Allies Agree on Iraq, Bush Says : Summit: Major nations support military action if Hussein is hiding nuclear program, President declares. Baker will be sent to Mideast at end of London talks.

President Bush said Monday that the United States has received solid support from its major allies for the military attack against Iraq that officials say is likely to come if a U.N. inspection team concludes that Saddam Hussein is still concealing elements of his nuclear weapons program.

Bush told reporters that he has received expressions of “strong, strong support” for military action if it is warranted.

“Most countries, recognizing the terrible danger of this man going forward with a nuclear program, would be of the same mind,” the President added.

At the same time, Bush--on his first full day in London for the annual economic summit--ordered Secretary of State James A. Baker III to fly to the Middle East as soon as the summit ends for a new round of shuttle diplomacy. Bush acted after receiving a message from Syrian President Hafez Assad that the White House characterized as offering “new opportunities” for progress on the Arab-Israeli peace process.

Bush termed the development “a breakthrough” but tempered his optimism: “We’ve got to be careful until the details are finalized.”

Baker had been scheduled to accompany Bush to Greece and Turkey at the end of the London summit.

The warning that the allies are united behind renewed military action against Iraq if the Hussein regime continues to defy U.N. resolutions on the nuclear issue is evidence that the alliance’s own pressing economic problems--which range from restarting stalled negotiations on world trade liberalization to concerted action on environmental problems--are already being overshadowed by other foreign policy and political issues. These include Baker’s hurriedly scheduled Mideast trip, as well as continuing negotiations on a START treaty to reduce long-range nuclear weapons and a visit here Wednesday by Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev to seek financial aid for the deteriorating Soviet economy.

Officials from the other summit nations--Britain, France, Italy, Germany, Canada and Japan--said privately that they would support U.S.-led military action against Baghdad if it became necessary, although the subject of such a commitment did not come up directly at the various meetings among chiefs of government and foreign ministers Monday because, as one senior diplomat put it, “we didn’t come here to unleash the dogs of war.”

A senior Bush Administration official, who agreed to be interviewed on condition of anonymity, said that “if the U.N. team comes out of Iraq and is satisfied that all nuclear weapons equipment and facilities have been identified and are being destroyed as required by U.N. resolutions, then fine. But if they are not satisfied and believe facilities are being concealed, that’s another story.”

Although he called chances of a military attack “pretty good” if the U.N. team is not satisfied, no action apparently could be taken for at least the next 10 days because the U.N. Security Council said last Friday that it was giving Iraq two weeks to disclose all nuclear facilities or face the consequences.

White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater, in a news briefing here Monday, said that Bush has been clear about his concern about the Iraqi nuclear threat in his discussions with other allied leaders. Fitzwater said that, should military action be necessary, the allies would find it “understandable and reasonable.”

It was Fitzwater who announced that Baker will leave immediately after the end of the summit Wednesday for visits to Israel, Syria, Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia to press for support of Bush’s proposal for a U.S.- and Soviet-sponsored Mideast peace conference.

Plans for the Mideast trip were hurriedly made after the President received a letter Sunday from Syria’s Assad reacting positively to the American peace plan.

Assad’s letter, in reply to one from Bush, “represents real movement in the search for peace, and it goes well beyond any previous position taken by Syria,” Fitzwater said, although he declined to provide details on the contents of Assad’s letter.

Underscoring the importance of Baker’s trip, Fitzwater--about four hours after an earlier briefing--returned to the podium in the White House briefing room at the London Hilton Hotel on Park Lane to announce the trip. He declared that both Bush and Baker were hopeful that progress could be made that would lead to direct bilateral and multilateral peace negotiations in the Mideast.

The U.S. peace proposal would provide for a general peace conference involving Israel and its neighboring Arab countries under U.S. and Soviet auspices with U.N. officials present as observers.

The conference would be aimed at spurring bilateral talks between Israel and the Arab countries, as well as with Palestinian representatives.

So far, the United States and Israel have held no direct discussions on Assad’s letter, at least at the senior government level, Fitzwater said. The Israelis have been cool toward the U.S. peace proposal. One Israeli official complained that Assad’s letter “makes us look like the stubborn ones.”

British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd apparently agrees with the Israeli official’s assessment. Asked in a radio interview if Assad’s letter “has now put the onus for the moment back on Israel to respond with some kind of change in policy which would in turn let the process go forward to the next stage,” Hurd replied enthusiastically: “Exactly, you put it well!”

In Israel, Foreign Minister David Levy told a committee in Parliament that Baker will arrive early next week and said he hopes that Baker will bring word of a change in Syria’s “hard-line position.”

“If there is a positive turn, then we will welcome it,” Levy said.

Other top officials in the right-wing government of Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir welcomed Syria’s decision as long as Syria intends to sign a peace treaty with Israel and does not expect to get back the Golan Heights, which Israel occupied in the 1967 Middle East War and later annexed.

“If indeed the Syrians have expressed a willingness to sit down with Israel on a peace treaty with Israel, it’s fabulous,” said Defense Minister Moshe Arens.

Privately, Israeli officials were bracing for pressure from the United States to attend a peace conference against their will. “This is the moment of truth for Shamir’s government,” declared Haaretz, an influential daily newspaper. “Right or wrong, the current government will be called upon to make compromises.”

In other political developments, Bush Administration officials said that:

* There is now better than a 50-50 chance that Washington and Moscow will be able to reach agreement on a treaty to limit long-range nuclear weapons by the time the summit ends Wednesday.

Bush has held out hope that agreement can be reached in time for a treaty-signing ceremony that would be held in Moscow in late July or early August. But he has made it clear no summit will be scheduled until there is agreement on the treaty.

