A Storm Erupts

By Strobe Talbott

Force. Derived from the Latin fortis, meaning "strong," it was the watchword of an extraordinary week.

I am stronger than you; therefore you will do what I say. Obey, or I will use force. That was what George Bush said to Saddam Hussein. For more than five months he had been saying it with warnings, then an ultimatum. Wednesday evening he switched to the vocabulary of bombs.

$ But Saddam talked back. I am stronger than you, he said to the man he calls the Satan in the White House. You may have more means of killing, but I have many more soldiers willing to die. Therefore I will not do what you say. On the second day of the war, Saddam added, Not only do I refuse to do what you want, I will now do something you thought you could prevent me from doing.

With that, sirens sounded in Israel.

The interaction of Bush's adamancy and Saddam's defiance was, to an unprecedented degree and in unprecedented ways, seen and heard round the world. Even when deprived of video transmission, television newsmen in Baghdad could still hold microphones to their hotel windows. Audiences on every continent studied maps of the city while they listened to the boom, boom, boom of what Bush was saying to Saddam.

Everyone expected this war. It started on schedule. The reporters were as ready as the warriors. Partly for that reason, and partly because the coverage was so pervasive and transfixing, another spectacle in another corner of the global village caught the world by surprise and received far less attention than it deserved. The agents of Soviet power and the people of Lithuania engaged in a grim dialogue of their own.

I am stronger than you, said Mikhail Gorbachev. Therefore you will do what I say. You can, if you insist, pursue your secessionist ambitions, but only according to rules and a timetable that suit those of us who don't want to see you ever achieve your goal. Otherwise I will use force.

The Lithuanians' reply: We are stronger than you because we have historical justice on our side. We are also strengthened by your own promises to govern democratically and to forswear the principle that might makes right. Therefore you cannot crush us.

Gorbachev: Wrong.

With that, the tanks rolled in Vilnius.

Thus the world saw, in a few astonishing days, two examples of the resort to force that were, in many ways, at opposite ends of the moral spectrum. If there is such a thing as a just war, President Bush launched one against Saddam. The Iraqi dictator confirmed the worst that Bush had said of him by raining down ballistic missiles on the civilian population of Israel, a nation totally uninvolved in the dispute over Kuwait -- and one with which Saddam's Foreign Minister, Tariq Aziz, had said only a week earlier Iraq has "no bilateral dispute."

At the other end of the spectrum, Gorbachev was showing the world that however earnest he may be in wanting to reform the Soviet Union, the system over which he presides -- and for which he bears responsibility -- still relies heavily on the threat and use of force. The Soviet version of the social compact still boils down to the powers that be saying to the citizenry: We are stronger than you; therefore you will do what we say.

It is, as Russians often say, no accident that Joseph Stalin's first important job in the Bolshevik government was commissar of nationalities. Gorbachev demonstrated last week that he is prepared to tolerate if not instigate Stalinist methods to keep the U.S.S.R. together. His alibis and obfuscations do not change that stark, ugly bottom line.

Yet there was a bizarre similarity between what Gorbachev and Bush felt compelled to do last week. Each was resorting to the use of force in the name of law and order.

Gorbachev hopes the world in general and Bush in particular will indulge him in his crackdown on separatists because the alternative could be worse: the chaotic disintegration of the Soviet Union, which in turn may trigger a takeover of the country by a troika representing the military, the secret police and the Communist Party hard-liners. The sad implication of last week's massacre in Vilnius was that such a reversal may already have begun, with Gorbachev himself either as a participant or as a front.

For his part, Bush justified the violence he unleashed on Iraq as an unavoidable step toward the forging of "a new world order, a world where the rule of law, not the law of the jungle, governs the conduct of nations."

It was the right rhetoric on behalf of the right policy. But no one should be under any illusion that the much vaunted new world order is in place or even at hand. Quite the contrary, last week's events in the Persian Gulf and on the Baltic Sea, while different in so many respects, had the combined effect of making the new world order seem all the more remote.

The U.S. Administration has been praised, deservedly, for securing the support of the United Nations Security Council and assembling a multinational coalition behind the effort to drive Saddam from Kuwait. Bush and other U.S. officials stressed repeatedly that the armed forces of 27 nations were fighting, or at least supposedly prepared to fight, alongside the American soldiers, sailors, aviators and Marines.

While all that is admirable, it is hardly new. The U.S. went to war against ^ Adolf Hitler half a century ago as part of an alliance and on behalf of principles similar to those at stake today. In 1950 the U.S. plunged into Korea with the backing of a Security Council resolution and accompanied by the forces of 16 other nations.

Moreover, politically comforting as it is to have them there, the multitude of different colored flags arrayed in and around Saudi Arabia is not terribly relevant to the outcome of the battles now under way in Kuwait and Iraq. Desert Storm is very much an American operation. Once again, America's hardware, prowess and ability to absorb casualties will ultimately make the difference. In his press conference Friday, when Bush expressed his desire for the U.S. to be a "healer" and a "conciliator" once the fighting stops, he sounded downright Wilsonian. Even the President's idealism and his eagerness to be a good winner are out of the past.

Much of the talk about a new world order started a year ago, when Saddam was just another loudmouth bullyboy who was being paid off by the gulf Arabs, lethally equipped by the Soviets, as well as by the French and Germans, and coddled by the U.S. The cold war was over -- that was the big news and the all-transforming fact of international life.

Yet now that proposition seems less clear-cut than it did even a few weeks ago. The horror in Vilnius is a reminder that there is still a lot of trouble, and terror, left in that giant country, not to mention almost 30,000 nuclear weapons. And if Gorbachev's relatively benign foreign policy collapses because of the vicious circle of internal revolt and repression, the West may find itself waging a Cold War II in the coming years. At a minimum, the Soviet Union may be less cooperative in the Security Council the next time Uncle Sam tries to round up a posse to go after some bad guy.

But the most basic refutation to the idea of a new world order was what happened in the air and on the ground in the Middle East last week. The resort to force -- no matter how necessary under the circumstances -- was an admission that the preferred and defining methods for making a better world had failed. Talk of a pax Americana was not just premature but out of place. There was plenty of Americana but too little pax. It was the same old world last week, and a not very orderly one at that.