What's Next on Hussein's War Agenda? Just Listen : Strategy: Analysts say he has telegraphed all his moves--and that surrender is the last thing on his mind.

By MARK FINEMAN

Jan. 28, 1991 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

AMMAN, Jordan — Iraqi President Saddam Hussein already has distributed chemical weapons to his front-line troops in Kuwait and plans to bombard allied troops with artillery firing poison-gas projectiles soon after the ground war begins.

Iraq will also unleash a squadron of kamikaze pilots known as the Ali Brigade. Armed with incendiary bombs, some will attempt to strike the largest Saudi Arabian oil fields, while others will make suicide runs against Israel in long-range SU-24 bombers equipped with chemical-bomb tanks.

Meantime, Hussein’s huge military force, most of which remains intact, will hunker down and wait for the real war to begin--the ground war the Iraqi leader has dubbed “the mother of all battles.”

The source for all of the above: President Hussein himself.

Eleven days into the Persian Gulf War, Middle East analysts, diplomats and statesmen who know Hussein best say the Iraqi leader has emerged as the most accurate source for predicting his own future battle plan.

Since the war began, said Jordan’s Crown Prince Hassan, an acquaintance and sympathetic neighbor, Hussein has done precisely “what he said he would do--attack Israel, blow up the oil wells.

“I mean, everything he said he is going to do, he has done.”

One thing he is not going to do, the prince concluded in assessing Hussein’s strategy during an interview with The Times last week, is surrender.

“It would be totally dishonorable of him as the leader of the Iraqi people in the middle of all this to say, ‘Look, I have led my country over this past crucial five months, talks have broken down, I have been attacked by the most massive military attack in history, and now I’m going to raise a white flag,’ ” said the prince, who is a keen analyst of the Iraqi leader’s strategy and motives. “It just doesn’t work that way.”

An even better authority on Hussein’s no-surrender posture is Hussein himself, and he declared in a largely ignored speech to his troops on the southern front late last week that Iraq’s material losses already are so great that he must now fight to the end.

A senior Western diplomat who spent most of the five-month gulf crisis in Baghdad said: “No one can really get inside Saddam’s head. He is the most enigmatic and fiercely secretive man in the world. Even his own commanders don’t really know what’s going on in there.

“But, if you want to know what Saddam is going to do, just listen to Saddam. He has telegraphed everything he’s done since the day he invaded Kuwait, and so far, he’s broken no promises. Study his speeches from the last five months, and especially the last five days before the war began.

“There really have been no surprises.”

Indeed, during a lengthy speech to a group of Islamic fundamentalists in Baghdad on Jan. 11, six days before the war began, Hussein said clearly that his forces would remain on the defensive until well after the allied forces had unleashed their initial aerial assault.

“If you go to the operations theater now, you will see only a few soldiers,” Hussein told the religious leaders that day. “You will not see all those thousands of tanks or the million soldiers, except rarely, for all the others are safely dug underground.

“After the bombardment, and when the enemy tanks and ground forces advance, the boys (Iraqi soldiers) will come out and fight.”

During that same speech, Hussein strongly hinted at his grim prisoner-of-war policy, which would take the world by surprise nearly two weeks later, when the Iraqi military displayed captured and apparently beaten allied pilots on Baghdad television. Anyone parachuting onto Iraqi soil, Hussein vowed, would be permitted to land “so as to show them something they had not experienced.”

The Iraqi ruler also explained in detail how he would maintain command and control over his troops and air force, even in the event allied raids severed his principal communications links. His military, he said, had been training for more than a year “to overcome the enemies’ attempt to jam communications between the command and the fighters.” He added that his Scud missile launching crews and fighter pilots were armed with advance instructions that needed no verification from the high command.

But that speech was just the final set of insights into Hussein’s battle plans.

A half-dozen times before the first Scud missile was launched at Tel Aviv, Hussein and his state-run media had specifically warned that he would shower Israel with ballistic missiles within hours of an allied first strike.

As long ago as Aug. 8, a front-page headline in the state-run Baghdad Observer declared, “Saddam Hussein threatens to launch missile attack against Israel” if the United States took military action in the gulf.

Hussein also let it be known in October that he would blow up Kuwait’s oil facilities if and when war broke out, leaking a story to the Western press Oct. 25 that Iraqi engineers had attached explosives to one-third of Kuwait’s 1,000 oil wells as a precaution against attack.

