Baker to Tell Syria It Faces Isolation : Mideast: He is expected to use Gulf nations’ agreement to talk with Israel as a lever to get Assad to the table. The Israeli-Arab gap is seen ‘narrowing.’

Secretary of State James A. Baker III arrived in Syria on Saturday, determined to use the Gulf Cooperation Council’s new willingness to talk peace with Israel as a lever to bring President Hafez Assad’s regime to the negotiating table.

Baker’s line of argument, a senior Administration official said, will be to warn Assad that he faces renewed isolation in the Arab world if he permits an Arab-Israeli peace conference to go ahead without him.

After spending almost a decade as the Arab world’s odd man out for supporting non-Arab Iran against Arab Iraq in the first Gulf war, Syria can be expected to be reluctant to stray too far from the mainstream.

Arriving in Damascus late Saturday, Baker said the GCC decision was an important one which “demonstrates that Arab governments will attend a conference, if a conference is held.”

Earlier, talking to reporters aboard his U.S. Air Force jetliner on the flight from Washington to Syria at the start of his fourth trip to the Middle East in just over two months, Baker said he believes that his efforts are “narrowing the differences” between Israel and its Arab adversaries over arrangements for a regional peace conference to be co-sponsored by the United States and the Soviet Union.

Nevertheless, both Israel and Syria have made it clear that they are unwilling, so far, to participate on any terms that might be acceptable to the other.

The senior Administration official said that if Baker fails to line up participation in a full-scale peace conference, his fallback position would be to advocate a series of single-subject meetings on such topics as water resources, environmental protection and arms control.

Baker’s present plan is to conduct the specialized discussions as an appendix to the main conference. But when the senior official was asked if the smaller meetings could take place first, even without agreement to convene the full conference, he replied that such a procedure was possible “if you can’t do any better than that.”

“That, at least, is a step toward peace,” the official said. “We’re still working to try and do better than that in the sense of having a conference that would launch direct bilateral negotiations between Israel and . . . the neighbors surrounding it with whom they have specific grievances.”

The six-nation GCC formally announced Saturday that it is prepared to send its secretary general as an observer to the full-scale conference and to participate as individual nations in the single-subject working groups. The agreement, which Baker said he had “worked very hard” to bring about, is seen primarily as a way to make the conference more attractive to Israel.

The announcement was made in Luxembourg where GCC foreign ministers were holding talks with their European Community counterparts.

“We have been following all the efforts to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict and the Palestinian problem on the basis of (United Nations) Security Council resolutions 242 and 338 and we think U.S. efforts toward this deserve support from all of us,” the announcement said.

The GCC groups Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates.

Baker hopes the GCC announcement will also have an impact on Syria, even though Assad has strongly opposed participation in the peace process by Saudi Arabia and other Arab states that do not border on Israel. By keeping the Gulf states out, Assad had hoped to limit the scope of the talks to the Israeli occupation of the Golan Heights and other formerly Arab territory.

The senior official said GCC participation “shows that there are Arab countries who heretofore have been unwilling to sit with Israel” that are now ready to do so.

Nevertheless, Assad may continue to hold out despite all the pressure Baker can bring to bear. Without Syria, the conference would be far less significant than it would be with Damascus participating. However, it is at least conceivable that the meeting could take place with just Israel, Egypt, Jordan, the Palestinians and the GCC at the table. Before the GCC announcement, a conference without Syria would have been all but impossible.

Two weeks ago, when Saudi Arabia said it would not attend the proposed conference, the decision seemed to strike a near-fatal blow to Baker’s plan to use a regional conference to launch direct, face-to-face negotiations between Israel and Arab governments on one track and between Israel and the Palestinian residents of the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip on another track. Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir’s government wants normal relations with the neighboring Arab states but has very little interest in internationally sponsored talks with the Palestinians. On the other hand, Arab governments want to settle the Palestinian problem but are reluctant to get into bilateral negotiations with Israel.

Baker’s two-track plan was intended as a compromise. But without Saudi Arabia, there seemed to be little left of the state-to-state track to attract Israel. It is not clear whether the latest GCC plan will be acceptable to Jerusalem, but Baker insisted that it was an improvement over direct Saudi participation.

“We have the GCC there. . . . And we have the Saudis committing to sit down face-to-face with Israel (in the proposed single-subject groups) and we have five other Arab states,” Baker said.

Meanwhile, the senior Administration official said the United States has urged Saudi Arabia and other members of the Arab League to suspend their economic boycott of firms doing business with Israel in exchange for suspension of construction of Jewish settlements in the Israeli-occupied territories.

“We haven’t gotten anything from either side,” the official said.

Although Baker has said in the past that such a trade-off might be an early outcome of possible peace talks, U.S. officials had not previously revealed that the idea had already been rebuffed by both the Israelis and the Arabs.