-N.J.)

In Washington

Bush needed no prompting. For days, White House aides have made clear that nothing short of the death or humiliation of the Iraqi leader would satisfy allied aims. And the President’s statement, issued from the White House Rose Garden as his top national security advisers looked on, only emphasized that goal.

“The liberation of Kuwait is close at hand,” Bush declared, as he proceeded to ridicule the Iraqi leader’s attempts to claim victory. “He is not voluntarily giving up Kuwait,” Bush said. “His defeated forces are retreating.”

Hussein’s “most recent speech is an outrage,” Bush said, charging that the Iraqi leader had refused to renounce territorial claims on Kuwait, had offered no “evidence of remorse for Iraq’s aggression” and had said nothing about releasing prisoners of war or ending “the pathological destruction of Kuwait.”

“The coalition will therefore continue to prosecute the war with undiminished intensity,” he said.

As his spokesman, Marlin Fitzwater, had done the day before, Bush emphasized that retreating Iraqi units might still go on the attack against U.S. and allied forces. Administration officials have stressed that point repeatedly, seeking to blunt any sympathy that might develop from reports of allied air power devastating retreating columns of Iraqi tanks bereft of air defense and seemingly helpless against the technologically superior onslaught.

“We will not attack unarmed soldiers in retreat,” Bush said. But he warned that allied commanders have “no choice but to consider retreating combat units as a threat.”

“It is time for all Iraqi forces in the theater of operation--those occupying Kuwait, those supporting the occupation of Kuwait--to lay down their arms,” Bush said. “That will stop the bloodshed.”

Bush’s three-minute speech came after four hours of hectic meetings that began when he called the White House Situation Room at 5:20 a.m. and was informed of Hussein’s broadcast. Along with his senior advisers, Bush studied a text of Hussein’s remarks and decided to issue his own statement, a pattern the Administration has followed throughout the war to keep the initiative in the battle for worldwide public opinion.

A few hours later, Iraq was still on the President’s mind as he bade farewell to Colombian President Cesar Gaviria, who had been in Washington for a state visit. U.S. troops, he remarked during that ceremony, are in battle with “the forces of evil halfway around the world.”

At the end of the day, at a retirement ceremony for Gen. Maxwell Thurman, the general who commanded the last American military offensive, in Panama, Bush once again returned to the Gulf conflict, declaring that “we are not only on schedule, we’re ahead of schedule.”

“No commander in chief has ever been so proud of America’s men and women in uniform,” he said.

In Baghdad

Hussein also was trying to assert pride in his crumbling forces.

Hussein clearly timed his speech as an answer to Monday night’s demand by the White House that he “personally and publicly” commit himself to the withdrawal and to fulfilling all 12 U.N. resolutions against his nation. But aside from the retreat order, Hussein never mentioned any of the U.N. resolutions, leaving vague whether his regime maintains its historic claim to Kuwait, and making no reference to prisoners of war or war crimes.

In his opening remarks, Hussein made clear the personal anguish behind his decision to withdraw after months of stubborn defiance that has left his once-prosperous nation an economic and physical ruin.

But he clung desperately to the rhetoric of triumph, taking pains to cast his order as a “withdrawal” and not a surrender, and vowing that his forces would, one day, fight again.

“Cheer for your victory, brothers,” Hussein exhorted. “Cheer for the victory of all those honorable ones of you Iraqis, now that you have fought 30 countries, and against the most sophisticated machinery of war and destruction anywhere in the world.”

“We remind everybody that the doors of Constantinople were not opened to the Muslims after the first holy attempt,” he said, an attempt to link his fight to the historical memory of one of the Arab world’s most storied military victories.

And while he gave up Iraq’s current claim to Kuwait, Hussein repeated its historic one, referring to the emirate as “Kuwait, which is part of your country that was partitioned” and talking of “70-year-old documents and events to (prove) our claim.”

Although the Iraqi leader days ago had abandoned his attempts to make his withdrawal from Kuwait conditional on winning concessions for the Palestinians, Hussein insisted that his efforts had lifted the Palestinian issue back to the center of international debate.

