A Long Hallucination of War

By LANCE MORROW

Two military precedents flicker almost subliminally through the mind when Americans imagine war with Iraq: the conflict might look like the Six-Day War. Or it might look like Vietnam.

Those are the hypothetical extremes: best case, worst case. Americans in a muscular frame of mind (not quite trusting it, however) like to think that they might repeat Israel's 1967 victory: the brilliant lightning strikes, the armies flashing across the desert, the war over quicker than Saturday-morning cartoons.

At the other emotional pole, the depressive version presents itself, all darkness: a memory of Vietnam's self-delusions and waste, its follies on an epic scale, its nightmares of the unforeseen.

In the four months since Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, the nation has been drifting amid vivid, dangerous possibilities, sleepwalking. It has been a long, strange time. Rarely before has a nation had such leisure for premeditation of war -- or for premonition of its consequences.

Television brought Vietnam into America's living rooms only when the fighting was well under way. This time, Americans are watching the preparations in the sand on television every night: an instant, electronic diary. "We are being told how many casualties we can expect on the first day, on the second day," says Alan Chartock, a political scientist at the New Paltz campus of the State University of New York. "The enemy is talking to us, giving us nightly forecasts of doom."

The crisis, half a world away, has become a presence of bizarre intimacy. The nation's designated killers in the desert look very young on camera and confess that they are scared. Soldiers say hello to the nation on the morning < television shows, like kids away for spring break at some overheated, militaristic Lauderdale. One trooper proposed marriage to his girlfriend back home via satellite.

In earlier wars, people cheered, the soldiers went marching off, the battles got fought, then after a time the bodies -- and the cost of it all -- started coming home. Reality had its cause and effect, its dramatic pace. Now the natural rhythms of warmaking have gone electronic -- a good thing, possibly, but disconcerting. Time gets dismantled somehow; slaughter gets projected into the hypothetical. The adrenaline rushes prematurely; the cost gets reckoned before the deployment. So much anticipation overworks the nerves. The process causes hallucinations and jitters. Normally war begins without such neurotic projections.

A tentative, uneasy atmosphere has settled over the American mood. Says former United Auto Workers president Douglas A. Fraser: "I'm not one who thinks we shouldn't be there. I think there is general support for being there. But there is general apprehension about a shooting war. Forever and a day, people will say, 'If he had waited until June, we wouldn't have had to have a shooting war.' "

The circuits of the historical imagination have been overloaded anyway. The end of the cold war, the "peace dividend," even the "end of history," as announced by one thinker -- all these came tumbling by chaotically, and then immediately darker themes set in: recession and the apocalyptic clouds in the gulf.

In the South, a historically bellicose region, a traveler sees a random yellow ribbon tied on a mailbox. Church suppers are putting together toilet kits to send to the soldiers in the gulf. Mothers with children serving in the Middle East are still sympathetic celebrities in the neighborhoods. And yet, as a conservative civil engineer in Atlanta remarked wearily last week, "every time I turn around, we seem to be going to some damned war or another. It just doesn't seem to stop."

In the Minneapolis suburb of Apple Valley, a middle school teacher startled his students with a warning about the Desert Shield pen pals to whom they had been writing since September. "You need to prepare yourselves," Todd Beach told the class, "because there is a possibility that the people you are writing to might die."

Many articulate opinions were still being expressed in favor of the war effort. Gerald R. Thompson of Chesterfield, Mo., wrote in a letter to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch: "The crisis in the gulf is driven by economic realities, not just political ideals. Black gold, or Texas tea, is worth shedding American lives for because oil is the blood that flows through the veins of the American economy. Without economic freedom, our political freedom is in serious trouble. The two go hand in hand."

But new hairline fractures have begun to appear in American opinion. Some of the divisions are generational. Those with memories of earlier wars seem warier than the young about new military adventures. Vietnam veterans are especially cautious about a new war. Says Richard Zierdt of Circle Pines, Minn., who served as an Air Force sergeant in Vietnam: "Veterans are the least willing to create new veterans. War is never really inevitable until you fire the first shot. But I think our current policies are taking us that way."

Polls suggest that young Americans are sometimes more eager for battle, or anyway less wary. A 20-year-old seaman aboard the U.S.S. Wisconsin in the gulf wrote to his family, "I am glad I am the only one of my generation in our family to volunteer to serve his country. Hopefully I will make a triumphant return to Norfolk with a bunch of medals pinned to my uniform. It looks like the combat service ribbon is a shoo-in."

One of the noisiest Vietnam poltergeists, of course, is the draft. Since the Iraqi invasion in August, Army recruiting has fallen off considerably. Many of those opposed to American military action fear that a gulf war would revive conscription. "If they come after my son," an Orlando mother vows, using language from another era, "I am going to send him to Canada."

On the op-ed page of the New York Times last week, an independent television producer named Adam Wolman published an ambivalent soliloquy about himself and the draft: "I know none of us has the luxury of clinging to pacifism in this world; I know it's not right to reap the joys of living here (or anywhere) without earning my keep . . . But I just can't see myself over there with a gun. I can't see myself running away either. But believe me, I'm thinking about it."

