NEWS ANALYSIS : Saudis Feel They Can’t Afford to Wait Much Longer in Standoff : Mideast: Alliance officials fear religious pressure could force the nation to seek a separate peace with Iraq.

Amid increasingly strident opposition by religious conservatives to American influences in the kingdom, there is a growing sense within Saudi Arabia that, whether the crisis in the Persian Gulf is resolved by peace or by war, the Saudis cannot afford to wait much longer.

Saudi Arabia until now has adamantly opposed a negotiated solution to the crisis. But officials with the multinational alliance here are growing increasingly concerned that mounting pressure on the monarchy from religious activists could force the Saudis--in the event of a continued stalemate--to seek a separate peace with Iraq.

“I think they clearly prefer a peaceful outcome. They doubt it will happen. But the one thing they have to have happen is to get it over,” one senior Western official said.

“By Jan. 15, they will need to know definitely when and how we propose to accomplish the objectives that we started out with in August,” he said. Jan. 15, 1991, is the deadline that the U.N. Security Council has set for Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait, which it invaded Aug. 2.

The Islamic holy month of Ramadan in March, which is followed by an annual pilgrimage, has become “a kind of control date,” the Western official added. “If this crisis has not taken some sort of decisive turn by then, the tensions become almost insupportable.”

But Saudi Arabia has rebuffed the latest efforts to negotiate an Arab resolution to the crisis. It applauds, in principle, attempts to reach a peaceful settlement, but it insists that any resolution comply with the U.N. demands for a complete Iraqi pullout and restoration of Kuwait’s ruling family.

Algerian President Chadli Bendjedid, fresh from contacts in Jordan and Iraq, canceled a planned trip to Saudi Arabia when the kingdom made it clear it has no intention at present of agreeing to a meeting between King Fahd and Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

Such a meeting “is a waste of time. It will not happen,” one Saudi official said.

At the same time, Western officials are becoming increasingly concerned that Saudi Arabia, alarmed at the increasing stridence of religious conservatives opposed to the U.S. military presence and mindful of its own need to eventually make amends with its Arab neighbors, will “exit to the bazaar” and cut its own deal if it perceives the United States is not prepared to act.

“They have to live in this region; long after we go away, they will still be here,” one senior Western diplomat said. “If we cannot contribute to their national security, and in fact end up detracting from it by hatching plans to stay here, then they will start pressing a resolution on their own.”

The prospect of the Security Council’s Jan. 15 deadline passing quietly with no resolution to the crisis in sight and no clear U.S. mandate for military action looms as a chilling scenario for both sides.

“The Saudis are totally reluctant to confront that possibility,” said one Western official, “as indeed we are.”

What kinds of terms the Saudis might seek in any negotiated settlement are not clear. The kingdom in recent weeks has been sending out subtle signals that it would not object to a scenario under which Iraq withdraws unconditionally from Kuwait and then negotiates, with Saudi Arabia’s blessing, for control of the two Persian Gulf islands and the oil field on the Iraqi-Kuwaiti border that Iraq regards as its rightful property.

“When there is no war, when there is no tension, there is nothing wrong with a compromise on territory among Arab countries,” one Saudi official said. “There is no dishonor in that. We have done it before.”

However, many Saudi officials still believe that decisive military action may be the only way to resolve the crisis. And they are increasingly nervous about what they perceive as a lack of will within the United States and on the part of many Saudi civilians to pursue such action.

“Perhaps if you take the majority of Saudis, the majority of Saudis would say they prefer to negotiate because they are foolish enough to think it can be solved without blood, without casualties,” said one official with close ties to the Saudi Defense Ministry.

“They keep talking about how many tanks Saddam has,” he said. “Don’t worry about tanks. You don’t need tanks. What you need is the head of the snake. You hit it and wait. If it doesn’t die, you hit it again.”

Fueling much of the concern for a quick settlement in Saudi Arabia is a rash of increasingly violent confrontations between religious conservatives and liberal, Western-influenced Saudis. Most Saudi officials believe these conflicts are tied to the religious Establishment’s belief that the U.S. troop presence is contributing to a disturbing secularization in the normally conservative Muslim kingdom.

Last month, a group of mutawain , or religious police, armed with firearms, axes and clubs, stormed into the home of a French businessman in Riyadh during a rowdy party, smashed furniture and attacked several party-goers, injuring 12.

All 46 people at the party, including several Americans, French and Britons, were arrested. The authorities in Riyadh intervened and released the party-goers the next morning and reportedly disciplined the mutawain involved. But the American and British embassies have filed protests.

Then, only two weeks ago, the mutawain in Jidda broke into a party hosted by a prominent perfume distributor, a man with close connections with King Fahd, and arrested him. He was sentenced by a religious court to two years in prison for violating the kingdom’s laws against alcohol and social contact between unmarried men and women, according to Saudi sources in Riyadh.

The two incidents have provoked alarm in both the Saudi and foreign communities here. Although laws against alcohol and intersex mingling are strictly enforced in public, people since the late 1950s have been largely free to do as they like within their own homes.

“It was a shock to liberal Saudis, who believed that what happened behind the walls of their house was their business, not the business of the religious police,” one diplomat said.

The most recent incident involved a group of mutawain in Riyadh who went to a supermarket frequented by Westerners and attempted to prevent single men from entering the market while women were inside. A group of Saudi men objected, a fistfight broke out, and the mutawain chased the men in their car and ran into a light pole, according to Saudi sources.