Some Mideast Experts See Long, Bloody Ground War : Outlook: Mideast experts also expect Iraq to use germ and chemical arms. And the peace movement is expected to swell as horrors of battle become known, they say.

WASHINGTON —  Some of the nation’s leading Middle East experts and military analysts agree that despite the virtually uncontested high-tech air war against Iraq, a long and bloody ground war appears inevitable, even if the heavy bombings continue indefinitely.

They also say that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein is apt to use chemical or biological weapons, possibly even before a ground war commences. At the same time, the analysts predict, worldwide anti-war sentiment will swell as details of the current bombing raids in Iraq and Kuwait emerge--particularly if there are widespread civilian casualties and damage to non-strategic property.

“A quick, easy and relatively painless U.S. victory has already proven to be unfounded,” Harvard analyst Zachary Lockman said Monday. “It’s likely to be a long and bloody war.”

“We’re in it for the duration,” added Judith Kipper of the Brookings Institution. “The Bush Administration strategy is clearly intended not to leave a way out for the Iraqis.”

Numerous analysts also foresee military surprises from Hussein that may be far deadlier than the Scud missiles that Iraq has lobbed at civilians in Israel and allied forces in Saudi Arabia.

“Sooner or later, we are going to see a chemical attack somewhere,” Kipper predicted. “And he may have other tricks up his sleeve,” added Lockman, associate professor of Middle Eastern history at Harvard University.

Kipper, Lockman and others also warned against the euphoria generated by the air war’s early successes, noting that too little information is available about the true extent of damage and casualties on the Iraqi side.

“So far, there’s been no blood and guts. It’s just been this impersonal, high-tech stuff--like children’s video games,” Kipper noted.

“It’s still too early to tell,” added Geoffrey Kemp, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, contending that the Pentagon has merely been “spoon-feeding” the news media.

“We all assume everything is happening as it’s supposed to. But we sure don’t know it,” said consultant Edward Peck, a former Middle East analyst at the State Department.

Pentagon spokesman Pete Williams conceded that U.S. bomb-damage assessments have been slow to come, attributing that in part to poor weather conditions over Iraq.

In any case, Peck and others said, once the true horrors of war become clear, anti-war sentiments around the world will grow.

In the meantime, the air war could go on “indefinitely,” predicted Edward Luttwak of the Center for Strategic and International Studies here.

Experts agreed that Hussein’s deployment of allied POWs as “human shields” at strategic Iraqi sites could backfire on Baghdad.

“This is either a sign of weakness and desperation or perhaps yet another miscalculation on Saddam Hussein’s part,” Kemp said. Such treatment of prisoners, he believes, will only strengthen the alliance’s resolve to defeat Iraq--something an angry President Bush echoed on Monday upon return to the White House from Camp David, Md.

All in all, Kemp and others said, more things have gone right than wrong for the anti-Iraq alliance, including the fact the coalition has held together. “I can’t think of anything that’s really gone wrong--except perhaps the underestimation of the (number of) Scuds” that are still in Iraq’s arsenal, he added.

Many military analysts said that allied air attacks still must destroy Iraqi roads, supply depots, communications links, missiles and antiaircraft sites before concentrating on the entrenched Iraqi ground troops in Kuwait--a prelude to a ground war.

But they said that may not happen until February or later. Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, the U.S. field commander in the Persian Gulf, said Sunday of the Iraqi troops in Kuwait: “At the present time, I would say there are probably some of the most formidable defenses that you could ever run into anywhere.”

“Attacking overland is a loser,” said William Taylor, a senior military analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which has estimated that a 20-day land campaign could cause 20,000 allied casualties, including 4,000 dead.

The real issue, Kipper concluded, is whether Bush is patient enough to wait for the aerial bombardment to take its toll before launching ground action. On that score, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney on Monday signaled the Administration’s readiness to let the bombs do the job indefinitely.

“It could conceivably be weeks, could conceivably be months. We have been very careful not to say it will be over in 27 days, or 14 days, or six months,” he said on CNN. “We’ve done a significant amount of damage already to his strategic military capability. We’re continuing to do that, and now we’re beginning to work on his forces inside Kuwait itself.”

Meanwhile, Kemp said that the continuing threat of the Iraqi Scud missiles is largely a problem of terrorism. Never known for accuracy, the Scuds are highly effective against urban areas where any hit is guaranteed to terrify the population. But Kemp said the missiles have military significance only because their destruction continues to divert the allied air war from other targets.

Most of the analysts interviewed said that, at some point during the hostilities, potential channels for diplomacy between Baghdad and Washington must be opened, probably through intermediaries.