By David Hoffman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, February 27, 1991; Page A01

Post time line

President Bush is attempting to force Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to swallow a punishment that may be even more painful than a military rout: public humiliation before his people and the Arab world so that he cannot emerge from the battlefield as a martyr.

According to administration officials, Bush's strategy is based on a calculation by leaders of the coalition fighting Iraq that Saddam may remain in power for some time after hostilities end and that they must deny him any opportunity to turn his military defeat into a political victory.

Since the early days of the gulf crisis, Bush has often personalized his criticism of Saddam, comparing him to Hitler. But officials said Bush is now following an endgame strategy designed to make Saddam commit political suicide by admitting his errors, discrediting himself and possibly opening himself to an internal coup.

"We're out to destroy the myth as much as the might," said a senior Pentagon official.

For months, Saddam has been heaping ridicule on the Arab participants in the U.S.-led coalition, such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Officials hope that his rhetorical and political power can now be neutralized, before the inevitable jockeying begins for postwar advantage in the region.

"He's going to suffer a resounding military defeat, and we want to leverage it into a potent political defeat as well," said an administration official, referring to Saddam. "We are personalizing it even more now."

The approach is based on a broad interpretation of the United Nations resolutions, which say nothing about destroying Saddam's regime, but do call for liberating Kuwait by "all necessary means" and for preserving the peace and stability of the region.

The president's strategy -- to drive Saddam into a self-imposed disgrace -- became apparent as the allied armies prepared to sweep into Iraq and encircle his army.

Last week, in delivering an ultimatum to Saddam, Bush asked only that he "publicly and authoritatively" accept the terms of the alliance. When Saddam did not, the ground war was launched.

Then, when Baghdad Radio early Monday accepted the first U.N. resolution calling for unconditional withdrawal, Bush upped the ante. On Monday night, after Iraq had sent a letter to the U.N. Security Council promising to pull out, the White House insisted that Saddam "personally and publicly" commit himself to the allied conditions.

Saddam followed this demand with the radio address he broadcast early yesterday, in which he again said troops would quit Kuwait but did not renounce Iraqi ambitions to control the emirate.

This refusal to buckle stirred Bush to denounce the speech as "an outrage." Bush went out of his way to point out that Saddam had shown no "evidence of remorse for Iraq's aggression, or any indication that Saddam is prepared to accept the responsibility for the awful consequences of that aggression."

"He is trying to save the remnants of power and control in the Middle East by every means possible," said Bush. "And here, too, Saddam Hussein will fail."

Many specialists on the Arab world have said that humiliation and loss of pride is one of the most severe punishments that Bush could seek to impose on a leader like Saddam, whose personal identity is so intertwined with that of his regime.

Soviet envoy Yevgeny Primakov argued from the early stages of the crisis that the way to resolve it was to offer Saddam a way to preserve this most precious commodity -- his pride. Primakov said in November that Saddam's greatest fear was that his enemies wanted "not only to force Iraq to quit Kuwait, but also to eliminate {his} regime and . . . even the dismemberment of Iraq."

Sohab C. Sobhani, a professor at Georgetown University, wrote recently that this paranoia and "sense of insecurity" was also a problem in finding a peaceful resolution of the Iran-Iraq war. A way had to be found for both countries to save face. "Face-saving is more important than are the details of the reconciliation," said Sobhani.

Saddam made clear in his Jan. 13 meeting with U.N. Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar, only a few days before the war began, that he feared political humiliation. According to a transcript of their meeting published in the Jordanian newspaper Al Dustur, Saddam said that to even utter the word withdrawal "would be creating the psychological conditions for enemy victory over us."

But the Bush administration and many of its allies have declined to play along with this approach since Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, on the grounds that Saddam must be given a stark choice between meeting the coalition's demands or total defeat.

Since the beginning of the ground war, Bush has expressed this view even more forcefully. "Saddam is not interested in peace, but only to regroup and fight another day," Bush said yesterday. Before the war, Bush demanded an Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait, but yesterday Bush was demanding that all Iraqi troops lay down their arms.

A high-ranking administration policy-maker said Bush's tougher message to Saddam now is: "You've done a lot of damage. You're not going to get off the hook."

By insisting on compliance with all the U.N. resolutions, Bush is also trying to ensure that Saddam does not retain any claim on Kuwait, as the Iraqi president intimated in his radio speech yesterday; that he frees prisoners of war and others held against their will; and that he is held responsible in some fashion for the damage and atrocities in Kuwait.

"The price of peace is higher and higher every hour for Saddam Hussein," said a diplomat here who is familiar with allied strategy.