Arab Leaders Call for Troops to Halt Iraqis : Gulf crisis: 12 nations urge dispatch of forces to aid Saudis. Hussein declares a holy war against the U.S., urging Muslims to 'hit their interests wherever they are.'

By KIM MURPHY

Aug. 11, 1990 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

CAIRO —

Arab leaders Friday abandoned hope of negotiating a peaceful solution to the Persian Gulf crisis and called for dispatching Arab troops to the region to hold back Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s proclaimed holy war against the United States and the “emirs of oil” in the gulf.

Swiftly raising the stakes after Iraq’s flat refusal here Friday to negotiate any withdrawal of its troops from Kuwait, 12 Arab countries went a step further than a proposed Arab peacekeeping force previously discussed for the Iraq-Kuwait border. At an emergency summit meeting of the Arab League, they adopted a resolution advocating active deployment of Arab troops in Saudi Arabia and other gulf nations threatened by Iraq.

Earlier in the day, Hussein had pushed up the temperature in the region with a plea for Arabs and Muslims to launch a holy war against the stationing of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia and against the monarchy that invited foreign soldiers onto the soil of the nation housing Islam’s two most sacred shrines.

“Burn the land under the feet of the aggressors who want evil for the people of Iraq, after which their weakness will spread in the whole Arab world,” Hussein exhorted in a statement read by an announcer on Baghdad Radio. “Hit their interests wherever they are. . . . Iraq has insisted on a holy war without hesitation or retreat against the foreign forces until you reach heaven or martyrdom.”

At the Arab League meeting in Cairo, Iraqi Foreign Minister Tarik Aziz denied that Hussein had ever made an all-inclusive promise not to invade Kuwait. Aziz declared that Iraq, hardened from eight years of battle with Iran, is ready to go to war against the United States if attacked.

“If you harbor in your mind to commit a military aggression against Iraq, you will be defeated,” he warned. “We know that America is a superpower. We know that America could erase Iraq from the map of the world if it resorted to nuclear weapons.

“But if Americans are going to use military forces to attack Iraq, they should take into consideration that . . .the Iraqis are well-experienced to defend themselves against aggression. We spent the best years of our lives defending our country against the Iranian aggression.”

A seven-point resolution endorsed by twelve of the 20 Arab leaders who attended the meeting implicitly endorses Saudi Arabia’s call for U.S. military intervention to hold off Iraqi troops massed at its frontier with Kuwait. It also supports the U.N. Security Council’s calls for a comprehensive trade embargo against Iraq and its refusal to recognize Iraq’s proclaimed annexation of Kuwait.

In an organization known for its raucous disputes, the Arab League’s Cairo summit may have exceeded all records for discord:

Kuwait’s exiled foreign minister, Sheik Sabah al Ahmed al Sabah, fainted after an argument with Aziz, his Iraqi counterpart.

Aziz then was reported to have engaged in a shouting match with the Saudi Arabian foreign minister, Prince Saud al Faisal. Kuwait’s exiled emir, Sheik Jabbar al Ahmed al Sabah, who looked tired and distracted in photographs of the opening ceremony, abruptly left the summit meeting without official explanation and headed for the airport shortly after deliberations began.

Baghdad television reported that members of the Iraqi delegation threw plates of food at Kuwaiti delegates during an official lunch. However, delegates denied the plate-throwing incident.

In the wake of the league’s failure to strike a compromise with Hussein, and as U.S. forces continued their defensive buildup in Saudi Arabia, it appeared that what happens next in the tense confrontation will be up to the mercurial Iraqi leader.

“I think there’s a certain amount of put-up or shut-up type of response in this,” a Western diplomat who has closely followed the Arab League’s deliberations said of the summit resolution. “This will show that the Arab states are prepared to fight back, but what happens next is a matter of reading one man’s character, and I don’t think anyone can be optimistic.”

Egypt was considered the state most likely to dispatch troops to the Persian Gulf in response to Friday’s resolution, and Egyptian officials have privately said they believe Morocco may be prepared to commit troops as well. Syria, historically Iraq’s bitterest foe in the Arab world, and Egypt maintain the region’s two largest armies, after Iraq’s No. 1 force of about 1 million troops and other personnel.

Because of the deep divisions on the issue--Libya, the Palestine Liberation Organization and Iraq voted against the resolution, Algeria and Yemen abstained, and Jordan, Sudan and Mauritania expressed “reservations”--it proved impossible to set up a joint pan-Arab force operating under the direction of the Arab League.

