What Happens / POSTWAR? : TO THE POLITICIANS : Finger-Pointers, Naysayers May Rue Being Right This Time

WASHINGTON —  It took three years for the Vietnam War to become controversial. It took the Persian Gulf War about three days.

Clayton K. Yeutter, the new chairman of the Republican National Committee, fired the first volley. Last week, he offered this view of the Democrats who voted against authorizing the President to go to war, “They picked the wrong war. If the conflict goes well, that will work against them.”

Democrats immediately attacked Yeutter for making the war a partisan issue. “These remarks are deeply troubling,” said Sen. Robert Kerrey (D-Neb.). “They attempt to politicize this war and to define victory in terms of electoral gain.”

Of course it was the Democrats who made the war a partisan issue in the first place. They defined themselves as the anti-war party on Jan. 12, when 70% of the Democrats in Congress voted against the war resolution. The Democrats made their bed, the Republicans are saying, and we’re going to make sure they lie in it.

You can see 1992 campaign ads now. Saddam Hussein will become Willie Horton. “Remember Jan. 12, 1991? That’s when the Democrats in Congress voted to let Saddam Hussein out on furlough. They wanted to give him another chance to rape and pillage a small, defenseless country.”

Right now, Democrats are lying low. President George Bush’s approval rating is at 84%, according to one poll. That ties the record for the highest approval rating ever recorded--registered for Franklin D. Roosevelt just after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. And he got elected to two more terms.

On Jan. 12, the public was split over whether the country should go to war against Iraq or wait for the sanctions to work. The Democrats voted to wait. Now three-quarters of the public say we were right to go to war. Democrats are worried.

This is the kind of war Americans like--a high-tech war with limited casualties, at least on our side. Last Thursday, after flying more than 10,000 sorties against the enemy, 13 American flyers were listed as missing in action, one Marine pilot was killed in a training exercise and two U.S. soldiers were slightly wounded in a border skirmish. “It’s the triumph of silicon over steel,” a defense scientist remarked.

Bush also chose his enemy well. With his terrorist attacks on the civilian population of Israel and his brutal mistreatment of allied prisoners of war, Hussein has convinced the world that he is a menace to civilization. The failure of negotiations at Geneva persuaded Americans that force was the only way to deal with this man.

Hussein is not the leader of an ideological movement. Nor can he claim to be an Arab nationalist--most Arabs are on our side. He is driven by pure ambition. There is no one to argue, as many did during the Vietnam War, that the United States is on the wrong side of history.

But there is an anti-war movement in the United States. That is no big surprise. Every war in American history, with the exception of World War II, has given rise to an anti-war movement. Anti-war activists claim to have learned a lesson from Vietnam. They now hold up signs saying, “Support the troops--oppose the war.” The distinction is lost on most Americans, however. The troops are fighting the war. According to one poll last week, 60% of Americans disapprove of the anti-war demonstrations, and half feel the protests are “undermining the war effort.”

Sensing an opportunity, the Administration unleashed Dan Quayle. The vice president charged that “the media seem compelled to devote much more attention to the anti-war protests than they deserve.” Vice President Quayle, meet Vice President Spiro T. Agnew.

Could 1992 be another 1972? That was the last time the Democrats defined themselves as an anti-war party--”Come home, America”--in the middle of a war. It didn’t matter that it was a massively unpopular war. Disgust with the Democrats led the country to reelect the GOP ticket--including Agnew--in a landslide.

Is there any hope for the Democrats? Remember what GOP Chairman Yeutter said: If the war goes well, that will work against the Democrats. Suppose the war does not go well?

The war has been going well so far, but for a very strange reason. As Gen. Colin L. Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, put it in a Pentagon briefing last week, Hussein “has not thrown a single military punch at us.”

Hussein’s strategy is not military. It’s political. His attacks on Israel have no military value. Their purpose is political--to draw Israel into the war. Similarly, his decision not to engage the allied forces has no military value. Its purpose is political--to break down our resolve and lull us into a false complacency.

We are, of course, wise to him. Defense Secretary Dick Cheney promised, “He will quit long before we do.” Maybe. But political scientist John Mueller recently argued, “To inspire a decline in support for the war in the U.S., the Iraqis need not win a single battle. They need only maintain a dedicated fighting force that is able to push American casualties beyond tolerable levels--and those levels are far lower than they were in Korea and Vietnam.”

In other words, what Iraq has to do is turn the war into a quagmire. There are several ways they can do this. One is to draw Israel into the war. As leader of the Arabs against Israel, Hussein would get the one thing he is missing in this war--a cause. Other Arab states, including those now fighting Iraq, would face enormous popular pressure to join the war against Israel. Public opinion in Egypt is already reported to be shifting in favor of Iraq.

Another strategy is to draw the United States into a ground war. A bloody land offensive may be the only way to take Kuwait. And we could do it militarily. But at what cost? We would have to fight one of the greatest tank battles in history, with perhaps thousands of U.S. casualties.

That’s why our military strategists want to put the ground war off as long as possible--at least until we can weaken and isolate the enemy. Some strategists outside the Administration doubt that we could fight a ground war at a tolerable cost. Instead, they say, we should continue to rely on air power--and patience.

Still another scenario has Iraq holding out for months, encouraging us to believe we are winning. Then they would stage a sudden, surprise offensive. The Iraqis have chemical weapons they could use against Israel. They have Exocet missiles they could use against U.S. ships in the gulf. They have terrifying fuel-air bombs that have never been used before in war.

This is not a military strategy either. It is a political strategy. It is the same political strategy the North Vietnamese used in the 1968 Tet offensive. For years, the Johnson Administration kept assuring Americans that the war was being won--that there was “a light at the end of the tunnel.” (“I am pleased to report that Operation Desert Storm is right on schedule,” Bush said last week.) All of a sudden, three years into the war, the enemy staged a surprise offensive. Americans were angered and mystified. If we were winning the war, how could this happen? More than a few people suspected that they had been lied to.

In military terms, the United States won the Tet offensive. Politically, however, it was a disaster. Support for the war collapsed in America--and so did confidence in the nation’s leadership.

So there are many ways the Persian Gulf War might not go well. But will that necessarily help the Democrats? The Jan. 12 vote gives the Democrats an obvious message if the war goes badly: “We told you so.”

There is a problem with that message, however. If people embrace a cause that fails, they will not necessarily find “We told you so” inspiring. More than a few voters would suspect the worst about the Democrats: They were hoping all along the war would go wrong.

Remember that when Americans turned against the Vietnam War after 1968, they also turned against the anti-war movement. The public’s growing opposition to the Vietnam War did nothing to legitimize the anti-war movement, as the 1972 election proved.

That’s why Democrats have to continue to make it clear that, while they have endorsed anti-war sentiment, they have not embraced the anti-war protests. If the Democrats want to survive as a party, they cannot be seen as undermining the war effort, or rooting for a U.S. defeat.