NEWS ANALYSIS : Can Sanctions Trip Up Hussein? : Iraq: The U.S. thinks so, and remains determined to press the strategy for as long as possible. Others aren’t so sure.

Having held Iraq in an economic stranglehold for 10 months, U.S. policy-makers now find themselves again facing the very question that confronted them before the Persian Gulf War began: Will economic sanctions work against Iraq, and if so, how long will they take?

Before last January’s military attack, they concluded that sanctions were too slow and too uncertain a weapon to be relied upon to force Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to leave Kuwait. But now they are counting on the strategy they discarded then to achieve something that is even harder to do--persuade Iraqis to oust a leader who seems as deeply entrenched as ever.

“Using (sanctions) to get him out of office is much more difficult,” says Henry Schuler of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “His very survival is at stake now, and the survival of everybody in the Baath (party) hierarchy, and the military as well. Everybody will sink or swim with Saddam, so there’s a reluctance to force him out.”

For now, Administration officials say, they have resolved to press the economic strategy as long as possible. This is not because they are convinced that the embargo will work soon but rather because there are no other effective alternatives.

“The bottom line that you try to make clear to people (in Iraq) is that there can be a tough peace or an easy peace. It’s going to be a tough peace as long as Saddam is there,” one senior Bush Administration official said.

But some analysts say the effect of the sanctions may be the opposite of what the allies intended. “Saddam appears to be politically strengthened,” says James Place, a former U.S. envoy to Iraq.

Officials acknowledge that this course poses some tough problems that the United States had hoped to avoid--in particular, waging war against Hussein by punishing his people. A Harvard University team has estimated that 170,000 Iraqi children will die during the next year because of the war and its aftershocks.

With a policy in which progress may be measured in disease and public deprivation, “we have to anticipate it will be difficult over time to hold the international consensus together on this,” an Administration official concedes.

“It gets continually harder to keep this on,” another adds.

Technically, the United Nations, which imposed the sanctions, has said they will remain in place only until Iraq has satisfied a number of conditions that include agreeing to pay economic reparations out of its future oil profits.

However, President Bush has taken a tougher line, vowing that the embargo will continue “as long as Saddam Hussein is in power,” with possible exceptions made for food imports.

Already, there has been some softening and signs that the United States and its allies are veering toward separate courses.

The U.N. Sanctions Committee agreed Wednesday to allow the 31 countries holding frozen Iraqi assets to release them, if Iraq could prove that they would go toward humanitarian purposes. The United States, however, will continue to keep frozen the $1.4 billion that it holds.

Administration sources say they will hold the line because they are skeptical of Hussein’s willingness to spend his resources to ease his country’s suffering. “We know he will feed his army first. We know what his priorities are,” one source warns.

Others add that there is no indication that the country is on the verge of starvation. One notes that recent reports from Baghdad indicate that “fruit and other food is quite plentiful.”

While these supplies may merely be an indication that Hussein is trying to project an air of normalcy and strength, the official says, “I think before we would have any enthusiasm for relief related to food and other humanitarian items, we would want to know what is his own capability.”

From the outset, Iraq seemed especially vulnerable to an international embargo. Virtually its entire income--as much as $13 billion a year--derives from selling oil, and it was a simple matter for the allies to choke off that flow.

So even if its mountainous borders might be tempting to smugglers, “without oil sales, they are not going to have significant foreign exchange to buy what they need from the outside,” said Riad Ajami, director of the Rochester Institute of Technology’s international business program.

U.S. officials say they are satisfied that the embargo is holding relatively tight. While smuggling activity has picked up somewhat since the war, it is nowhere near the levels of last fall, probably because Iraq has less money.

Hussein has managed to use local materials and labor to repair some of the war damage to bridges and roads. However, sources say he is rapidly reaching “a plateau” in his abilities to continue the reconstruction.

But analysts say conditions might have to get much worse before Hussein’s survival is in question.

“How bad do things have to get before the army will take things into its own hands and oust him?” asks Jeffrey J. Schott, who has studied the use of sanctions for the Institute for International Economics. “It could be some time, and he could kill a lot of people between now and then.”

Richard Ellings, author of a book on embargoes, predicts that the goals of the sanctions may shift, as they did when the United States and its allies attempted to isolate the Soviet Union after its blockade of Berlin in the late 1940s.

Ultimately, those sanctions--which are still in place in many areas of commerce--evolved to become less coercive and took on “a long-term strategic purpose” of limiting the Soviets’ access to materials and markets.

And that, Ellings suggests, may be the most the United States and its allies can expect from the economic squeeze on Hussein.

“He is the most intractable character on the planet,” he adds. “An economically coercive policy is doomed to failure.”

Times staff writers Doyle McManus and Norman Kempster contributed to this story.