Fear of Uncontrollable Situation : Reflagging: Diplomats See a New Set of Risks

CAIRO — As the Reagan Administration proceeds with plans to provide naval escorts for Kuwaiti tankers in the Persian Gulf, diplomats and Arab officials are expressing growing concern that the United States may be drawn into an unpredictable situation with uncontrollable consequences.

Until now, the nearly seven-year-old Persian Gulf War, while devastating to the combatants, Iran and Iraq, has had little impact on the outside world. However, the U.S. decision to re-register 11 Kuwaiti oil tankers as American ships and to provide them with naval protection against Iranian attack, beginning as early as next Wednesday, is liable to change this by introducing a whole new set of risks, these officials agree.

‘Escalating by the Day’

“The situation in the gulf is very serious and is escalating by the day. It could put the whole region, and perhaps even the world, at risk,” a senior Egyptian official said this week.

Not all the experts hold such alarmist views, but all of those interviewed did agree that the war is about to enter a new “internationalized” phase whose effects are likely to ripple far beyond the waters of the turbulent gulf itself.

The risks arise from the escalating violence that could be triggered by a military clash between the United States and Iran.

Egyptian and Western military experts described several scenarios and said their concerns stem chiefly from the difficulty of foreseeing where any of them will lead.

One scenario begins with Iran attempting to attack a “reflagged” Kuwaiti vessel or, less likely, one of the U.S. warships escorting it. In either case, the United States would probably have to retaliate militarily, initiating a sequence of events that could drag Washington directly into the war.

Even if Iran shies away from a direct confrontation with the U.S. Navy, it can be expected to step up its attacks on other commercial shipping in the gulf as a way of making the Navy patrols look ineffectual, analysts say. Although the Navy’s role, at present, is only to protect tankers flying U.S. flags, the declared aim of the patrols is to protect all commercial shipping in the gulf in order to keep international sea lanes open.

“What does the Reagan Administration do if the tanker war escalates, if there are more attacks rather than less as a result of the increased U.S. presence?” asked a Western diplomat. “Does it withdraw, which would be seen as another failure and a humiliation? Or does it expand its role and in doing so become sucked into a vicious and unpredictable war? And if that happens, what will be the Soviet response?

“These are very disturbing questions,” the diplomat added, “and the most disturbing thing about them is that no one seems to know any of the answers.”

Indeed, diplomats and Egyptian officials say their misgivings are magnified by what they see as the Reagan Administration’s lack of a clearly defined policy toward the gulf war or an accurate perception of the situation into which it is thrusting itself.

For instance, Administration officials have insisted that the reflagging operation does not represent a departure from the declared U.S. position of neutrality in the war. However, as several diplomats noted, virtually no one in the Middle East, least of all Iran, is likely to see it that way.

For one thing, Iraq, which initiated the so-called tanker war, still attacks many more ships than Iran does. Indeed, although everyone now agrees that it was an accident, it was Iraq that illustrated the dangers facing the United States in the gulf with its May 17 attack on the guided missile frigate Stark, which resulted in the loss of 37 American lives.

While each side in the gulf war has disrupted the other’s oil exports with attacks on shipping, Iran has another reason for targeting ships from Kuwait, which is a staunch Iraqi ally and a major transit point for armaments entering Iraq.

“No matter how it is portrayed in Washington, if you try to protect only one side’s shipping and not the other’s, it is going to be seen in the gulf as an intervention on behalf of Iraq,” one senior diplomat said.

The consequences of taking sides, or at least of appearing to take them, could also undermine another declared U.S. policy objective of trying to keep communications open with Iran to preclude the possibility of its turning more pro-Soviet, the experts say. This was the rationale originally advanced by President Reagan, among others, to justify the covert sale of U.S. weapons to Iran as part of the secret negotiations to free American hostages held by pro-Iranian groups in Lebanon.

But any overt “tilt toward Iraq now runs the risk of having precisely the opposite effect--you may end up pushing the Iranians further and faster towards the Russians,” a Western European diplomat said.

So far, very little of this concern has been expressed in public, and indeed none of the officials interviewed by The Times would speak for attribution. Their reticence partly reflects the fact that it was Kuwait itself that requested superpower protection for its tankers. But, in the wake of the revelations of the Iran- contra affair, there is also, in the words of an Egyptian official, “considerable sympathy” for any attempt by the Reagan Administration to shore up its badly damaged credibility by showing support for an important Arab ally.

