Saudi King Fahd Agrees to Support New U.S. Efforts for Mideast Peace : Diplomacy: Officials report on monarch’s backing after visit by Secretary of State Baker.

King Fahd of Saudi Arabia agreed Friday to take an active role in support of Bush Administration efforts toward peace in the Middle East, U.S. officials said, but offered no specific commitments for Saudi action.

“They made it clear that they want to work closely with us,” a senior official said of the Saudis, briefing reporters after Secretary of State James A. Baker III met with Fahd for 2 1/2 hours at the king’s opulent Yamama Palace.

He said Baker outlined to the king the planned U.S. effort to pursue four goals at once: Arab-Israeli peace agreements, security arrangements in the Persian Gulf, regional arms-control pacts and economic development.

“There was no hesitation on their part,” the official said. “There was clearly agreement that it was important to make progress in all these areas.”

At the same time, he acknowledged, the Saudi monarch made no specific commitment toward any of those goals.

“These were not decision-making meetings,” the official said.

U.S. officials have said they hope Saudi Arabia will soon take specific steps toward rapprochement with Israel, such as ending the boycott of U.S. firms that do business in the Jewish state.

But a senior official traveling with Baker indicated that any such Arab concession may only come once Israel agrees to make a reciprocal gesture.

Asked whom he expects to move first, Israel or the Arabs, the official paused and said: “There are two tracks.”

Baker and his aides have been promoting a “two-track” approach to the long-intractable Arab-Israeli conflict. One track would focus on developing normal relations between Israel and the surrounding Arab countries, beginning with “confidence-building measures” in such areas as border security, water rights and trade. A second track would focus on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, seeking new ways to negotiate some form of autonomy or independence for the Arab-populated West Bank and Gaza Strip.

If King Fahd follows through on his general commitment to aid the American effort, it would mark a new height of activism for Saudi Arabia, and it would also reflect Bush’s new reliance on the desert kingdom as the main pillar of U.S. Middle East policy.

In the past, Saudi Arabia has played a low-key and often invisible role in regional diplomacy, quietly supporting its allies with money but rarely working openly to promote peace efforts. Now, however, both U.S. and Saudi officials say the U.S.-Saudi victory in the Persian Gulf War has emboldened the ruling Royal Family to take a more active and visible role.

Part of that, as well, is a new Saudi willingness to be seen as an active partner of the United States--an attitude that was less apparent before Fahd decided last fall that the defense of his kingdom required a full embrace of the U.S. armed forces.

“If you look at the last seven months, there was a qualitative change in the nature of the relationship,” a senior official said.

Baker and Fahd also discussed the kind of continuing military presence the United States should maintain in the Gulf and agreed on what one official called “a capable naval presence and air and ground exercising.”

He declined to be more specific, although his remark suggested that the Administration has backed off the idea, expressed earlier by some officials, including Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, that U.S. Air Force units might be permanently stationed in the kingdom.

The official said Baker had expressed support for the Arab decision to send a peacekeeping force staffed mostly by Egypt and Syria to Kuwait. But the Administration is also suggesting that the force be placed under the authority of the U.N. Security Council--which would give the United States a major role in determining the new force’s mandate and longevity.

“They listened in very good spirit and indicated that they wanted to think through what we said,” one official said of the Saudis. They also said they did not want to make any specific commitments on security arrangements until they consult with other Arab governments, he said.

Officials said the issue of Saudi Arabia’s pledge to pay $13.5 billion toward the 1991 costs of the U.S. military deployment in the Gulf never came up in the talks because, as one senior diplomat here explained, “the Saudis have made it clear that they will meet the commitment.”

Fahd and Baker also agreed that they would welcome the overthrow of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, officials who attended the meeting said.

But U.S. and Saudi officials declined to say what, if anything, they are doing to reach that goal. Saudi Arabia has long maintained close contact with officers in Iraq’s armed forces, which some experts identify as the most probable source of any challenge to Hussein.

A U.S. official said both the Saudis and the Americans are confident that Hussein “isn’t going to last more than a year.”

But the Saudis--though intent on seeing Hussein toppled--also want to avoid an outcome in which southern Iraq fell under control of hostile forces, the official noted. An abortive uprising this week in that area, which lies above Saudi Arabia’s northern border, was led by radical Shiite Muslims apparently allied with Iran. Saudi Arabia is ruled by members of the larger Sunni Muslim sect, but the kingdom’s Eastern Province includes a large Shiite population.

“The last thing the Saudis want is a Shiite state that starts reaching down into their Eastern Province,” the official said.

He noted that U.S. officials have little reliable information on what is going on inside Iraq. “We have almost no human intelligence coming out of there,” he said.

Baker’s stop in Riyadh was the first of a 10-day, seven-nation trip to the Middle East and the Soviet Union. He is scheduled to visit the emir of Kuwait today in Taif, the Saudi mountain resort where the emir has remained in exile more than a week after his homeland was freed from Iraqi occupation.