America Abroad

By Strobe Talbott .

In the heat of battle, too much victory may be hard to imagine, but the leaders of the coalition arrayed against Iraq should remember Versailles. By imposing an excess of defeat on Germany in 1919, the winners inadvertently stirred resentment among the losers that led to political extremism and eventually to another war.

Many Arabs and, more generally, many Muslims identify with Saddam Hussein precisely because he is losing on what they see as a heroic, even mythic scale. For them, his plight is a symbol of their own victimization by the rich and powerful nations of the world. No matter how and when the war ends, Islamic rage already threatens the stability of traditionally pro-Western regimes from Morocco to Jordan to Pakistan. Blunting that trend is more important than seeing Saddam get what he deserves.

His opponents want him not just out of Kuwait but off this planet. That goes for all the active combatants and many interested bystanders as well. The government in Tehran hopes that someone other than Saddam will eventually present the claim check for the Iraqi warplanes now parked in Iran. The Israelis have a tacit deal with Washington: they stay out of the fighting, and the U.S. rids the neighborhood of its No. 1 menace.

For George Bush, too, this thing is personal. While the U.S. Army and Marines prepared to go whirring and clanking and blasting their way north, U.S. government lawyers were beavering away on a brief for the prosecution of the ground war all the way to Baghdad. Certainly by Scudding Israel and launching oil slicks at desalination plants, Saddam justified expanding the war aims beyond the liberation of Kuwait. A presidential adviser remarked, "We're almost counting on this guy to use chemical weapons to clinch the case for dealing with him as a war criminal when this is over."

Instead his opponents may have to deal with him for a while longer as President of Iraq. First came signals from Moscow that Saddam's former benefactors in the Kremlin are determined to save his skin, his face, even his job. Then came the news from Baghdad that Saddam's battered legions might get out of Kuwait one step ahead of a coalition offensive. Hence the note of frustration in Bush's voice Friday as he all but begged the Iraqi armed forces to "take matters into their own hands," thus doing what not even the smartest bomb in the U.S. arsenal has been able to accomplish.

From the beginning, Saddam's objective has been his personal survival. His strategy has been to play for a lopsided stalemate, sacrificing pawns (his citizens' lives) and pieces (his best weapons) as long as the king is still standing.

So let it stand, at least for the next phase of the game. When this battle was joined on Jan. 16, Saddam had two major assets: the ability to conquer other countries and, in his occupation of Kuwait, proof of his willingness to do so. He has already lost much of the first, and he may abandon all of the second. If so, the coalition can deprive him of a third asset, his political appeal as a martyr, by ending hostilities.

The U.N. sanctions, meanwhile, can and should continue. When Saddam emerges from his bunker, blinking into the sunlight, he will face the devastation he has brought down on his people as well as an embargo that could last as long as he is in power. Perhaps then, finally, there will be a genuinely Arab -- indeed, Iraqi -- solution to the real problem Saddam represents, which is aggression and its consequences for everyone involved. Checkmate: the king is dead.