COLUMN ONE : Doomsday for War Forecasts : For months, analysts spelled out the disaster scenarios. But good planning, deft diplomacy, military skill--and some luck--produced a remarkable success.

The doomsday predictions were seemingly endless:

Iraq’s battle-hardened troops would inflict terrible damage on American forces, resulting in between 10,000 and 30,000 casualties.

Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein would hurl chemical weapons into the battle at the first shot.

America’s computerized high-tech weapons would jam or bog down in the desert sands.

Women soldiers would be sent home in body bags by the droves.

The people of other Arab countries would rise in anger, attacking Western citizens and sacking their embassies.

A wave of Iraqi-led terrorism would sweep the world.

Arab countries, such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt, would never fight against Iraq.

The American-led coalition would fall apart.

The price of oil would soar beyond $60 a barrel.

The United States would find itself once again mired in a Vietnam-style quagmire with no way out.

Israel would be drawn into the battle, turning the war into an uncontrollable Arab-Israeli conflict that could plunge the whole effort into chaos.

None of the bad news came true. Instead, a combination of good planning, deft diplomacy, skilled military execution--and a few essential strokes of luck--handed George Bush and his allies an almost flawless war.

After weeks of relentless U.S. bombing raids, most Iraqi units sought only to surrender. The threatened chemical onslaught, which U.S. commander Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf called “the nightmare scenario,” never happened at all. American high-tech weapons--from the Patriot missile to the M-1 tank and the F-117 Stealth fighter--proved spectacular successes. The coalition held; America’s Arab allies stayed the course; Israel stayed on the sidelines. Oil prices even fell.

And while the war’s cost in Iraqi lives was fearsome, the low number of allied casualties--79 U.S. soldiers killed, at latest count--was, in Schwarzkopf’s words, “miraculous.”

What went right?

Adm. Eugene Carroll of the privately financed Center for Defense Information, who himself was a vocal critic of the war at first, concedes that “there were a lot of pleasant surprises” but insists that “it didn’t happen by accident. There was a lot of excellent planning and brilliant execution involved.”

Joseph S. Nye Jr., a professor at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, agrees. “I don’t think we were aware of the military tactics,” Nye says, and “the people who were, weren’t worried. . . . But the view that nothing American can work, and especially nothing in the American military, just turned out to be wrong.”

“Nothing was wrong except the basic premises,” jokes Stephen Hess, a Brookings Institution critic. “We were all fighting the last war,” Hess says. “People were basing their expectations on the past, and that meant Vietnam or the Iran-Iraq War”--which both dragged on for years.

“It wasn’t just the press,” Hess adds. “It was hard to find experts who were arguing the other side. It was like two blind mice, and each fed the other.”

In fact, Joseph Kechichian, an analyst with the RAND Corp. in Santa Monica, points out that even if the experts do look a little silly now, they weren’t completely wrong.

“It’s a matter of degree,” Kechichian says. “All of those things did happen, but to such a low degree that they didn’t matter. The Arab masses did protest. The Soviet Union did try to negotiate a compromise, but decided not to pursue it. The Israelis were tempted to retaliate, but cooler heads prevailed.”

Still, the Persian Gulf War almost certainly will go down in military and diplomatic history as a string of deadly fears that never came true.

For example:

Fear: Allied forces would run into fierce resistance from Iraq’s battle-hardened army, and suffer thousands of dead and wounded.

This prediction was almost universal. Defense consultant Edward Luttwak warned Congress that “thousands” would die, and called a ground assault on Iraqi lines “madness.” Brookings Institution scholar Joshua Epstein devised a complicated computer model of the war that projected at least 1,049 U.S. dead in a “best-case” victory. Carroll’s group at the Center for Defense Information predicted at least 10,000 would die during a 12-week drive to Baghdad. The actual coalition death toll in the ground war: 79 Americans and an estimated 61 allied troops.

For their part, the experts are undaunted. “The Iraqis didn’t resist,” Epstein says. “My model is a model of war. If the war doesn’t happen, the model doesn’t apply.” Carroll agrees: “We were clearly foreseeing a more violent war against a more tenacious defense,” he says. Luttwak didn’t return phone calls Thursday.

To be fair, even U.S. military commanders didn’t expect to roll through Iraqi defenses as fast as they did. “If we’d thought it would have been such an easy fight, we definitely would not have stocked 60 days’ worth of supplies,” Schwarzkopf noted at a briefing earlier this week.

What happened, the commanders said, was that six weeks’ of aerial bombardment destroyed not only hundreds of Iraqi vehicles and artillery pieces, but also the Iraqi supply lines and--most important--the Iraqis’ morale. “We didn’t know how effective the air war would be,” Lt. Gen. Thomas W. Kelly, operations chief for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Thursday. “We didn’t know the amount of destruction that had been caused.”

