America Abroad

By Strobe Talbott

George Bush has vowed that the gulf crisis would not be "another Vietnam," but in a way it already is. Everywhere you look, they're back: the hawks, the doves, the generals and Administration officials on the defensive, the clergymen and professors, the has-beens and wannabes on the offensive. Even the slogans echo across the years. ALL WE ARE SAYING, read a sign in front of the White House last week, IS GIVE SANCTIONS A CHANCE.

It's not just the cast and the sound track that are so familiar. Once again, the U.S. is trying to reconcile two qualities that lend themselves to generous interpretation: the internationalist ideal that drives its foreign policy and the aversion to bloodshed that comes naturally to a humane and democratic people.

Every time the U.S. has fought a major war in this century, its goals have included the defense of a principle larger and nobler than its own self- interest. "What we demand," said Woodrow Wilson in 1918, "is that the world be made fit and safe to live in." Safety meant the protection of all nations, not just the U.S., "against force and selfish aggression."

Vietnam was conceived as a Wilsonian venture. However wrong yesterday's hawks were in many respects, they were right that communism spelled ruin and misery for the peoples of Southeast Asia.

The enemy in that war posed every bit as tough a military and strategic challenge to the U.S. as Iraq does now. Not only did Hanoi's forces have jungles to hide in but they also had the backing of both the Soviet Union and China. Now the U.S. has Moscow and Beijing on its side, more or less.

Ironically, that is part of Bush's problem. Now that the cold war is over, hot wars are harder to justify.

The U.S. has never been eager to send its soldiers overseas. Wilson was reluctant to enter World War I. It took the sinking of the Lusitania, at the cost of 128 American lives, to draw him in. Had it not been for Pearl Harbor, America Firsters might have prevailed in keeping the U.S. out of World War II. The Tonkin Gulf incident, in which Washington claimed North Vietnamese patrol boats fired on U.S. warships, provided Lyndon Johnson with a pretext to secure congressional support of the escalation in Vietnam.

For more than 40 years, the best antidote to isolationism was the invocation of the Red Menace. When Harry Truman wanted to send troops to Korea and Ronald Reagan decided to invade Grenada, all they had to do was suggest they were stopping the expansion of communism. There was already a political consensus about the nature of the challenge and the rationale for the mission.

In the case of Vietnam, it took more than a decade and the loss of 58,000 American lives before domestic support collapsed. The Iraq crisis is only 4 1/ 2 months old, and there has not been a single U.S. combat death. Yet some sectors of the home front are already in the throes of a full-scale antiwar movement. Bush's attempt to fill the conceptual vacuum left by the end of the cold war with talk about a new world order apparently works better in the United Nations than in the United States.

So far, most of the Administration's critics agree that Saddam Hussein must get out of Kuwait. But they reduce the chances of achieving that end by seeming to limit the means to diplomatic and economic pressure. Since Saddam is unlikely to do anything that might serve as another Lusitania or Tonkin Gulf, he may succeed in keeping Kuwait, thus making a mockery not only of George Bush's policy but of Woodrow Wilson's vision as well.