Saddam Hussein has the world on a yo-yo - and the world is trying to cut the string.
Just by shifting some of his troops toward Kuwait, Saddam has provoked a costly and dangerous mobilization of U.S. troops and their allies.
And there's no reason to think that, even if this immediate crisis is resolved without bloodshed, that he won't try it again - and get the same worldwide response.
"We can't be . . . taunted and provoked this way on a regular basis at Saddam's wish," says Madeleine Albright, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
So how can the cycle be stopped? Experts and officials are mulling a variety of options:
-- Punish Iraq with air strikes on Baghdad and elsewhere. This would demonstrate allied military superiority and exact a price for Saddam's behavior. The downside: It would risk making the dictator look like a victim for doing nothing more than moving troops within his own country.
-- Drive Saddam from power with a military offensive into Baghdad, "finishing off" the job left undone at the end of the 1991 gulf war. Besides the obvious cost in dollars and lives, it would leave the allies with the awful job of trying to establish new rule in Iraq.
-- Have him assassinated. Besides being illegal, it hardly encourages Iraq to rejoin the mainstream and it's unclear whether a successor would be much better.
-- Station a large, permanent force in and around Kuwait. This would deter Saddam but, like the U.S. troops standing vigil in Korea, create a large expense with no end in sight.
Complicating this option further: President Clinton's critics already are warning that the military - shrunken considerably since 1991 - is stretched thin with ongoing operations in Bosnia and Haiti, and the unstable situation in North Korea.
So far, however, the Clinton administration is looking most closely at a proposal that hits a middle ground - and might at least lessen the yo-yo effect in the short term.
Tuesday, it proposed to allies that Saddam's forces be pushed behind a "no-tank zone" in southern Iraq - so wide that any dream he has of invasion could be cut off before it got close to happening.
The plan is attractive on several counts: It's relatively inexpensive, risks few American lives, allows withdrawal of the newly mobilized troops and, militarily, is a clear mission.
"It's probably the next most marginal increase from what we have now," says Lawrence Di Rita, military analyst at the Heritage Foundation.
The United States already enforces a "no-fly" zone in the area - an imaginary line in the sky that could, in theory, be extended to the ground.
Rules would be simple: An ultimatum would be issued. After a certain date, any tank detected, say, south of the 32nd parallel, would be destroyed by allied air power.
Details of the plan were being developed in consultation at the United Nations and with gulf allies.
Similar zones have been enforced in the former Yugoslavia, for example, to stop the shelling of Sarajevo. And, notes Gen. John Shalikashvili, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, "it would be easier to do in a desert kind of environment than it is in (the) mountainous, wooded terrain of Bosnia."
As the U.S. demonstrated in the 1991 war, its planes can "plink" tanks almost at will in the desert, especially if they have total command of the air. Pushed far enough north, Iraqi tanks would have almost no chance of making it to Kuwaiti.
Robert Gaskin, a Pentagon planner during the Bush administration, now with Business Executives for National Security, calls it "the beating the tethered goat strategy."
A cruel-sounding analogy, perhaps, but reflective of the strategic thinking of many, who wonder how this could happen so soon after the licking the Iraqis took during Desert Storm - and want to make sure it doesn't happen again.
"We believed he was deterred from doing this sort of thing," Gaskin says. "Clearly, that assumption was full of holes."
Shalikashvili Tuesday described the Iraqi movements as professional and swift - all the more reason to push the troops as far as possible from any place they could cause trouble.
"I think that common sense tells you that an army, the military, living under the conditions that they have been living for the last few years, must have a reduced readiness," he says.
But, Shalikashvili admits, "as you analyze the deployment of those divisions from up north into the south, they were done quickly, very well, clearly pre-planned. . . .
"(It was) executed as a ready force would execute it."
Even if Saddam never really had designs on another invasion of Kuwait, his movements were not without purpose.
"This may have been a test," says Prof. Bernard Reich, of George Washington University. Having watched Clinton's uneven responses to other crises, "he may be trying us out."
Now that Clinton has responded vigorously, sending 50,000 troops and a virtual air armada, "I don't think we need to pull the trigger," Reich says. Saddam "knows we can do it."
If Saddam also was trying to test international will, he didn't get the result he desired on that front, either.
He's bucked up traditional U.S. allies such as Britain and France, who have joined with U.S. forces in the effort.
"We have to show Saddam Hussein that we aren't going to be intimidated or divided," says British Foreign Minister Douglas Hurd, who flew to Kuwait Tuesday to meet Secretary of State Warren Christopher and ministers of six Persian Gulf states.
And this time, even some of Saddam's old friends are looking the other way.
Jordan's King Hussein, in Amman, pledged his country "very clearly and very openly" to the defense of Kuwait. "Something has to be done," the king said.
Saddam Hussein can still influence his fate.
A speedy withdrawal, which he's promised, would minimize any chance allied forces will launch a "punishment" attack.
Shalikashvili said that, as of nightfall in Iraq Tuesday, there was evidence he was moving his troops - although exactly where was still unclear.
Saddam also could take other steps to lessen the odds of a harsh allied reaction, such as recognizing Kuwait's sovereignty, a key demand unfulfilled since the gulf war. But he probably can't get the international community to switch gears, withdraw and ease economic sanctions.