“Palestine has come back to knock at closed doors, thanks to the deeds and the sacrifices of the Palestinians and the Iraqis,” he said.

Several analysts speculated that Hussein’s capitulation on Kuwait may well have come as a result of pressure from his military commanders in the field, who may have realized that their battlefield position in Kuwait was untenable.

During the eight-year Iran-Iraq War, Hussein, who has had no military training, initially tried to command his armies directly, but after failing as a battlefield tactician put most of the command responsibility back into the hands of his more experienced generals. The move made it possible for Hussein to avoid personal blame in the event of failures.

In the Soviet Union

As Bush and Hussein hurled charges at each other from afar, Gorbachev once more tried to position himself as a peacemaker, saying a continued attack by U.S.-led forces against Iraq could only lead to a pointless “blood bath” and possibly harm superpower relations.

Speaking to workers at the V.I. Lenin Tractor Plant while on a trip to the Byelorussian capital of Minsk, Gorbachev indicated that U.S.-Soviet relations could suffer if the Kremlin’s wishes are not heeded.

“Stressing that Soviet-American dialogue lay at the center of the normalization of the world situation, Mikhail Gorbachev remarked that progress in relations between the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. is still ‘fragile,’ ” the official Tass news agency reported.

In a Moscow news conference, Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander M. Belonogov warned that the Kremlin believes some of the allies may be pursuing goals that exceed the U.N. Security Council mandate to free Kuwait. And he indicated that the Soviet government thinks the allies were wrong to have started the land war after Iraq agreed to a Soviet-negotiated pullout plan.

“We believe there was a possibility, a real possibility to avoid it,” Belonogov said. “Only at a later stage will we know the real cost of the land war. I’m afraid that the cost will be very high indeed. At the moment we only have the figures about losses on the American side, but we do not know anything about how many people have died on the other side.”

But at the United Nations, the Soviet Union agreed Tuesday that Iraq’s offer by itself was insufficient to halt the fighting.

“We need two things at one and the same time,” Soviet Ambassador Yuli M. Vorontsov said. “We need a cease-fire and compliance with all the resolutions.”

In addition to the Soviets, Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani offered some criticism of U.S. actions, saying, according to Iran’s official news agency, that when peace plans were launched, “Each time, the United States and its allies found an excuse for intensifying their pressure in order to attain their goals until the situation reached this point.”

Few other nations, however, joined the criticism, with only longtime Iraqi allies such as Cuba, Libya and Yemen taking up Hussein’s cause.

The Coalition

Within the anti-Iraq alliance, both Arab and Western members strongly supported Bush’s stand.

In a speech to the Egyptian Parliament, Foreign Minister Esmat Abdel Meguid said Hussein’s claim to be withdrawing from Kuwait was not enough.

Iraq, Meguid said, simply cannot be trusted. “While Baghdad radio declares acceptance of withdrawal, Iraq fires missiles at Saudi Arabia and Qatar,” he said. “These things generally do not inspire confidence.”

Privately, Egyptian officials repeated that Hussein must be driven from power, or at the least so humiliated that he loses all influence in the Arab world and faces overthrow from within his own country.

In Syria, another Arab participant in the alliance, the government avoided direct comment on Hussein’s speech, but indicated approval of the continued war. The “catastrophe” of what is happening to Iraq is solely the fault of Hussein, said Foreign Minister Farouk Shareh.

“The Iraqi regime is not aiming at saving the Iraqi people and its economic and military potential,” he said. “Rather it is is aiming at saving the regime and saving its face.”

In Paris, French military and diplomatic officials said in interviews for the first time that the removal or overthrow of Hussein from power is an important objective of the war.

British Prime Minister John Major struck a similar note in a speech to a cheering House of Commons. “Saddam Hussein started this war on his terms. He must end it on the terms set out by the U.N.,” Major said. “We simply do not trust him.”

Lauter reported from Washington and Fineman from Amman, Jordan. Contributing to this report were staff writers John-Thor Dahlburg and Elizabeth Shogren in Moscow, Kenneth Freed in Cairo, Rone Tempest in Paris, William Tuohy in London, Tamara Jones in Bonn, William D. Montalbano in Rome and John J. Goldman in New York.