Fear: The high-tech weapons on which the Pentagon had staked its war plans would jam, break or bog down in the unforgiving environment of desert combat.

Even some critics of high-tech weaponry, like Carroll, are admitting that their fears turned out to be unfounded. “The M-1 tank seems to have worked fine,” Carroll admits. “A lot of people were expecting problems with the propulsion, but that didn’t happen. The Patriot missile’s effectiveness has been a pleasant surprise. That was a crash program and nobody knew whether it was going to work or not. And ECMs (electronic countermeasures--used to jam or fool enemy radar) are a plus we ought to mention. The Iraqis hadn’t the slightest ability to detect where our planes were.”

Among the reasons the weaponry worked, Army officers say, was that the troops had as much as five months to get ready for war. That enabled Schwarzkopf to set up a gigantic logistics operation to deliver spare parts whenever and wherever they were needed.

Fear: Dozens of women soldiers would come home in body bags, heightening Americans’ angst about the war and possibly eroding public support for the U.S. deployment.

Although women are barred from direct combat duty, thousands of American women served in the combat zone, which is dangerous enough, and some even piloted helicopters ferrying the 101st Airborne Division deep inside Iraq.

But of an estimated 32,000 women serving in the war, only three were listed as killed in action--all trapped in their barracks in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, when a Scud missile warhead struck the building. A fourth, Army Spec. 4 Melissa Rathbun-Nealy, was apparently captured by Iraqi troops and is listed as missing in action. All four women were unmarried. The main reason that the number of women casualties was so low was that there were so few casualties overall.

Fear: Iraq would unleash a wave of anti-Western terrorism around the world.

William M. Baker, assistant FBI director for criminal investigations, acknowledges that the tally of attacks against Western targets has been thankfully low, confined largely to small-scale vandalism. “The rush to Baghdad by certain terrorist groups cut them off once the conflict began,” he says. The allied air war made it difficult for them to move in and out of the country.

At the same time, Baker points out, some terrorist groups were “held down by governments” outside Iraq. He declines to be more specific, but another official notes that Syria and Libya--both of which have sponsored terrorism in the past--had condemned Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.

Still, the FBI official warns that this fear remains very much alive, and that terrorists bombed Pan Am Flight 103 in December, 1988, five months after a U.S. warship shot down an Iranian airliner. Investigators believe the Pan Am bombing was done by a terrorist cell seeking revenge for the Iranian plane and notes that it takes time even for an experienced terrorist cell to pull off such an act.

“I would caution that there is no end time limit to this,” he says. “We applaud the approaching end of the conflict, but our alert goes on.”

Fear: Saddam Hussein would stop the allied armies in their tracks--and inflict terrible casualties--by hurling his much-vaunted chemical weapons at them.

This was the biggest surprise to doomsayers and military planners alike: Why didn’t the Iraqis fire their chemical-warhead artillery shells to slow the allied advance? “I don’t know the answer, but thank God they didn’t,” Schwarzkopf said Wednesday.

Possible reasons include the five-week-long allied air campaign, which eventually concentrated on destroying Iraqi artillery; the rapid breakthrough of coalition troops, which prompted many Iraqis to flee, and even a freak storm that turned the prevailing north wind around so that any chemicals the Iraqis hurled would have backfired on them.

It was even possible that Hussein made his decision not to fire his chemical weapons in response to repeated U.S. warnings that any use would draw a massive and deadly response. “We never told them exactly what that meant,” one senior official said--in part to leave the Iraqis wondering whether the United States was thinking of using nuclear weapons. (It wasn’t, the official said later.)

Fear: Arabs, angered by the U.S.-led campaign to crush Saddam Hussein, would take to the streets, forcing one or more of the coalition’s Arab members to withdraw.

“It didn’t happen,” says William B. Quandt, a Brookings Institution analyst who was one of the scholars who had warned of an adverse reaction among Arabs to an American-led war. “But that doesn’t mean the war has been without any effect on the internal politics of these countries. It may just mean we haven’t seen all the effects yet.”

Egypt’s college campuses did erupt in anti-war protests before the ground war, but they had no apparent effect on the policies of President Hosni Mubarak. Algeria and Jordan saw some demonstrations earlier, but those countries were not members of the anti-Iraq coalition.

The main political effect of the war, Quandt suggests, was “a new kind of division in the Arab world.” Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait--the seizure of one Arab country by another--split the Arab League more deeply than ever before. But that also meant that the war was not a simple battle between Arabs and non-Arabs--a factor that some analysts say may have dampened the protests.

Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to Washington, Prince Bandar ibn Sultan, offers a simpler explanation: “The pundits underestimated the Arab masses,” he declares. “The Arab masses were with us.”

