NEWS ANALYSIS : Bush Tried Not to Step Into Iraqi ‘Quagmire’ : Kurds: But the depth of the commitment may be largely out of U.S. control.

The human disaster in the mountains of Kurdistan has forced President Bush to take a step he resisted for more than a month: accepting an essentially open-ended commitment to defend hundreds of thousands of Kurds well inside the territory of a hostile Iraq.

For weeks, Administration officials had insisted that the U.S. military could not take major steps to protect the Kurds because to do so would lead inexorably to “a quagmire” of involvement in Iraq’s bloody internal strife.

To avoid that outcome, the Administration tried a series of half-steps--first an unsuccessful attempt to bluff Iraqi President Saddam Hussein into leaving the Kurds alone, then an attempt to aid the refugees with a long-distance airdrop campaign.

As recently as Sunday, White House officials were confidently insisting that U.S. involvement in aiding the Kurds could be wrapped up by the month’s end. But now, “we don’t know” how long the direct U.S. role inside Iraq will last, Bush acknowledged in announcing creation of the special refugee encampments.

Moreover, the depth of the commitment may be largely out of U.S. control. Asked how many U.S. troops might be needed at the encampments, Bush acknowledged that is up to the Kurds. “The problem isn’t what we think about it,” he said. “The problem is what do these Kurdish refugees who have been brutalized by this man think?”

Administration officials say they will try to keep direct U.S. military involvement to a minimum, relying on French, British and Turkish forces as much as possible and attempting to keep U.S. combat troops out of Iraq. At the same time, Bush conceded, the ground force will have to be large enough to persuade the Kurds that they would be safe going home.

Among the potential problems ahead, according to analysts: What will Bush do if the Iraqi army renews attacks against the Kurds? And how will the Administration react if the Kurds use the new, protected refugee camps as bases from which to renew their revolt against Baghdad?

“This is one of those dark alleys,” said Augustus Richard Norton, a Middle East expert with the International Peace Academy in New York. “It’s hard to see where it ends.”

The most immediate, unanswered question is how the Iraqis will react.

A senior Pentagon official noted that the basic assumption underlying the current plan is that few troops will be needed to guard the refugee camps “because the Iraqis are not going to be dumb enough to screw around with them.”

But if that assumption proves false, Bush has set no limits on the numbers that could be sent in if needed, he added.

Even if the Iraqis prove docile, the Kurds themselves may become a serious problem. The long-term hope is that--once the immediate crisis of food and shelter is finished, and once Hussein is forced from power--the Kurds and Iraq’s many other factions “could reconcile their differences and keep that country with its proud traditions intact,” Bush said. The problem, Norton noted, is that neither the Kurds nor Iraq’s central government has shown any desire for reconciliation in a battle that goes back for generations.

“The Kurds want independence, or at least substantial autonomy, and the fact of the matter is we’re giving them that,” Norton said.

The U.S. and its allies will now be forcibly preventing Iraq’s army from assuming control of a substantial chunk of the northern part of the country, and leaders of the Kurdish rebellion will have every reason to try to make that involvement as permanent as possible.

Administration officials are well aware of those problems and cited them often to reporters over the last two weeks in answer to questions about why Bush was trying to avoid involvement in the refugee problem.

But in the end, Bush’s policy of distancing himself crumbled under two separate sets of pressures. At home, White House officials have been concerned about the nonstop television pictures of starving children and ragged women dragging through the mud of the Kurdish mountains and the growing criticism that Bush had launched a war against Iraq but then had failed to take care of the war’s innocent victims.

Abroad, Bush faced pleas from his ally, Turkish President Turgut Ozal, to do something to get the hundreds of thousands of Kurdish refugees out of his territory and back into Iraq. Turkey, like Iraq, has long battled a restive Kurdish population, and Administration officials say Ozal fears that the huge number of refugees could destabilize his country’s eastern region.