NEWS ANALYSIS : U.S., Mideast Are Wedded, and No Divorce Is Possible : Diplomacy: The Gulf War has effectively consigned the volatile region to American custodianship.

Just after he ordered American troops to the Middle East last September, President Bush warned the public that the United States would remain a key factor in the Middle East for some time to come.

“Our interest, our involvement in the Gulf is not transitory,” he told Congress. “Long after all our troops come home . . . there will be a lasting role for the United States in assisting the nations of the Persian Gulf.”

Now, a year after Iraq invaded Kuwait, Operation Desert Storm is over, and America is more deeply enmeshed in the Middle East than ever. And it cannot easily extricate itself or sail away, as it did in similar crises in Lebanon in 1958 and again between 1982 and 1984 and in the 1987-88 naval deployment in the Persian Gulf.

Indeed, the 42-day Gulf War has effectively consigned the world’s most volatile region to U.S. custodianship. “There’s no way out of the Middle East for the United States now,” concedes a senior U.S. official. “Whatever happens, we’re stuck.”

The Bush Administration is already getting a taste of its new responsibilities. The U.S. commitment in the Persian Gulf region has three major aims--the security of the region’s sheikdoms, the maintenance of a force in Turkey and a solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict.

In Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, the last ground troops are scheduled to depart this fall. Still, to back up the oil-rich but virtually defenseless sheikdoms, another American carrier task force will be deployed indefinitely in or near the Persian Gulf. And hundreds, probably thousands, of troops will be dispatched on prolonged training missions, U.S. officials say.

Although the last American troops left Iraq in mid-July, to deter Iraqi reprisals against the vulnerable northern Kurds a new U.S.-led mobile strike force has been assembled in neighboring Turkey and a U.S. carrier task force has been stationed in the eastern Mediterranean.

Even an Arab-Israeli peace, if it comes, will mean a broader U.S. commitment.

“The peace process will further deepen U.S. involvement because, in the end, the United States will have to provide the guarantees to make it work or last,” a U.S. senior official said. “That will clearly mean political guarantees. It will probably mean new funding or aid or credits and probably to more than one party. It could even involve another military deployment. We’re in for the long haul.”

The transfer of American troops now stationed in Europe to the Gulf in the run-up to the war may have been a harbinger, he added. “We’re gradually decreasing in Europe and gradually increasing in the Mideast. It may be a trend.”

The new American role reflects both the strengths and weaknesses of the United States’ biggest, boldest intervention in the Middle East.

During the first seven months of the crisis, the U.S.-orchestrated coalition scored startling successes:

Kuwait was swiftly liberated, its sovereignty and ruling family restored. The Iraqi threat to other Gulf emirates was checked, at least short-term, and most of its weapons of mass destruction apparently were discovered, disclosed or destroyed. The flow of Gulf oil is once again unimpeded.

The United States achieved some implicit goals during the Persian Gulf conflict: It tested--and proved--the technological superiority of American arms and aircraft. Through unprecedented international cooperation, it thwarted terrorism spectaculars and pressured Baghdad to end the largest single hostage crisis in modern times. It revitalized the United Nations and introduced the principle of collective security--in participation and funding--to deal with regional conflicts.

It also achieved some unexpected gains: Old foes, such as the Soviet Union and Syria, became new partners, at least temporarily. The aftermath opened the way for a new U.S. push on the ever-elusive peace between Arabs and Israelis; the only Arab rejectionist state now is irrelevant Libya. And, with much fanfare, the Vietnam era formally ended.

But the last five months of the yearlong crisis, since the guns fell silent, have also underscored U.S. vulnerabilities in the wake of Operation Desert Storm:

* Saddam Hussein still is the dictator in Iraq; neither the southern Shiites nor the northern Kurds are safe from his wrath. Indefinite U.N. sanctions are likely to take a higher toll on the Iraqi people than on their leadership. And the most developed and literate country in the Arab world, bombed back to a pre-industrial state, may require a generation or more to rebuild just to 1990 levels.

