Inside the Habanos Bar at the Ritz-Carlton, the smiling sheikhs and chuckling US generals avoid disturbing one another as over-anxious Romanian waiters lop off the ends of their fresh Cuban cigars. The compassionate gaze of a uniformed Fidel Castro staring down from a portrait is a reminder of the awkwardness of fighting wars in strange places.

General Tommy Franks, the chief of US Central Command, dropped into the Ritz this week to stress to his Gulf Arab friends – including Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, and Kuwait – the danger that Saddam Hussein poses to the region. But, based upon the noises made by some of his allies afterwards, General Franks still has some convincing to do.

"For Arab leaders and citizens there is a big difference between what Winston Churchill warned about Hitler's expansionism and George Bush is now warning about Saddam's alleged intentions," says Amr El-Kahky, an Egyptian political analyst and television correspondent at the groundbreaking Qatari cable news channel, Al Jazeera. "After all, Saddam has not started a new war, he has been beaten badly the last time he started one and he is now under intense scrutiny."

What the Arab regimes fear most, say analysts, is a cornered Hussein, who, facing his own certain end with no option of personal survival, decides to lash out at his neighbors.

Western and Arab analysts say that Arab politicians and citizens see Hussein as a leader who will act within reason when the US and its allies apply deterrent pressure to keep him in his box. The prevailing Arab view is the equivalent of the way many in Washington once looked at the Soviet Union as a calculating foe, unwilling to make a move that would surely provoke massive retaliation.

The already intense world scrutiny of Iraq took on an ever-sharper focus yesterday. Mark Gwozdecky, a senior weapons inspector attached to the International Atomic Energy Agency, said in Vienna that the world cannot "give an authoritative guide yet" to what weapons of mass destruction Saddam Hussein does have, but that Gwozdecky's staff, who fill the ranks of the UN inspectors now likely headed for Baghdad, intend to start new inspections in Iraq within a matter of weeks.

Arab nations, led by Saudi Arabia, which signaled a new willingness this past week to back UN-sanctioned military action against Iraq, are credited by Western diplomats with helping to force President Saddam Hussein into allowing the return of UN weapons inspectors.

Last week, when Saudi Arabia and tiny Qatar finally bowed to Washington's intentions, Baghdad stood on the precipice of losing its own battle to win more Arab support for the dropping of US-led economic sanctions and military threats. Then, early this week, Husseincaved into the idea of renewed UN inspections.

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