Washington ? Saddam Hussein’s only effective weapon in the 1991 Gulf War was the shame factor. He is preparing to deploy it again in a grisly replay of a military strategy based on sacrificing as many Iraqi civilians and soldiers as he must to save himself.

In Arab society and politics, a foe who can be made to feel shame is a weakened and vulnerable opponent. For the Iraqi dictator, that meant exhausting American willingness to kill leaderless and defenseless Iraqi troops to get a cease-fire 12 years ago. This time, Iraqi civilians and oil fields will be pawns in Saddam’s strategy of morale-weakening destruction.

U.S. generals will need also to cope with Saddam’s penchant for sacrificial battlefield surprise and his belief that an Iraq that fails him and his grandiose ambition does not deserve to exist. Failing to become Saladin, he could settle for being Sampson in the temple.

He may again use force immediately to express his disdain for the Arab “traitors” helping the Americans, as he did early in the 1991 campaign. Then he sent an armored Iraqi column with no air cover on a suicide mission into Saudi Arabia. This time Kuwait and Qatar could feel his sting, however symbolic. He will also again try to draw Israel into the battle.

There is a mad logic at work. The goal is to turn weakness into strength: Saddam’s last hope will be to manipulate international revulsion over massive Iraqi losses into pressure on Washington to halt the campaign short of his overthrow. He will not protect the regular army troops any more than he did in 1991, when he ordered commanders and most staff officers out of Kuwait while leaving their troops behind.

Saddam’s strategy will be to consume Iraqi lives, not to preserve them. It was, after all, effective before. Colin Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, emotionally called for a halt to Operation Desert Storm after watching television film of devastating air strikes on retreating Iraqi convoys.

Despite plenty of advance warning that “the Iraqi army will suffer a catastrophic defeat,” in the words of British war historian John Keegan and others, Powell felt the only choices left to the Pentagon at that point were continuing the slaughter or stopping military operations altogether.

In this campaign, there must be more balanced options for accomplishing U.S. goals while minimizing Iraqi and American casualties. The Iraqi dictator will seek to maximize both. No one should be surprised if he cuts off food, water and health services to the Iraqis bottled up in the few cities where Saddam will make his stand. Humanitarian disasters that can be blamed falsely on American forces are the hole card in the shame strategy.

Saddam may have indirectly previewed a scorched earth approach in his interview with Dan Rather last month, when he suggested that Americans would accuse him of destroying oil fields and dams “to cover their backs while they themselves destroy Iraq’s dams and oil wells.”

Americans and Europeans dismiss the insults and accusations that Arab leaders hurl at each other at public gatherings and summits as angry and even irrational outbursts. But when the Iraqi vice president recently called Kuwait’s leaders “monkeys” and questioned the virility of a Kuwaiti minister’s moustache, there was as much calculation as there was anger in his remarks. President Bush’s strategists need to understand the shame factor as they fashion final war aims and tactics.

On the eve of Desert Storm, Iraq’s Tariq Aziz went out of his way to remind Bob Dole and other Republican senators who were about to vote on going to war that they had recently been chatting amiably with Saddam in Baghdad about grain sales–at the behest of President George Herbert Walker Bush. Aziz’s gimmick failed. The senators were not shamed out of taking action.

A variance of this gimmick will be tried again soon. Saddam intends to take shelter behind a mountain of Iraqi dead. But what makes this situation extremely dangerous is that scorched earth is not just tactics with this dictator.

Both Bushes have compared Saddam to Adolf Hitler. Such analogies are always imperfect. But in Iraq, U.S. policy-makers should keep in mind Hitler’s endgame. In March 1945, Hitler “condemned Germany to national death,” according to historian Sebastian Haffner’s “The Meaning of Hitler,” because, in Hitler’s words, “this nation has shown itself the weaker. … What remains after this struggle are only the inferior, for the good have died in battle.”

Germans refused to follow Hitler’s orders of self-annihilation. Iraqis should do the same, and invading U.S. forces must avoid giving any credibility to what should be Saddam’s last grotesque manipulation.