* Kuwait is more unstable--politically, economically and militarily--than at any time since it gained independence from Britain. The new U.S.-crafted triad of power--Saudi Arabia, Syria and Egypt--has already crumbled. Without a strong leader or idea for direction, the Arab world is floundering--and increasingly susceptible to the Islamic appeal that makes the West so uncomfortable. Democracy is, so far, not spreading.

* At least six Middle East states still have weapons of mass destruction that they show no signs of wanting to give up. Rather than scare or discourage countries away from advanced armaments, the war increased the clamor for ever more sophisticated arsenals and aircraft.

* And for all the hope surrounding new talks to end 43 years of Arab-Israeli tension and strife, even the most positive projections put real peace years away.

In other words, the Bush Administration got much of what it wanted over the last year. The overlapping outcomes of both the Cold War and the Gulf War ensured that, for the foreseeable future, the United States is not only the dominant power in the oil-rich region, it is the only power.

“But with victory comes responsibility,” says Augustus Richard Norton, a fellow at the International Peace Academy in New York who served with the United Nations in the Middle East. “The responsibilities are much more numerous than the Administration may have anticipated. The United States proved it can be effective in implementing Mideast policy. As a result, many states in the region expect the United States to expand its successful diplomacy.”

The senior official admits: “Peace is always harder. That’s a tough thing to remember when you’re winning so decisively. Peace is bound to cost us more, far more than the war did--in every way.”

It is also bound to take much longer. The pressures now facing the Bush Administration are unprecedented, U.S. officials and experts on the region agree. While most of the key players in the region want--by choice or by lack of alternatives--further U.S. leadership, their agendas are often conflicting.

Among them:

* The pro-democracy and former resistance forces in Kuwait are counting on U.S. pressure to create political openings in the tiny city-state. But the ruling Sabah family, which the U.S.-led coalition restored to the throne, is pressing Washington to help secure its fragile hold on power--against both external and internal challenges.

* In the other emirates, similar conditions prevail. Whatever weapons their petrodollars can buy, they still want a foreign presence or U.S. guarantees to prop them up. Yet each is determined to maintain a semblance of independence to the point of rebuffing any diplomatic or military quid pro quo--such as full-fledged involvement in the peace process or Egyptian and Syrian troops on their turf.

* Iraqi opposition and minorities, particularly the Kurds, are dependent on U.S. leadership to keep their people, and thereby their causes, alive. But Baghdad’s neighbors are counting on the Administration’s support for Iraq’s territorial integrity to keep the country from splintering into troublesome ethnic or sectarian pieces.

* On a broader Mideast peace, the front-line states of Syria, Jordan, Egypt and Lebanon are counting on the Administration to maintain the momentum behind talks on a land-for-peace swap with Israel. But the government of Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir is counting on the longstanding U.S. support for Israeli security to prevent it from having to cede what it deems unacceptable.

* And throughout the region, secondary players in North Africa, the Levant and the Persian Gulf are looking to the United States for either direct involvement or indirect support to help sort out their domestic traumas--at the very time the Bush Administration would like to lower its Middle East profile and focus on crises elsewhere.

“No, I don’t think we did anticipate the fallout from the Gulf War,” a U.S. Mideast analyst says. “There was, to some degree, an expectation that we could win and then withdraw. That’s still what we would prefer.”

On the eve of the conflict, State Department policy planners presented Secretary of State James A. Baker III with a 75-page option paper on the U.S. role in the postwar period.

Among its bold proposals was a unilateral embargo on the sale of U.S. arms to any Middle East country, designed both to shame other arms suppliers to halt their sales and to dampen the feverish demand for new weapons, according to U.S. sources.

Like several other proposals, however, it was quickly rejected. The Administration instead opted for new billion-dollar arms sales to at least five countries in the region.

“Never have there been more opportunities for the United States in the region,” says a former Reagan Administration Mideast specialist. “But the new opportunities are not being matched by new thinking or approaches. We’re in many of the same old ruts.”

Ironically, he added, the United States has finally won unchallenged influence--only to find that it would rather back away.