COLUMN LEFT : Back to Propping Up Saddam : As we learn about the Gulf War’s start and its aftermath, ‘victory’ looks ever more hollow.

Radicals in Houston paled somewhat when I told them last weekend that I was scheduled to speak the next day on the topic of the Gulf War at the College Station campus of Texas A&M;, some two hours north of Houston across the east Texas flatlands. They said that Houston, as a place hospitable to liberal-left ideas, had tough moments, but that in College Station I might be taking my life in my hands.

They painted a grim picture of flourishing purblind know-nothingism at College Station. Until recently it had been an all-male military school and many students still went about their business in ROTC uniforms.

American radicals often talk in such alarmist terms about the next town up the road. To listen to the folks in Seattle talk about Spokane you would think that neo-Nazis crammed every sidewalk cafe. In Spokane they speak forebodingly about Metaline Falls or Coeur d’Alene. But the truth is that in every town there are plenty of people with radical ideas, stewing as the usual lies trickle out of their television sets, receptive to reasoned presentation of the other side of the story.

And thus it was at Texas A&M; and College Station, a community that surrounded itself with the world’s longest yellow ribbon (30 miles) and which also boasts a George Bush Drive, in hopes of swaying the President to build the George Bush Library there.

After the usual chat about how grim things were for radicalism in College Station, it turned out that the student newspaper had editorialized against the Gulf War, that there had been some well-attended anti-war rallies.

Still, I detected among my hosts a sense of having been steamrollered. For most of March, speaking across the country, I found many on the left asking themselves whether they were doomed to spend the rest of their lives watching the “new world order” unfurl.

But now, after this period of despondency, radicals are beginning to realize that the end of history is not upon us. The end of the “just war” is looking very much like its preamble, with the United States standing carefully aside as Iraqi gunships mow down the Kurds and the Republican Guard goes back to the job of crushing all opposition to Saddam Hussein, given license to do this--if we are to believe Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, before the President told him to rewrite his lines--by the U.S. government, which halted its utter destruction at the end of February.

In fact, there are signs that many Americans are beginning to wonder what indeed the whole war was really about. Airwaves and newsprint are full of reports about the vicious persecutions of Palestinians and Sudanese by Kuwaitis, not to speak of the fate of domestic foes of the royal regime; about the the new gold faucets in the emir’s palace, installed before the city had water or light; about the emir’s weekly purchase of young women for his satisfaction (married by Islamic law every Thursday evening and divorced on Friday morning, according to a front-page article in the New York Times.)

Amid reports of the immense destruction and loss of life, I’ve found--to judge from radio talk shows and phone-ins--that many people are prepared to ask, “Was all the war really necessary?” The historical record of Iraqi peace overtures is getting fleshed out. Robert Parry reports in the Nation that Deputy Foreign Minister Nizar Hamdoon communicated a proposal at the end of the first week of August for an Iraqi withdrawal in exchange for access to the Gulf via the islands of Warbah and Bubiyan, plus negotiations on the price of oil.

This proposal was presented to Brent Scowcroft and National Security Council officials by Aug. 11. In the words of one of the intermediaries, former CIA chief Richard Helms, “the U.S. government didn’t want to make a deal.” The peace feeler, as another participant put it, “was already moving against policy.”

Virtually everyone now accepts that sanctions, imposed without negotiations, were given no time to work. As it was, they were taking a fierce toll and it can be argued that they helped prompt Saddam Hussein toward a negotiating table at which the United States refused to sit.

With the United States now dominating OPEC, a former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia remarked recently that he thought Bush would like an oil price of $25 a barrel, which is what Saddam Hussein told U.S. ambassador April Glaspie last July 25 in Baghdad he thought a fair price would be.

Soon the summer heat will bring typhus and cholera to Iraq and more innocent people will die. Over here people ask themselves whether, given the risks and killing, the war was worth it, and why the United States is back in the business of keeping Saddam Hussein in power.