It is unlikely, however, that the U.S. will bring back the draft. The armed forces now number 2 million, with l.5 million reservists. Congress has ordered the military to cut its ranks by 80,000 by next year. A draft would become necessary only if the U.S. planned to maintain an enormous deployment of troops abroad for a number of years, or if it suffered extremely high casualties. Both of those conditions are unlikely for political reasons. The entire thrust of the Bush strategy, after all, is to get a war over quickly, if one comes. "Assuming we don't," says former Assistant Secretary of Defense Lawrence Korb, "the American people won't let you take enough casualties to need a draft."

Some, like former Navy Secretary James Webb, believe the draft should be revived so that any American war effort would be broadly, democratically based, the fighting and dying shared by all classes. It is true that some 30% of Army enlisted men are black, although blacks make up 12.4% of the population. But the armed forces are no longer drawn as heavily from the ranks of the poor, as they were, for example, in the volunteer force of the late 1970s. Most U.S. soldiers now come from the middle working class, with both affluent and very poor urban populations underrepresented.

Whether a draft would result in a fairer military service is debatable. A renewal of conscription, however, would no doubt restore to full vigor an antiwar movement that is already beginning to stir. "One way to really get the fire going," says Martin Binkin, a military manpower specialist at the Brookings Institution, "is to start talking about a draft. I think what you'd see is that normally quiet campuses, like Berkeley, M.I.T. and Harvard, would explode with demonstrations: 'Hell, no, we won't go! We won't fight for Texaco.' "

Organizers of a teach-in at the University of Michigan were surprised when more than 1,500 people turned out to hear a discussion of the Persian Gulf. "I figured we'd get 300," says an organizer.

Most Americans are morally clear about Saddam Hussein and the nature of his crime against Kuwait. He may not be another Hitler, as Bush overstated the case, trying to turn Saddam Hussein into a sort of world-historical Willie Horton. But he is villain enough to need to be stopped. Virtually no American dissenters from the Bush policies idealize Saddam Hussein in the way, say, that American radicals in the '60s praised the Viet Cong ("Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh/ Viet Cong is gonna win!"). The argument is whether to go in and fight now or to wait, isolate Iraq and gamble that international sanctions will produce a solution.

But Americans do not enjoy much moral clarity about their mission in the gulf or its motives. Says Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.: "There has been a major mobilization without an underlying rationale at a time when people are concerned about education, about the environment, the homeless, and how they are going to pay the bills this month."

The Administration's case for a military operation against Iraq has a number of movable parts, moral components that have periodically changed in emphasis and importance: Are Americans in the gulf to stop Saddam's naked aggression? To restore the rulers of Kuwait? To ensure international law and order in the aftermath of the cold war? Or to protect the West's access to oil? To separate Saddam Hussein from his nuclear weapons?

Bush's performance at his Friday press conference may repair a lot of the damage he sustained earlier by failing to explain clearly, persuasively, his case for sending the troops. Americans, a people who have historically required a sense of their own virtue almost as a matter of self-definition, have not felt entirely clean or clear about their motives in the gulf. Says Hermann Eilts, director of Boston University's Center for International Relations: "The split is going to be over questions like Why are we doing this for the Kuwaiti royal family? Or why are we doing this for Saudi Arabia?" Americans feel least clean, least morally comfortable with themselves when they think they are going to war to protect their own profligate consumption of oil.

Making war is an atavistic business that may require a profound harmony of purpose among people, a sort of tribal agreement. Americans feel a moral dissonance about certain stray complexities involved in the gulf. The problem is full of crosscurrents and moral baffles. The National Organization for Women, for example, fired off a bitter statement about the Saudi subjugation of women. Why would America defend such a system? If there is war in the gulf, some American women soldiers may die. Some will leave widowers in the U.S. That prospect produces a novel moral disturbance in the American mind.

War, as the military theorist Karl von Clausewitz said, depends to a large extent upon imponderables, including the enormous, unpredictable force of public opinion. One of the profound lessons of Vietnam is that no President can fight a war (except the quick Grenada-Panama kind) without the full backing of the American people.

Bush may yet obtain that support, but it will not be nearly enough. Bush is a sort of flawed perfectionist working on a colossal project -- as he says, the making of a new world order. To keep his enterprise in the gulf together, he must orchestrate not only American opinion but also that of the international alliance.

If character is destiny, is the President's character America's fate? In times of war, it is a disturbing thought that is in some sense true: think of Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War, Franklin Roosevelt and World War II, Lyndon Johnson and Vietnam.

In an article in the Boston Globe, M.I.T. political scientist Barry R. Posen argued, "President Bush is doubling U.S. strength in the Persian Gulf to create an offensive option. Since the President cannot want war, his purpose must be to frighten Saddam Hussein to leave Kuwait. This is coercive diplomacy." But, as Posen adds, the chaotic multiple voices of American democracy can sometimes sabotage a President who is trying to make a point: "Democracy thrives on debate, but once a policy of coercive diplomacy has been well and truly launched, debate can only reduce the odds of success."

Being the Commander in Chief in a democracy is one of the dangerous mysteries of American leadership, as Lyndon Johnson found out. Unless George Bush, a President with some royalist tendencies, learns to fear that mystery, it might destroy him.

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT: From a telephone poll of 1,000 adult Americans taken for TIME/CNN on Nov. 27-28 by Yankelovich Clancy Shulman. Sampling error is plus or minus 3%. "Not sures" omitted.

CAPTION: NO CAPTION

With reporting by Joseph J. Kane/Atlanta and Priscilla Painton/New York, with other bureaus