Tick, Tick, Tick

Whatever the prospects for a shooting war, the war of nerves in the Persian Gulf intensified last week. “The clock ticks toward war or peace,” observes Robert Hunter, a Middle East expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “But nobody knows what time it is.” With only two weeks remaining before the United Nations’ Jan. 15 deadline for Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait, George Bush seemed determined to convince Saddam Hussein that his time is running out. But with questions of U.S. military readiness and resolve still unanswered, Saddam appeared to be pondering a last-minute maneuver that would make it harder to dislodge him peacefully from Kuwait — and more difficult to use force to oust him.

As the first of several signals that the U.S. is preparing for combat, Bush dispatched 17 more warships to the gulf, which will bring the total to 64. The formidable armada includes the giant aircraft carriers America and Theodore Roosevelt; all told, six American carriers, with as many as 300 attack planes, will be within striking distance of Iraq on Jan. 15. The State Department ordered the evacuation of all nonessential staff and dependents from U.S. embassies in Jordan and Sudan, where pro-Iraqi sentiment runs high.

In an especially ominous move, officials said the Pentagon would soon start to vaccinate American troops against the potential threat of Iraqi germ warfare. The CIA has been warning that Iraq, despite its denials, has developed biological weapons. But even inoculations are no guarantee against germ warfare, which can be conducted through dozens of different strains of various organisms, each requiring a separate vaccine. Saddam’s arsenal is believed to include anthrax as well as botulism, a form of stomach poisoning for which there is no vaccine.

For its part, Iraq added to the jitters by conducting two test firings of surface-to-surface missiles within its territory. Saddam also made a series of bellicose statements, telling a Spanish television channel that if war broke out, Israel would suffer the first retaliatory blow. “We consider that the responsibility for the Arab conflicts falls on Israel and the Zionists,” he warned. “It is they who have pushed Bush into the dead-end street in which he now finds himself.” To a Mexican television interviewer, Saddam vowed that the al-Sabah family, deposed by the Iraqi invasion, will “never again rule” Kuwait.

Meanwhile, diplomatic efforts to find a peaceful solution continued to stall. Both the U.S. and Iraq denied reports published in an Israeli newspaper, Ma’ariv, that the two nations had secretly agreed on Jan. 9 as the date for Secretary of State James Baker to meet with Saddam in Baghdad. Arab sources close to Baghdad claimed that the U.S. and Iraq have agreed in principle to go ahead with the Baker meeting as well as a meeting between Bush and Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz, although the deal is not final and no dates have been set. The tentative agreement, they say, stems from secret contacts between Washington and Baghdad conducted via messages carried by Arab and European diplomats and even American businessmen. But when the highest- ranking American diplomat still in Baghdad, deputy chief of mission Joseph C. Wilson, met last week with Nizar Hamdoon, Under Secretary of the Iraqi Foreign Ministry, in another attempt to arrange a mutually acceptable date, no progress was reported.

Though the Jan. 15 deadline was meant to put pressure on Saddam, it has also created a gnawing problem for Bush. The date was never intended to specify when military action would begin, but it inevitably came to be widely understood that way. That was one reason for the uproar that Lieut. General Calvin A.H. Waller, deputy commander of Operation Desert Shield, touched off when he said that American forces would not be ready for battle until mid- February. Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and General Colin Powell, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, delivered similar assessments to Bush last week after they paid a five-day visit to Saudi Arabia. The principal reason for wanting more time is logistics: the need to build up stocks of sophisticated munitions.

The growing impression that the U.S. would not be prepared to attack on the morning of Jan. 16 seemed to undercut the pressure on Saddam to comply quickly with U.N. demands. To keep up the heat, Bush tried last week to dispel doubts about American military readiness. After interrupting his Christmas vacation in Camp David for a six-hour working stint at the White House, the President declared that the confidential briefings he had received from his top military advisers had left him with a “quite different” feeling about U.S. war preparations than press accounts indicated. “I’m not going to tell you what they said, but don’t believe these reports you’ve been reading,” insisted Bush. “It’s under control. Don’t be misled by these rabbit tracks running through the snow.”

Even within the Administration, there was concern that Washington was sending a muddled message. “Looking at the way things have gone,” mused a State Department official, “Saddam must be saying to himself, ‘Maybe I can ride this out.’ ” In London aides to Prime Minister John Major, just back from an official visit to Washington, reported that their boss had found Bush and Baker deeply pessimistic. “They thought Saddam was not convinced that the allies were ready to go to war,” said a senior adviser to Major. “They saw little chance of U.S.-Iraqi talks getting under way before the U.N. deadline.”

Saddam began the week by summoning to Baghdad 20 of his ambassadors, many to nations that have contributed troops to the U.S.-led alliance. He sent them back to their posts carrying the message that he was ready for “serious and constructive dialogue” to avert war. But whatever optimism those words might have engendered was quickly undercut by Saddam’s reiterated demand that any diplomatic settlement would have to link an Iraqi pullout from Kuwait with an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Though the U.S. has flatly rejected such a linkage, Saddam’s continuing effort to tie a resolution of the crisis to other intractable regional disputes is just one of the potential ploys that give American policymakers sleepless nights. They are concerned that Baghdad will try to split the alliance by proposing to withdraw only in return for a promise to call a prompt international conference on the Arab-Israeli dispute. Though the governments of Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Syria have shown no interest in such ideas so far, they could be under pressure from their own people if Saddam chose to press the point. But the U.S. is not likely to accept the idea under those conditions.

Then there is what State Department officials call “the nightmare scenario” in which Saddam would withdraw partly from Kuwait, retaining the Warbah and Bubiyan islands, which control Iraq’s access to the gulf, as well as the sliver of northern Kuwait that includes the Rumaila oil field. President Bush has made a pre-emptive strike against that possibility by insisting — with backing from the other 14 members of the U.N. Security Council — that only a complete withdrawal would be acceptable.

Nonetheless, a partial pullout would present the White House with a thorny political dilemma. Persuading an increasingly restive Congress — not to mention American allies — to fight for the liberation of Kuwait is one thing. But to fight for the liberation of the Warbah and Bubiyan islands? U.S. officials reluctantly conclude that such a move by Saddam would defang the coalition, leaving Bush with no choice but to hope that sanctions would eventually force Iraq into a complete pullback.

Or Saddam could choose war, betting that his dug-in forces in Kuwait and southern Iraq could inflict so many U.S casualties that the American public would lose its stomach for the battle. Least likely of all is that he will opt to comply fully with the U.N.’s demands and withdraw entirely from Kuwait. The French newspaper Le Figaro reported last week that Iraqi secret-service agents have been going door to door in Baghdad urging people to assemble next week for a “spontaneous” rally in favor of withdrawing from Kuwait. If true, the report would suggest that Saddam is trying to arrange a face-saving way to back down. Asked to comment on Le Figaro‘s story, the Deputy Speaker of Iraq’s parliament gave a tantalizing reply: “We entered Kuwait because the people demanded it. In Iraq it is the people who decide.”

Welcome as such a step would be, most U.S. policy experts are convinced no such move is forthcoming. They believe that Saddam has concluded he can drag out the fighting long enough to force a diplomatic solution that leaves him in power in Baghdad and with a plausible claim to partial victory. If so, they say, he still does not understand the awesome power of the military forces arrayed against him. “The U.S. attack will be something entirely outside Saddam’s realm of experience,” says former Army Chief of Staff General John Wickham. “It’s not clear he can even imagine what will happen.” With the clock ticking, many people hoped the Iraqi leader would still show the sense not to put Bush’s determination to the ultimate test.