February 3, 1991

EIGHTEEN days after the fighting began, it is obvious that the progress of the Persian Gulf war has deepened Arab wounds and widened the confusion throughout the Middle East over who is right and who is wrong, what the fighting is all about, and even how to define victory. Last week's battle at the Saudi town of Khafji, in which Iraqi invaders were routed by Saudi and Qatari troops heavily backed by United States forces, was not only the first important ground engagement of the war. It was also a bloody duel across the fault line that lies between the rich gulf states, with their oil money and American military hardware, and the poorer Arabs of many lands who Saddam Hussein, with some justification, claims are rooting for him.

The New York representatives of the Government of Thailand are settling into a new mission on the East Side. The six-story town house at 351 East 52d Street -- which was blessed by nine Buddhist monks in an elaborate ceremony in December -- had been a gutted eyesore. But now renovations are almost complete for Thailand's United Nations delegation, as well as for the Royal Thai Consulate General. The Thai government bought the building in 1989 from Marvin Tisser, a New York City developer who had demolished almost all its interior walls and fixtures three years earlier as part of an aborted plan for new condominiums. For years, Thailand's United Nations and Consulate General personnel had been split between offices it leased elsewhere in Manhattan. "This gives us a clean, bright, much more efficient space," said Nitya Pibulsongghram, Thailand's United Nations delegate. A graduate of Brown University, he commissioned JHP Designs of Manhattan as the project's architect, and also relied on advice from his wife, Patricia, a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, for some interior decoration. Unlike most diplomatic buildings, in which space is entirely carved into private offices, much of the new Thai mission is divided by low partitions. Its top floor has been renovated as a penthouse office suite, which includes a greenhouse, for senior diplomats. Separate street-level entrances, flanking a curved glass wall, have been built for the mission and consulate offices.

IN a pattern showing up with increasing frequency at condominiums and cooperatives across the country, nine of the 31 shareholders at 210 West 103d Street -- a 50-year-old brick building in New York City's Manhattan Valley neighborhood -- have fallen more than 60 days behind in their monthly maintenance payments of about $725. "It's one thing to be four weeks late," said Mark Schorr, president of the six-story co-op, where one-bedroom apartments sell for around $100,000. "Its another to be four months overdue. Our clock is ticking."

The trajectory of hope inspired by Mikhail S. Gorbachev began and ended, in the minds of many of his citizens, with two telephone calls, four tumultuous years apart. The first, in December 1986, was Mr. Gorbachev's call to Andrei D. Sakharov, to inform the dissident and physicist that he was being freed from his exile in the closed city of Gorky.

Over the last few years, Manhattan Valley, on the Upper West Side, has been emerging from the sort of vacuum that sucks the life out of communities overtaken by drugs and abandonent. Among several redevelopment efforts under way there is an $8 million mixed-income project. It will create 36 apartments in three tenements -- at 967 and 971 Columbus Avenue and at 69 West 107th Street around the corner -- and erect a 10-story building on the lot at 965 Columbus. The new building will have 22 units for elderly homeless people and 10,000 square feet of retail space. Financing has come from the New York State Housing Finance Agency and the city's Department of Housing Preservation and Development. Atlantic Bank of New York is the construction lender. William Q. Brothers, whose architectural firm, Brothers & Gura, designed the project, is managing partner of the development company, OBRFC/Columbus Associates. Rents for the subsidized units -- about 25 percent of the total -- will range from $400 for one-bedrooms to $600 for three-bedrooms. The rents for the market-rate apartments will range from $1,000 to $1,500. Some apartments will have a wall that slides on a track to turn a dining room into an extra bedroom. Occupancy for the renovated units is scheduled for April.