* Bush and other summit leaders will be expecting Gorbachev to bring to their discussions Wednesday a strong and irrevocable commitment to revitalizing the Soviet economy and adopting a market-based economy based on the Western system if he hopes to receive a sympathetic hearing for his plea for Western aid, although some sources indicated that that expectation may be over-optimistic.

The Soviet Union is not a participant in the economic summit, but Gorbachev has been invited to meet with the leaders of the so-called Group of Seven at the summit’s close Wednesday. Gorbachev will also have a one-on-one meeting with Bush at lunch that day.

On the Iraqi nuclear issue, Bush said before coming here that he still has reason to believe that Hussein is hiding nuclear facilities “and is not coming totally clean.” He said he was anticipating a unanimous view of the other G-7 leaders that “we’ve got to keep our eyes open and not be lulled by some letter or some very belated offering from Saddam Hussein that he is now willing to do that which he . . . should have done a long time ago.”

Last week, Administration officials said a 29-page report from Iraq claiming that its nuclear program was solely for peaceful purposes contained “significant omissions and discrepancies” intended to hide the truth.

On Sunday, after Bush and French President Francois Mitterrand suggested that Iraq might face a military attack if it continued to hide nuclear facilities, Baghdad provided a more detailed picture of its nuclear program. But Dimitri Perricos, head of the 37-member U.N. inspection team now in Baghdad, declined to say whether the list satisfies all demands made in the U.N. Security Council resolution ending the Gulf War.

The latest list, Perricos said, does include information in all areas requested.

At the United Nations, nuclear inspectors just back from Iraq told the Security Council on Monday that they examined two huge production facilities designed to enrich uranium for weapons. Both plants, they said, were 18 to 24 months away from production when they were badly damaged by allied planes during the Persian Gulf War.

Jay C. Davis, a nuclear scientist director of the center for accelerator mass spectrometry at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and a member of the inspection team, said the experts estimated that, once in operation, the plants at Ash Sharqat and Tarmiyah could each have turned out enough weapons-grade uranium to produce one atomic bomb each a year.

Davis told a news conference after a private briefing for members of the Security Council that several West European firms had helped Iraq build the hardware for the enrichment plants.

British Foreign Secretary Hurd emphasized that the summit countries are solidly behind U.S. warnings to Hussein that he must divest Iraq of any nuclear weapons capability. “We are all very clear--Britain, the United States, France, others--that one way or another we are going to prevent Iraq becoming a nuclear power.”

And a British spokesman said Monday that “we all agree that Iraq is cheating on the cease-fire” it agreed to with the allies on Feb. 28 to end the war but said they would await a report of the U.N. inspection team before deciding what to do.

A European Community official said Monday: “President Bush and Secretary Baker have played this very skillfully. They have rounded up support under U.N. resolutions, and I don’t think anyone . . . in Europe would seriously object to the use of force to wipe out Iraqi nuclear weapons capability.”

The Soviet Union, which reluctantly went along with the U.S.-led attack last January that drove Iraqi forces out of Kuwait, is less than enthusiastic about renewing military action against Iraq.

A Soviet spokesman, Vitaly N. Ignatenko, said that in deciding how to move against the Iraqis in the event they fail to disclose all nuclear facilities, the Soviets “want to see all avenues explored . . . excluding military action.”

Although the remainder of allied forces are being withdrawn from Iraq this week and the number of U.S. troops in the Persian Gulf region has dwindled to 44,000, or less than 10% of their wartime peak, the United States continues to maintain enough military assets in the region to launch a major aerial assault on Iraq.

Times staff writers Daniel Williams in Jerusalem and John J. Goldman at the United Nations contributed to this story.

Summit Scorecard

The developments: As the 16th annual economic summit opened, President Bush said he had received support from the leaders of the six other industrial nations for a military strike against Iraq if President Saddam Hussein does not dismantle his nuclear weapons facilities. They also cautioned that the economic reform plan presented to them privately by Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev is inadequate and won’t merit sizable Western aid, as Gorbachev had hoped.

* Despite earlier hints that Germany might bolt from the other allies and press for massive Western aid to Moscow, Bonn so far is sticking with the majority view that any aid should be modest and geared mainly to providing technical assistance. * Britain, Japan and the United States are adamant against providing anything beyond technical advice--on grounds that the money would be wasted unless the Soviets make needed economic reforms. Outlook: The G-7 leaders probably will come up with an aid package that allows Gorbachev to save face at home but still eschews any sizable cash grants. Most likely: Giving Moscow associate status in the International Monetary Fund and World Bank.

On tap today: The seven are expected to discuss ways to jump-start the stalled “Uruguay Round” of global trade-liberalization talks.

* Talks have been at an impasse since last spring. * Little movement is likely until later this year. Quotable: It would be naive to say that we expect President Gorbachev to come away from the meeting (with Western leaders on Wednesday) with eight black limousines filled to the brim with money.”

--Vitaly N. Ignatenko, spokesman for Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev

By the numbers: The summit is expected to cost close to $18 million--just slightly less than the $20 million spent on last year’s G-7 summit in Houston.

* The summit has attracted 3,021 journalists from 49 countries. U.S. newspapers and television networks have sent 924. Gabon, Venezuela, Nigeria and Luxembourg each sent one.

* The seven heads of government, their delegations and the journalists are expected to consume 525 pounds of British beef and 84 fresh Scotch salmon. In all, the group will eat 32,000 meals--some donated by private industry.

Remembrances: The first economic summit was held in Rambouillet, France, in 1975 with only five major participants--the United States, Japan, West Germany, Britain and France. Italy and Canada joined the group in 1976.