NEWS ANALYSIS : Bush Betting Clout Can Move Obstacles : Strategy: President harnesses superpower prestige in hopes of overcoming longtime barriers to peace.

In agreeing to an impromptu trip to Madrid for the opening of an unpredictable Middle East peace conference, President Bush is gambling that superpower clout--and his own personal prestige--can overcome the long-immovable obstacles to an Arab-Israeli settlement.

With Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, who will appear at Bush’s side, “we’re trying to give every bit of momentum we can to a very, very difficult issue,” a senior Administration official said Friday.

But Bush and Gorbachev also plan to use the occasion to move the superpower agenda along at a time when the two nations’ relationship is at a sensitive point.

In a one-day mini-summit the day before the Middle East conference opens, officials said, Bush is expected to present to Gorbachev a specific package of humanitarian assistance designed to help the Soviet Union and its breakaway republics through a bitter winter.

At the same time, the officials said, the unexpected meeting will offer a chance for Bush to assess whether Gorbachev might at last lend Soviet support for a treaty that would allow the two nations to create a limited “Star Wars”-type antimissile defense.

The officials insisted, however, that the key motivation behind yet another Bush foreign trip lies in aspirations directed closely at the Middle East.

“We want to give every advantage we can to this conference in terms of producing results,” the senior Administration official said, adding, “The prestige of the two presidents being there underscores the seriousness with which we view it.”

It remains unclear, however, whether the two leaders have enough leverage over Israel and the Arabs to force them to make decisions that they have avoided for four decades--and whether Bush himself is willing to invest the time, energy and political capital to make it happen.

Bush is trading on the new stature he attained as leader of a victorious Western-Arab coalition in the Persian Gulf War against Iraq.

But while that factor has enabled him to bring the Arabs to the negotiating table, it is no guarantee of U.S. influence over Israel.

“We had a lot more leverage over the Israelis in the old days,” said Helmut Sonnenfeldt, a former aide to then-Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger.

Even though the United States is Israel’s largest source of military and economic aid, the hard-line government of Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir has often been willing to defy Washington--and has sometimes gained popularity at home by doing so.

Moreover, veteran negotiators warned, the negotiations will almost certainly run into repeated impasses that only Bush himself can break.

“Historically, what you find is that there is no real progress unless it’s very, very clear that at the appropriate moment the President is going to get involved,” noted Joseph Sisco, chief Middle East negotiator under former President Richard M. Nixon and Kissinger, who was his secretary of state.

U.S. officials said that it remained uncertain until two weeks ago whether Bush would actually attend the peace conference--an indecision that they said reflected his uneasiness at being associated with the process, if the session were to collapse.

And while Bush will participate in the ceremonial opening of the Madrid conference, he plans to depart for the United States immediately afterward in a step that will put symbolic distance between the President and what is sure to be a contentious process.

With the White House now forced to prepare for the meeting with Gorbachev with less than two weeks notice, harried officials said that the hasty nature of their planning had been compounded by a snafu that until Thursday had called for the peace conference to convene in The Hague, capital of the Netherlands.

Only then did a State Department official remember that Syria has no diplomatic relations with the Netherlands and would be unwilling to attend a session there. Madrid was a last-minute choice, a senior White House aide said, and U.S. officials were being dispatched there to make arrangements. “We don’t have a room, we don’t have a place, we don’t have anything,” the White House official said.

Officials traveling with Secretary of State James A. Baker III said earlier in the week that the peace conference would take place in Lausanne, Switzerland. But an Administration official said Friday that Lausanne had never seriously been considered because it had been the setting of a previous failure in a 1949 attempt to secure an Arab-Israeli cease-fire.

With tensions in the region still no less severe, the decision by Bush to take part in the peace conference could pose a political risk, if the talks collapse.

But political analysts and other experts minimized that danger, noting that few Americans are likely to expect swift success. “If the negotiations are difficult, prolonged and drag on, that’s what people expect,” said William B. Quandt of the Brookings Institution. “There is ample understanding that the parties (the Arabs and Israelis) are the likely culprits.”

U.S. officials said that the day of talks between Bush and Gorbachev, expected to occur Oct. 29, is equally unlikely to produce an immediate tangible gain, a senior White House aide said.

But a senior Administration official said the White House wants to assemble its package of humanitarian aid for the Soviet Union in hopes that Bush could present it to Gorbachev. He added, however, that the Soviets’ uncertain situation with an economic union means that Bush will not be prepared to offer more direct assistance.

And with veiled new expressions of Soviet interest in a treaty that would permit deployment of a limited “Star Wars”-type defense, the official said that Bush intends to probe the issue with Gorbachev in the hope of winning a more concrete assurance.

Perhaps more important, another official said, the one-day session is likely to provide Gorbachev with renewed prestige at an uncertain time for him. The session will be the first face-to-face meeting between Bush and Gorbachev since the failed Soviet coup in August, since Gorbachev has been forced to share effective authority with Russian Federation President Boris N. Yeltsin and others and since each side introduced sweeping arms control proposals.

For the United States, the weighing-in by Bush at the peace conference will mark an end to a strategy that had kept his participation to a minimum, leaving to Baker most of the work in managing the negotiations that have led to the session. Administration officials said that the intervention reflects a U.S. determination “to do everything we can,” and outside experts said that such presidential intervention is inevitable if the peace effort is to succeed.

“The Arabs and Israelis both won’t pay much attention unless it’s the ultimate authority,” said Quandt of the Brookings Institution, who helped President Jimmy Carter negotiate the Camp David accords between Israel and Egypt in the late 1970s.

When Carter decided to seek that peace agreement between Israel and Egypt, for example, it took 12 days of direct talks between Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat--with Carter acting as mediator, counselor and treaty drafter at the presidential retreat at Camp David, Md.--to conclude the pact.

Senior officials have said that they do not expect Bush--or Baker--to spend much of their time on the negotiations from here on out. The Administration plans to put the talks in the hands of Edward P. Djerejian, the assistant secretary of state for the Middle East and a former U.S. ambassador to Syria.

Some outside experts question whether that approach will work. “As soon as there’s a real crunch, Bush will have to get involved again,” Quandt predicted.

Arab-Israeli Wars

1948-49 War of Independence. Israel lost 6,200 killed. Arab losses estimated at 2,000 regular troops killed.

Suez War of 1956. Israel: 172 killed, 817 wounded. Egypt: estimated 2,000 to 3,000 killed. British and French casualties in invasion of Suez: 82 killed, 129 wounded.

Six-Day War of 1967. Israel: 777 killed, 2,811 wounded. Egypt: estimated 11,500 killed, 10,000 captured. Syria: 1,000 killed, 600 captured. Jordan: 6,094 killed.

Yom Kippur War of 1973. Israel: 2,569 killed, 7,500 wounded, 530 captured. Syria: estimated 3,500 killed, 21,000 wounded, 370 captured. Egypt: estimated 15,000 killed, 30,000 wounded, 9,000 captured. Iraq: 125 killed, 260 wounded.

Israel’s 1982-85 invasion of Lebanon. Israel: 657 killed, 3,887 wounded. Syria: 370 killed, 1,000 wounded. PLO: estimated 1,000 killed, 6,000 captured. Lebanese and Palestinians: 19,000 killed, more than 30,000 wounded.

SOURCE: Associated Press