Resiliency of Gulf Coalition Is a Surprise to Many

WASHINGTON —  For more than four months, the vast international coalition that President Bush and his aides have stitched together to confront Iraq has proven far stronger, and far more resilient, than virtually any foreign policy expert predicted.

Since Iraq invaded Kuwait last Aug. 2, the alliance has not only remained intact, and even become stronger, but it also has survived a series of blockbuster developments, any one of which might have been enough to cause it to crumble:

* The killing of more than a score of Palestinians at Jerusalem’s holiest Islamic site.

* The downfall of Margaret Thatcher, who had been Bush’s strongest European ally.

* Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s persistent efforts to divide the alliance by using the hostages as bargaining chips.

* Wild fluctuations in oil markets that have weakened the economies of the industrialized countries and severely damaged those of poorer nations.

But with the U.N. deadline for Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait now three weeks away, Administration officials are bracing for what they believe will be the toughest tests yet.

And, as the surprise resignation of Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze underscored, the U.S. decision to rely on an international coalition makes American policy at least partially hostage to unpredictable events, many of them far from the Middle East.

Hussein, officials and private analysts believe, is likely to respond to the deadline in one of two ways--either by attempting to de-escalate the conflict by withdrawing partway from Kuwait, or desperately gambling to escape encirclement by widening the conflict to include Israel, a move that almost certainly would spark a quick military response from that quarter.

“The thing he might do that would, at least initially, face us with the most difficult choice is this scenario of a partial withdrawal,” says William B. Quandt, a former National Security Council official now at the Brookings Institution.

Under the partial withdrawal plan, Hussein would, at the last minute, pull his troops out of most Kuwaiti territory, including Kuwait city, retreating to a line that would give him control over a disputed oil field shared by Iraq and Kuwait and two Kuwaiti islands that control the approaches to Iraq’s major ports.

In theory, U.S. officials could claim that sort of Iraqi action as a major, although partial, success: The Kuwaiti royal family and its government could return to power. Most of Kuwait’s oil production, which is located in the southern part of the country, could be resumed. And Hussein would have been seen to retreat in the face of international pressure.

But officials fear that in the wake of such a partial withdrawal, support for a tough allied stand would erode. And for that reason, over the past week President Bush, Secretary of State James A. Baker III and other top U.S. officials have publicly denounced the idea of a partial withdrawal, branding it “unacceptable.”

“A partial withdrawal would reward aggression,” Baker said in a press conference in Brussels after meeting with European leaders last week.

Other leaders of the coalition have taken the same line. In a press conference in Paris last week, French President Francois Mitterrand insisted that the U.N. demand for Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait would require Iraq to relinquish “every square meter.”

In the event of a partial withdrawal, U.S. officials say, Bush would try to maintain both military and economic pressure against Iraq. Although U.S. officials fear that international support for the trade embargo against Iraq might wane, they also believe that the U.S. Navy’s presence in the Persian Gulf would be enough to ensure that the embargo would stick--at least as long as Turkey and Saudi Arabia continue to block Iraq’s oil pipelines.

The more difficult challenge, officials say, would be keeping at least some U.S. troops in place to discourage any return by Iraq.

“There is no desire on our part to have a permanently stationed U.S. ground force in the region,” a senior Administration official says. But as of now, U.S. officials have no assurance that any other countries would be willing to volunteer troops to protect a partially restored Kuwait from Iraq.

The second scenario, an attack on Israel, is widely discounted in Washington but is still a major worry in Jerusalem, U.S. officials say.

“If you are sitting there within range of Iraqi missiles, you worry about it in a way that you do not back here,” says California Rep. Anthony C. Beilenson (D-Los Angeles), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, who recently returned from a trip to Saudi Arabia and Israel.

Some analysts believe that Hussein might figure that by attacking Israel, he could force the Arab members of the coalition--particularly Saudi Arabia and Syria--to turn against the United States. But most Administration officials contend that Hussein’s chief desire is simply to survive in power, not to engage in a gambit that would almost certainly bring a massive military retaliation.

Publicly, Administration officials will say only that they have consulted with all the major coalition allies about what would happen in the event of an Iraqi attack on Israel and that, as Bush said in a press conference recently, they are “comfortable” with the result of those talks. Officials have been resolutely silent about what the President means by that term.

But despite the continuing anxiety about possible Iraqi moves that could disrupt the coalition, the reality is that international unity against Iraq so far has been remarkably consistent.

Analysts point to several reasons for the coalition’s resilience:

First may be Hussein himself. The Iraqi leader has proved less adept at manipulating world opinion, even Arab opinion, than many expected. His attempts to gain advantage by first seizing hostages and then by gradually releasing them backfired. And his troops’ depredations in Kuwait seem to have undercut at least some of his support among the Arab masses in places such as Jordan.

Second is that Bush has asked for relatively little from most of the other nations involved--besides rhetorical support, patience and, in some cases, money. Few world leaders have had to share with Bush the prospect that their armed forces might encounter serious casualties if the crisis moved from stand-off to shoot-out. Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney tacitly acknowledged that reality when he conceded that if war comes, very few of the coalition partners--perhaps only Britain, Saudi Arabia and Egypt--actually would fight alongside U.S. forces.

Finally, shutting down the oil production of Iraq and Kuwait so far has had relatively little impact on the world economy, giving other nations little reason to balk at continued confrontation with Iraq.

At the time of the invasion, some analysts predicted that the disruption of oil supplies would throw the entire world economy into a recession. Higher oil prices have, as usual, badly hurt poor nations from Africa to Eastern Europe, deepening the poverty of millions by choking economies that were already seriously ill.

But in the world of international power politics, poor nations have little voice. Among the nations that could have disrupted Bush’s confrontation with Iraq, the economic impact of the crisis has been relatively modest.

In June, two months before Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development estimated that the economies of its 24 industrialized member nations would grow 2.9% this year.

Measuring the impact of the gulf crisis, the OECD in mid-December downgraded that estimate by a scant 0.1%. For 1991, international economic growth will slow further, to 2% in the OECD’s prediction, but most of the slowdown will be caused by the recession in the United States, a downturn that may have been partially triggered by the gulf crisis, but which was anticipated long before Aug. 2.