Hussein Appears to Seek to Draw U.S. In Deeper

In shooting at U.S. warplanes, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein appears to have devised a wily game plan designed to up the ante and bring the United States deeper into direct conflict with him.

According to a range of analysts, the Iraqi dictator now actively welcomes and anticipates the major U.S. military response that appears to be imminent.

Though Hussein has little defense against a U.S. missile attack, “the long-term goal is attrition,” said Henri Barkey, an Iraq specialist at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa. “He wants to tire us of involvement in the [Persian] Gulf, cost us any residual support from the coalition [of U.S. allies] and build his prestige at home and in the region by taking on the United States.”

Hussein also would like to capture a U.S. pilot he could flaunt on Iraqi television--and in America’s face--close to the Nov. 5 American presidential election.

For the Clinton administration, the goal is to keep the upper hand in the conflict and use the chance to push Hussein more firmly into the regional box created after the 1991 Persian Gulf War. But like a jack-in-the-box, the Iraqi leader keeps bouncing back in a bid to bait Washington into making a mistake.

Riding on a crest of military conquests at home and empathy for his nation’s plight in some quarters abroad, Hussein now appears prepared to risk the loss of military equipment and personnel in his challenge to U.S. power. He apparently is calculating that the short-term costs are worth the long-term political gains.

“The bombings of airfields have absolutely no military value in terms of weakening Saddam, except in the abstract sense of counting the number of his weapons,” said Kanan Makiya, an Iraqi dissident and a fellow at Harvard University’s Center for Middle East Studies. “Now he has less, but that’s not important to his power.”

Despite massive losses in Operation Desert Storm and massive U.S. arms sales to the Gulf sheikdoms, Hussein still has the largest, most experienced military in the region. Turning over his weapons of mass destruction to the United Nations, a term of the 1991 cease-fire, cut his arsenal. But he still has weaponry to spare, analysts said.

His career has been carved from confrontations--at home, in the region and with the outside world. He molds strategy around adversaries--some real, others conveniently created--so as to portray himself as defender and champion of whatever issue is at stake.

His timing in taking on the United States is superb, analysts said. In contrast to a year ago, the U.S.-orchestrated peace process between Israel and the Arabs has hit snags. U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia have twice been bombed. And the post-Gulf War arrangements in Iraq are unraveling in the north, where Baghdad-backed Kurdish troops routed their opposition in a mere 10 days.

“People respond, not because the public loves him, but because Hussein now presents an image of power,” Makiya said, adding: “You create an adversary in the way you treat him. Here is the most powerful nation in the world hauling in B-52s and stealth [fighters] from thousands of miles away to deal with a tin-pot dictator.”

Hussein appears to be assuming that escalating the confrontation with America could force Washington to pay a price. “If Saddam is prepared to take substantial military punishment and the United States keeps going back and back and back each time he provokes us, then at some point we may end up with almost no international support,” said James Placke, a former senior U.S. diplomat in Baghdad.

Hussein can try to further this strategy with public remonstrances over U.S. actions, such as the one made by Iraqi Foreign Minister Mohammed Said Sahaf in a message to U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali on Wednesday. Last week’s U.S. missile attack on Iraq, Sahaf wrote, “constitutes a flagrant aggression against Iraq’s sovereignty and the safety of its political independence in contravention of the U.N. Charter and norms of international law.”

Iraqi protests have limited effect in the West, but they play to sentiments in the Arab world, where Hussein is gaining points even among those who fear or distrust him, analysts said. “Hussein will expect and encourage questions, for example, about what authority the United States is acting on, in order to play to public opinion, which is not in favor of this U.S. military action at all,” Placke said.

The administration contends that the U.S. policy of containment since the war--squeezing Hussein’s regime through economic sanctions, military restrictions and political isolation--is tightening rather than loosening the box he is in. “His recent actions have met with a firm response that leaves him worse off strategically than he was before,” a senior administration official said Wednesday. “And we will not tolerate any further threats.”

Hussein’s ability to stage an attack against Kuwait has been removed with the expansion last week of the southern Iraq “no-fly” zone, which now runs from Kuwait’s border to the gates of Baghdad, the official said. And the Gulf War coalition is still a “functioning organism,” the official said. Kuwait has allowed U.S. stealth fighters to use its bases. British and French warplanes Tuesday resumed patrolling “no-fly” zones, though France refuses to fly the new portion of the expanded southern area. U.S. warplanes patrolling the zones still fly out of Saudi bases. And foreign criticism has ebbed.

But with a new round of U.S. punitive measures appearing imminent and fears of other Iraqi probes and provocations ahead, analysts predicted that Washington is unlikely to have the last word any time soon.

* IRAQ POLL: Respondents back President Clinton’s moves in the Gulf. A6