On Nov. 8, the Iraqi News Agency quoted Hussein as issuing additional warnings that he has since only partially fulfilled: that all multinational forces in Saudi Arabia would be targeted by Iraqi missiles if U.S. troops attacked from Saudi soil and that he would turn the Arabian Peninsula into ashes and the Persian Gulf oil fields into “a sea of fire” if he were attacked.

Middle East experts in assessing Hussein said the last of those still-unfulfilled warnings is the more threatening.

The Iraqis privately confirmed reports from Washington in October that Hussein’s arsenal includes so-called fuel-expansion bombs, weapons that create fireballs that some say are similar to those caused by small nuclear explosions. Most analysts have interpreted Iraq’s “sea of fire” threat to mean that Saudi oil fields will be the targets of expansion bombs, probably delivered by airborne suicide squads.

The threat of suicide attacks, repeated in an Iraqi News Agency dispatch a few days after the war began, illustrates the difficulty most Westerners have had in reading Hussein through the words of Hussein, several analysts and diplomats said.

“One really has to cut through all the rhetoric and boastful claims--all of his tirades about infidels and holy war and threats to feed American pilots to the dogs,” said a Western military analyst who was based in Baghdad until recently.

“It throws a lot of people off and distracts them from the real information that Saddam is giving out. But the information is there. Even now . . . Saddam hasn’t done anything he hasn’t told us he was going to do days, weeks or months ago.”

Analyzing Jordan Prince Hassan’s assessment that Hussein will not surrender, military analysts in the region agreed that the Iraqi president can no longer back away from his position, adding that the only possible conclusion to the war, short of a long and brutal ground battle, would be a rebellion within the ranks of Hussein’s military command or his ruling Revolutionary Command Council.

“There is always this possibility that even his RCC members might try something against him if they think things are going badly and realize they don’t want to get caught in the same trap,” one Western military expert said. “There are still quite a few people who can think in there.”

Short of an internal coup or rebellion, though, most analysts said Hussein has made it clear that his game plan is simply to have his large ground forces sit in their defensive bunkers and wait.

“In a way, his strategy in war is the same as his strategy during the relative peace of the prewar crisis,” the Western expert said. “He has returned to the human-shield policy as an attempt to deter attack, and, politically, he has continued his constant appeals to the Muslim and Arab worlds to join his holy war and split the alliance against him by fomenting street unrest in coalition members like Egypt, Pakistan and Syria.”

Meanwhile, the expert added, if and when a ground war does begin, Hussein intends to unleash all the weapons in his arsenal, including poison gas and other chemical elements that military experts said Iraq has loaded into artillery shells to be fired at advancing allied forces.

“And, again, Saddam has warned us,” a Western military analyst said. “He has promised it several times, using words to the effect that he will burn the infidels in their foxholes.”

Through all their assessments, the experts repeatedly called attention to the cultural and linguistic gaps between Hussein and the Western forces opposing him, saying that lack of understanding was partially to blame for the march toward war.

Prince Hassan said: “The Americans all the way were saying, ‘We don’t know him. How does this man work? How does this man think?’ While, at the same time, brandishing labels--monster, madman, Hitler and so forth--continuously provoking him from Day One. You don’t say the man is a monster and a madman and then get surprised when he takes prisoners of war and parades them on television, and then say this is a violation of the Geneva Convention.”

But the misunderstanding worked both says, the prince added.

He said Hussein, for his part, did not understand the Americans because he was listening as well as speaking in “vernacular Iraqi, which more often than not was badly translated.”

Thus, there was “a clash of idiom, of culture, of mentality . . . right up to the point of the 15th of January,” the prince said, referring to the U.N. deadline for Hussein to withdraw his forces from Kuwait.

“In a sense, from the beginning, not only has he been isolated, but the whole game plan has been enacted as though he wasn’t even a player in it,” the prince said. “You know, it’s sort of like spanking your child and saying, ‘It hurts me more than it hurts you.’

“So the single-mindedness is on both sides.”

Asked to describe Hussein’s strategic options now that war is raging around him, Prince Hassan said, “There is only the option of continuing to face up to the United States, as he sees it, and to feel effectively that in fighting back he’s going to stimulate further and further responses in the Arab and Muslim world.”

And the prince had a near-apocalyptic theory about that strategy and where it would lead: It recalls, he said, the image of “Samson in the temple. You know, let’s bring the whole thing down--culture, civilization.

“You know, this is the Big Bang.”