Fear: The anti-Iraq coalition would collapse because of differences over war aims. France and the Soviet Union would seek a compromise with Saddam Hussein and seek to end the war on Baghdad’s terms.

France did put forth a compromise plan on the eve of the war in January, promising Hussein it would back an international conference on the Arab-Israeli conflict if he would agree to withdraw from Kuwait. The Soviet Union offered a series of possible compromises in February in an attempt to halt the air war and forestall the ground invasion of Iraq last week. But neither bargained on Hussein himself. “Nobody got anywhere, because of the astonishing stubbornness of Saddam Hussein,” a French diplomat says.

“The coalition needed constant tending but never came close to needing mending,” a senior State Department official said. “It was preventive maintenance rather than repairs.” Once the French were on board, “they were completely on board,” he asserts. “The Soviets came right up to the edge (of withdrawing their support), but they never crossed the line. It was clear that, in their minds, the U.S.-Soviet relationship came first.”

There also was a more important factor in the Soviet Union’s decision not to try to stop the war, one senior official points out: “They didn’t trust Saddam to keep his word.” As a result, he says, some Soviet officials seemed distinctly unenthusiastic about the compromise plan their own government was trumpeting. And when President Bush rejected Iraq’s proposed conditions, every member of the coalition backed him up.

Fear: The war would send the price of oil rocketing from the pre-crisis level of $18 a barrel to $60 or even more, crippling the world economy.

What really happened: The price of oil rose to $41 a barrel in September, but by early this week it had dropped to only $18.50 a barrel.

“Governments handled it just right by releasing much of their strategic petroleum stocks,” says Philip Verleger of the Washington-based Institute for International Economics. “This will go down as the greatest success for energy policy in the 20th Century.”

Fear: Israel would be drawn into the war, through Iraq’s Scud attacks or some other means--and that would prompt an immediate split in the coalition and uproar in the Arab world.

“That was the coalition’s biggest test,” a senior State Department official says. After Iraq attacked Israel with Scuds, President Bush telephoned Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir to assure him of American concern, and to explain to him how grateful he would be if Israel refrained from any response. Bush also dispatched Patriot missiles to Israel to defend against any further Scud attacks. And he sent Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence S. Eagleburger to Jerusalem for three days of high-visibility hand-holding with the Israeli government.

Still, some Administration officials admit that they expected Israel to retaliate against Iraq--with unpredictable results for the coalition.

Instead, the Israelis, impressed by the sudden flood of political credit they were receiving in Washington, stayed their hand. (They did, however, tell Eagleburger that they expected at least $13 billion in additional U.S. aid to compensate for war damage, and Eagleburger promised that they would get serious consideration. Footnote: Israel got turned down on the $13 billion.)

Equally surprising was the reaction from the Arab members of the anti-Iraq coalition. Even Syria, Israel’s sworn enemy, quietly indicated that it would understand if Israel felt compelled to respond. “Nobody in the coalition came to us and said, ‘If Israel gets in, we’re getting out,’ ” a senior official says.

Fear: In time, the war would turn into a Vietnam-style quagmire, with steadily diminishing public support at home.

This war was so short that there never was enough time for the public to dampen its support. With only six weeks from beginning to end, the initial support never dropped off, notes John E. Mueller, a University of Rochester expert on public opinion during wartime. And American casualties remained too low to sap public support. Enemy casualties, Mueller notes, “have no discernible effect” on the U.S. public’s support for wars.

At the same time, Hussein’s own actions--creating a huge oil spill in the Persian Gulf, torching Kuwait’s oil wells, carrying out atrocities in Kuwait city and publicly displaying allied POWs in violation of international rules of war--helped the Administration maintain public support by portraying him as a villain.

Despite all the skill and wise decisions, however, there was one string of luck that the allies enjoyed and that helped them avoid the pitfalls that had been forecast: the miscalculations and missteps of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein.

In keeping the coalition solid, “Saddam was the one who relieved the pressure by not putting anything out there for people to look at (as a compromise). In almost every case, he made it easier to hold the coalition together,” a senior State Department official says.

And on the field of battle, an Army planner says: “The luckiest thing was that the guy is a dummy. He grossly underestimated his enemy; he underestimated our will to fight; he underestimated our technology. . . . He made a lot of assumptions that were just plain wrong. He put up a World War I defense--and then didn’t defend it properly.”

Therein may lie the most important lesson: “We were very lucky that our enemy was Saddam Hussein,” says Harvard’s Joseph Nye. “There are going to be other conflicts in the world, and we won’t always be that lucky.”

Times staff writers John M. Broder, Melissa Healy, Ronald J. Ostrow and Robert C. Toth contributed to this report.