League regulations require a unanimous vote on any resolution to commit troops. Instead, the resolution encourages threatened Persian Gulf states to seek help from the individual Arab countries that signed the resolution. Further, in a departure from normal Arab League actions, which are undertaken with unanimous consent, the signatories are the only ones bound by the resolution.

The countries that signed are Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Djibouti, Kuwait, Lebanon, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Somalia, Syria and the United Arab Emirates.

Tunisia did not send a representative to the summit and did not say why.

In Washington, White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater praised the Arab League’s action as “a positive and significant statement” offering “very strong condemnation of Iraqi behavior and equally strong support for Kuwaiti sovereignity.”

Mofid Shihab, an Egyptian legal specialist who aided the league’s deliberations, said any Arab forces deployed in the region under the resolution would serve separately from the U.S. multinational force ordered to Saudi Arabia by President Bush earlier this week.

Also, the forces could be dispatched only by means of individual “bilateral” agreements reached between Saudi Arabia and Kuwait and the country from which the aid is sought, he said.

“There are no troops which are going to be sent under the name of the Arab League or the presidency of the Arab League general secretary. This means that those countries which are threatened with aggression can ask for assistance,” he said. “Saudi Arabia has the right to ask the devil’s help if they want it.”

In an interview with Egyptian reporters after the meeting, Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd said the resolution does not propel the region into war. “We don’t want to attack anyone, and I am committed to that, unless we are attacked,” he said.

Speaking to U.S. reporters earlier in the day, Iraqi Foreign Minister Aziz reiterated that Iraq has no intention of invading Saudi Arabia.

“When did the Iraqi government, and when did any Iraqi official say in the past, a few years ago, a few weeks ago, a few days ago, that we have a problem with Saudi Arabia so Saudi Arabia would be a target for an Iraqi threat? We have had excellent relations with Saudi Arabia,” Aziz said.

“All the allegations that there is an Iraqi threat to Saudi Arabia are untrue, are baseless, I categorically deny them, and they cannot provide any evidence that such a threat exists,” he added.

Responding to a complaint by Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak that Iraqi President Hussein had assured him in the days beforehand that he had no plans to invade Kuwait, Aziz said that Hussein’s assurance was misrepresented. He asserted that the Iraqi leader had pledged only that he would not invade Kuwait before a negotiating session was held on Iraq’s economic and territorial disputes with Kuwait. That session took place in Jidda, Saudi Arabia, on the two days preceding the invasion.

Aziz also played down concerns about thousands of foreigners being held in Baghdad and Kuwait against their wills after the closure of the borders in the two countries. He attributed that situation to “precautionary measures” imposed as a result of the “special circumstances” of the invasion.

With airports closed and the overland crossing into Jordan limited in capacity, Iraqi officials must prepare before allowing any large-scale exodus out of the country, he said. “This is more a technical matter than a political matter,” he said.

Asked if the foreigners prevented from leaving are hostages of Iraq, Aziz scoffed: “Hostages, my dear friend, don’t live in hotels, talk to their relatives in the U.S. and Britain, enjoy life better than we do. They are not hostages--they are guests.”

Aziz had called in reporters to announce that Iraq was not prepared to conduct any negotiations at the Arab League meeting until U.S. troops were removed from the region. At about the same time, Hussein in Baghdad was issuing his emotional appeal to Arabs all over the region to resist the U.S. intervention.

Hearkening back to the Muslim prophet Mohammed and such legendary figures of Arab nationalism as Said Zaghoul and Gamal Abdel Nasser, Hussein declared that “the liberation of Kuwait became the struggle of liberating the Arab nation as a whole. It is the war of liberation against hunger, poverty, looking for an honorable life away from humiliation.”

Appeals such as that one have won widespread approbation for the outspoken Iraqi leader in Arab countries such as Jordan, Tunisia and Sudan--countries in which Islamic fundamentalism is also on the rise.

Hussein appealed to Muslims all over the Arab world, declaring that Saudi Arabia, home to the Islam’s shrines of Mecca and Medina, has been breached by foreign forces.

“The day has come when they put holy Mecca with the Prophet Mohammed’s grave under the foreigners’ protection,” he said.

“You Arabs, you Muslims, you believers in God wherever you are, this is your day to rise and spread to defend Mecca, which has fallen under the spear of the Americans and the Zionists. . . . Push the foreigners away from our holy land . . . and stand against those rulers who don’t know honor and revolt, against the oil emirs who take the Arabs’ women and drive them to sin. . . .

“Tell the traitors that they have no place in the Arab land after they gave up the rights of the people and insulted their dignity and honor.”