NEWS ANALYSIS : Bending Iraqi Dictator’s Will a Delicate Task

As President Bush intensifies the rhetorical pressure on Saddam Hussein, Administration officials are confidently asserting in public that the United States has the military power to force Iraq to comply with the United Nations’ cease-fire terms.

But privately the White House confronts a harsher reality: While the United States and its allies can certainly rain terrible destruction down on Iraq, they may not be able to force Hussein to open up his secret arms facilities without taking steps far more drastic than Bush was willing to take even in the Persian Gulf War.

Short of sending combat troops into Baghdad or actively involving the United States in Hussein’s elimination--something neither the President nor the American people may be ready to do--Bush may find it difficult to bend the Iraqi dictator to his will, analysts and others suggest.

“It’s one thing to bomb and destroy a target. It’s something else to coerce behavior,” RAND Corp. senior analyst Benjamin S. Lambeth said.

The United States and its allies certainly have the ability to wreak destruction over a large part of Iraq, bombing strategic targets and further damaging both the country’s economy and its military capability. But although Hussein’s U.N. envoy Friday offered some hope that the current impasse might be resolved peacefully, Hussein in the past repeatedly has shown his willingness to allow his people to suffer on his behalf.

“It’s what I would call the Br’er Rabbit problem,” former National Security Council Middle East expert Robert Hunter said. Having survived a military confrontation with the United States before--and even having used that confrontation to strengthen his hold on his country--”Hussein keeps daring us to throw him into the brier patch.”

The problem the Administration now faces has become a familiar one: how to control Hussein without actually having to force him from power.

The reason the problem is so familiar goes to the heart of U.S. policy toward Iraq. Bush and his advisers want Iraq to remain a major regional power--one capable of preventing Iran from dominating the oil fields of the Gulf region--but not so strong a power that it can once again threaten its neighbors or others in the region, such as Israel.

That requires an awkward and difficult process of trying to bend Hussein without breaking him. And the Iraqi dictator understands the constraints on U.S. policy and has taken advantage of them repeatedly, particularly when he put down rebellions against his rule by Shiite Muslims and Kurds shortly after the end of the war.

At that time, Hussein gambled, correctly, that the Administration would not intervene because U.S. policy-makers preferred to see Iraq intact with Hussein in power rather than Hussein out of power but Iraq divided into several smaller states.

At the end of the war 17 months ago, Administration officials confidently predicted that economic sanctions would bring down Hussein’s regime by the end of the year. Instead, while Hussein has not exactly prospered, he has survived and has continued to defy Washington’s attempts to bend him. The Iraqi dictator has proven tenacious and skillful in the peculiar politics of defeat, periodically creating small crises that he has used to test whether the Administration and its allies still have the will to confront him.

In each of those past crises, Hussein has backed down, and many analysts believe he will do so this time. Bush’s tactics--ostentatiously announcing a meeting in Washington with his national security advisers and having senior officials and spokesmen make bellicose statements about American willingness to use force--appear to be calculated to bluff Hussein into backing down again.

But if he does not bend, and if Bush feels compelled to back up his threats with action, a military response will carry several risks, analysts say.

The greatest is simply that Hussein will absorb the pounding and still refuse to yield. The prospect of that sort of stalemate has brought warnings from military planners about the importance of setting clearly achievable objectives before sending troops into battle.

Much of the success of the war came about “because we had a very clear set of objectives. It was very clear what we were trying to accomplish,” RAND’s Lambeth said. “It’s very important that in the current situation we not lose sight of the importance of that.”

A second risk is the possibility of U.S. losses during an attack. Iraq’s air defense network, as well as its air force, has been substantially rebuilt in recent months, and one official noted that “their ability to fly airplanes is coming back, although it is not what it was before the war.”

To minimize the possibility of such losses, Pentagon officials have suggested that a major portion of any attack against Iraq would rely on Tomahawk cruise missiles. Over the last few days, at least three ships carrying hundreds of Tomahawks have moved into positions in the waters near Iraq.

As the Aegis cruisers Mobile Bay and Bunker Hill drew close to Iraq in the Persian Gulf and the cruiser Philippine Sea passed through the Suez Canal into the Red Sea, officials said that more than 200 Tomahawks stood ready to strike well-defended Iraqi targets. Under the surface of the Red Sea, at least two Tomahawk-laden attack submarines also lurked.

In addition, a substantial arsenal of forces, including roughly a dozen F-117 Stealth fighters and more than 60 other warplanes, has remained in the Persian Gulf region since the end of the war. And over the past year, an official said, the Navy has rushed hundreds of “smart bomb” kits--designed to guide bombs to their targets with extreme precision--to its aircraft carriers so that Navy warplanes will be able to strike targets with greater accuracy.

The official added that communications problems that resulted in poor coordination between Navy and Air Force jets in the war have been repaired.

The gathering of forces has made it possible to conduct what one military officer called “a pretty good skirmish.” But knowledgeable officials denied that a renewal of air operations against Iraq would resemble the kind of “pelting” of Iraqi forces that the six-week Persian Gulf air war represented.

“I don’t see this as being terribly sustained,” one knowledgeable official said. “We’d go in and hammer away and sit back and wait for the political results.”

Constructing a Battle Plan

The United States and its allies are discussing an ultimatum to use military force against Iraq unless Baghdad allows U.N. inspectors access to a ministry believed to house secrets about Iraq’s weapons programs. Among the options:

Diplomacy. While military action is being discussed, officials say there are diplomatic steps, such as an ultimatum, still to be taken before any strike.

The military options:

Renewed attacks on Saddam Hussein’s elite Republican Guard units

Surgical bombing strikes against suspected weapons or communications sites

Attacks along routes used to ferry items into Iraq in defiance of the U.N. trade embargo.

U.S. Military Presence

21,000 U.S. military personnel are in and around the Persian Gulf.

Six U.S. ships are in the Red Sea, 17 in or near the Persian Gulf, including the aircraft carrier Independence. A second aircraft carrier, the Saratoga, is in the Mediterranean.

At least two attack submarines are on duty in the Red Sea.

More than 200 Tomahawk missiles are ready to strike Iraqi targets.

2,000 Marines are aboard the amphibious assault ship Tarawa and its support ships recently returned to the Gulf.