Bush to Visit Gulf Thanksgiving Day : Mideast: The President will spend the holiday with American troops and will meet with leaders in the region. His eight-day trip also will take him to Europe.

ROCHESTER, Minn. —  President Bush will spend Thanksgiving Day with U.S. troops in the Persian Gulf, the White House announced Friday.

Bush, who will leave Washington on Nov. 16 at the start of an eight-day trip to Europe and the Middle East, will also meet in Egypt with President Hosni Mubarak and in Saudi Arabia with King Fahd, the Saudi monarch, and the exiled emir of Kuwait, Sheik Jabbar al Ahmed al Sabah.

The initial plans for the trip were disclosed by White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater while Bush was in the middle of a political tour of the Midwest.

The President has said frequently in recent weeks that he wants to spend the holiday visiting with some of the more than 210,000 GIs stationed in the region if such a tour could be arranged. A visit over Christmas, it was felt, would risk offending the Saudis, who have been extremely sensitive over the presence of non-Muslim forces in their nation, site of some of the holiest places in the Islamic religion.

The trip will put an American President in a zone of potential warfare for the first time since Lyndon B. Johnson made a 2 1/2-hour visit to Vietnam on Oct. 26, 1966, during the height of the U.S. involvement in the war there.

The U.S. forces are deployed in the Saudi Arabian desert although Arab forces have generally taken up the most forward positions on the Saudi-Kuwaiti border where they face Iraqi troops. U.S. troops are also aboard ships in the Persian Gulf, the Arabian Sea and in neighboring countries allied with the anti-Iraq effort.

The President’s specific plans for the troop visit, as well as the sites of his meetings with Mubarak, Fahd and the emir, were not disclosed. White House officials are about to begin their initial travel survey of the region.

The presidential visit to Saudi Arabia will be the first since Jimmy Carter visited Riyadh in January, 1978.

At the same time that the White House disclosed the President’s Middle East travel plans, it made public a presidential proclamation declaring Friday a “National Day of Prayer,” a generally routine document. In this case, however, it dealt specifically with the crisis in the gulf.

“With these grave concerns before us, we do well to recall as a nation the power of faith and the efficacy of prayer,” the proclamation said. It asked for divine protection of those “working to uphold the universal cause of freedom and justice half a world away from home.”

The announcement of the trip was made at the end of a week in which the Administration sent multiple signals about the anticipated course of events in the gulf--holding out renewed hopes for a peaceful resolution of the confrontation there, even as the President stepped up his angry pronouncements directed at Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

Bush continued that approach Friday during his political appearances in the Midwest. He said that although the United States is not alone in its deployment of troops in Saudi Arabia and the gulf--the Americans have been joined by troops from 25 other nations--only the United States has the strength and commitment to stand up to Hussein.

Secretary of State James A. Baker III was scheduled to leave Washington today to visit Europe, Saudi Arabia and other Arab nations to assess the status of the U.N. Security Council’s economic sanctions on Iraq and, sources have said, to consider additional steps, including a military offensive.

The Middle East portion of the President’s trip is being added at the end of a long-planned visit to Europe that has been built around a summit conference in Paris, at which a treaty making sharp cuts in conventional, or non-nuclear, armaments in Europe will be signed.

Bush will take part in the Paris summit with Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev on Nov. 19 and 20.

In addition, the White House announced that Bush will visit Prague on Nov. 17, the first anniversary of the revolution that overturned four decades of Communist rule in Czechoslovakia. The next day he will confer with Chancellor Helmut Kohl of Germany in Kohl’s hometown of Ludwigshafen.

The visits will highlight the changes that have taken place in Europe over the last year. The trip to Prague will be Bush’s first to a former Communist nation since those dramatic upheavals, and his visit to Germany will serve to mark the unification that occurred there Oct. 3.

The European trip is the first of several foreign journeys on Bush’s agenda in the coming months. He is also planning to visit Mexico at the end of November, South America during the first week in December, and Moscow early next year for the anticipated signing of a treaty cutting in half the U.S. and Soviet arsenals of strategic, or long-range, nuclear weapons.

During his public appearances Friday in Rochester and Cincinnati, Bush stepped back from one approach he employed at several stops Thursday, when he said Hussein was more brutal than Adolf Hitler. He made no mention of the Nazi dictator during his speeches Friday.

Alixe Glenn, White House deputy press secretary, said the omission was not deliberate and that the reference, which drew criticism from some Jewish leaders, may be repeated in future speeches. Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, said the comment was “an unfortunate exaggeration.”

Bush otherwise maintained his adamant opposition to the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait, insisting on one hand that “no one wants a peaceful solution to this situation more than I do,” while also declaring that he would hear of no compromise--”none at all”--when it comes to his demand for a total Iraqi withdrawal and restoration of the Kuwaiti government that was overthrown Aug. 2.

“Thank God, the people of the United States understand that it is only the United States that has the strength and, I would say, total commitment to stay the course and see that this aggression is turned back,” Bush said at a Republican Party rally in a high school gymnasium in Rochester.