Still, in private, off-the-record conversations, doubts are expressed over whether the Administration really has a firm grasp of the political and military implications of its intended actions.

“A policy that has you protecting ships against attacks by a country to which you have until very recently been supplying arms is a policy that seems to be going around in circles,” one source said.

Militarily, U.S. forces protecting Kuwaiti vessels in the gulf will have to contend with three possible threats, military experts believe.

The first is the Chinese-supplied Silkworm missiles whose deployment by Iran along the narrow Strait of Hormuz is what prompted Kuwait to seek protection for its tankers in the first place. Capable of covering the strait and packing warheads big enough to sink a tanker, the missiles, if they are made fully operational, could give Iran a chokehold over the entrance to the strategic gulf.

Some analysts say they think that the Iranians may now be deterred from using these missiles because of the likelihood that U.S. planes or warships would respond by destroying them. Similarly, the remnants of the Iranian air force, while they pose another threat, are no match for the U.S. naval force, the experts say.

However, the Iranians also have another less conventional means of attack at their disposal in the form of a fleet of small and fast Swedish-built speedboats. Big enough to be mounted with missiles, the boats, which are capable of speeds of up to 55 m.p.h., lie low in the water and are hard to detect on radar.

While military experts doubt that they pose a great threat to a fully armed and alert warship, the speedboats can and have been used successfully in strafing attacks against commercial shipping.

They have also been used to lay mines, and they could be filled with explosives and used to ram ships, becoming, in effect, floating truck bombs. More disquietingly, these small craft are now manned by Iran’s fanatical Revolutionary Guards, who on numerous occasions in the war with Iraq have demonstrated their willingness to be “martyred” in suicide missions.

“Catching these fellows could prove difficult. They will be fighting a guerrilla war at sea,” one military analyst said.

“No one can really predict what they will do. The Revolutionary Guards are not even wholly under the sphere of Iranian influence,” a diplomat added.

Some experts still think the threat posed by all these uncertainties is overrated.

They note, for example, that the British navy has been escorting British-registered ships through the gulf for some time now without incident and see no reason why the U.S. Navy would not have an equal or greater deterrent effect on the Iranians.

Others, however, warn that the circumstances are far different in the case of the United States. Whereas the British have been able to keep a low-key and largely unpublicized profile in the gulf, the recent history of U.S.-Iranian relations, the deep animosity that Iran’s revolutionary government harbors toward the United States and the debate over reflagging in Congress, with all its attendant publicity, have combined to make some sort of direct conflict unavoidable, these experts argue.

The ‘Great Satan’

Moreover, in the case of Iran, and especially with the newly seaborne Revolutionary Guards, the United States is not dealing with a unified, level-headed leadership given to rational assessment of the risks involved, but with fanatics willing, perhaps even eager, to go to great lengths to further embarrass and humiliate the “Great Satan,” as they call the United States.

And the Iranians, judging from their rhetoric, appear eager to throw down the gauntlet.

Hassan Ali, commander of the Revolutionary Guards naval units, said in Tehran recently that Iran regards the “reinforcement of U.S. military presence in the Persian Gulf . . . (as) a declaration of war,” and Tehran radio, in a typically boastful commentary, advised the United States to “save its flags for the coffins of the American military personnel who enter this perilous place.”

On Wednesday, even as four U.S. amphibious assault ships passed through the Suez Canal from the Mediterranean and headed south in the general direction of the gulf, another high-ranking Revolutionary Guards official, Ali Shamkhani, said Iran was “eagerly waiting” for the opportunity to take on the U.S. naval force. And the Speaker of the Iranian Parliament, Hashemi Rafsanjani, said Iran was ready to attack U.S. ships.

The Iranian bravado may contain even more than the usual amount of bluster, but the real risk to the United States, according to an Arab diplomat, involves doubts over whether or not the Reagan Administration has a strategy for preventing itself from being drawn into a conflict that it may not have the political resolve to see through.

This diplomat noted that “President Reagan sounded tough in Lebanon too” but ordered U.S. forces out of that country a day after 241 U.S. servicemen were killed in a suicide truck-bomb attack carried out by pro-Iranian terrorists.

Repeating that cut-and-run scenario would shred “what remains of U.S. credibility in this part of the world,” the diplomat concluded.