THE AGONY OF VICTORY

By JOHANNA MCGEARY/KUWAIT CITY

In the black night heat, brilliant tungsten lamps spotlighted ranks of Abrams tanks, Bradley Fighting Vehicles and Humvees lining the draw yard at Camp Doha, as the first of 3,500 jet-lagged soldiers from Texas slung their gear aboard and revved the engines for the long drive into the desert. They were on a "combat time line," moving straight into battle position as if Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard troops were really advancing. "We are here to send a signal, and that signal is 'We are ready,'" said Colonel Robert C. Pollard. With its buildup in Kuwait last week, the U.S. very visibly made its latest move in the now-take-that contest with Iraq that has rattled nerves throughout the Persian Gulf and left American allies wondering who is winning what.

Despite the nighttime drama at Doha--part of the U.S. force additions that include 4,700 ground troops, eight Stealth bombers, 23 F-16 fighters in Bahrain, a Patriot antimissile battery and 23 combat ships--military tensions seemed to diminish by day. The troops are officially embarked on a training mission dubbed "Intrinsic Action 96-3," hardly the ringing title of a real assault. Saddam stuck to his word, temporarily, by not firing at planes patrolling the no-fly zones. He appeared to be removing his antiaircraft missiles and mobile launchers. The U.S. stepped back from its threat of "disproportionate" retaliation.

Whether the latest round of confrontation is really over depends on the whims of Iraq's unfathomable ruler. "If he continues to flex his muscles," says Pollard, "we have to deploy our forces to keep the peace and protect U.S. interests." But with most American officials increasingly confident that the U.S. has squelched Iraq's military adventuring for the moment, the next real concern is how much political and diplomatic damage has been done.

Nearly everyone is worried that a prime victim of the crisis is the Western-Arab coalition mustered in 1991 to combat Saddam. Iraqi Deputy Foreign Minister Riyadh al-Qaysi chortled to TIME, "Where is it now? I don't see any coalition." In Washington last week, CIA Director John Deutch told Congress he believed Iraq's political position in the region had improved. He also found it "a little bit shocking" that for the first time there was initially "no support for U.S. air strikes." Yet after a whirlwind trip around the alliance, Secretary of Defense William Perry declared the coalition was "alive and well."

Vigorous diplomacy was required to shore up allied support for U.S. actions. The most egregious snub seemed to come from Kuwait, the very nation the coalition rescued from Saddam's grasp, when the U.S. Administration's plan to deploy an added 3,500 Americans was publicly put on hold for a day. But officials admit the show of pique was Washington's fault: an army officer misread an order to prepare to deploy as the final go-ahead, prompting the Pentagon to announce the troops were going before Perry could seek permission from Kuwait. U.S. diplomats scrambled to repair the damage by confessing their "screw-up" to Kuwait's Emir, and a deployment that Kuwait had in fact urged on Washington quickly went ahead.

The bigger debate was whether what Saddam had done warranted Washington's response. "A Western whack on an Arab state, however unsavory, causes twitchiness," says an official in Kuwait, "and if the reason is not immediately apparent, the twitchiness increases." To calm the twitch, Perry spent three days in five Arab and Middle Eastern capitals. Perry's argument, according to a Western official in Kuwait: "Saddam showed his capacity to do reasonably complicated military operations effectively in a short time, and if he got away with such actions in the north, he would be emboldened to try the same where it was really important--in the south."

That case was intuitively apparent in Kuwait, where hundreds of stagnant black lakes of wasted crude oil still cover miles of desert, bearing permanent witness to the threat from Iraq. Kuwait's government, says a Western official, "always asks why the U.S. can't do more against Saddam--though they know the policy the U.S. is pursuing is the only practical one."

Farther afield and five years after the war, other coalition members watch Iraq through a more complex lens. Gratitude for defeating Saddam back then is tempered today by new interests and demands. Turkey's Islamist government is keen to revive relations with its old trading partner. Saudi Arabia and Bahrain are mindful of growing fundamentalist and dissident oppositions that demand Muslim solidarity above all. Frustration over the lack of peace progress colors the reaction elsewhere in the Arab world. Fearing the impact of a real rift, Kuwaiti officials fanned out to make sure the rest of the gulf understood their support for U.S. military moves. "Their message," says a Western official, "was to get attention off the U.S. missile strikes and on Saddam's threat."

After the week's diplomatic whirl, officials argue that no major damage has been done to "basic core support" for the fundamental goals of the coalition: containing Iraq and maintaining economic sanctions on Saddam. If he dares to menace anyone outside his borders, the alliance will snap together to oppose him. But Saddam retains a frustrating capacity to unsettle the coalition at any time. And the latest encounter, says a Western official in Kuwait, demonstrates that when the threat from Iraq is not self-evident and the justification from Washington is not clear, "no one will leap to support the U.S." In fact, Turkey, which is worried about cross-border attacks by the Kurds, has urged Baghdad to take control of Kurdish lands in the northern Iraqi no-fly zones. "We have sent a delegation to Saddam to tell him that if he can impose central authority there, O.K.," Turkish Foreign Minister Tansu Ciller told the New York Times last week.

Washington's single-minded obsession with Saddam has provoked some allies to think about a rift in the making potentially graver than the latest hubbub. Even in Kuwait, where eagerness to unseat Saddam runs high, officials wonder if the U.S. is dangerously ignoring the region's other and perhaps greater threat: Iran. "Seventy percent of Kuwaitis just want to get rid of Saddam," says Mohammed al-Qadiri, a Kuwaiti businessman and former government official. "But the rest worry that if he goes, Iran will step in, and that, my friend, is real trouble." Some of Kuwait's top leaders have counseled against deposing Saddam because he is needed as a bastion against Iran. Elsewhere in the gulf, that sentiment is widely endorsed as part of the regional balance of power. Many are concerned that Washington has lost sight of the larger picture. What the U.S. really has to handle is not one devil but two--and it may be letting one grow perilously large while it is trying, however unsuccessfully, to cut the other down to size.