COLUMN RIGHT : Judge the War by Things That Didn’t Happen : Was Hussein a nascent Hitler? Fortunately, we’ll never know.

“What were the results of the French Revolution?” someone once reportedly asked Chou En-lai, then China’s foreign minister. “It’s too soon to tell,” was his reply. Critics of the Persian Gulf War have no such perspective. Instead of Chou’s 180 years, they can’t manage to wait 180 days to render their verdicts. “The prevailing wisdom,” notes one observer, “appears to be that the war achieved little or was even a mistake.”

Many of these selfsame critics were in an almost constant state of the-sky-is-falling hysteria during the war--the enraged Muslim masses will overthrow all the moderate governments in the area; Israel will certainly respond to the Scud attacks, setting off a regionwide conflagration; the coalition will disintegrate when the first shot is fired. Curiously, they are almost petulant that none of their fears came to pass. How unkind of Uncle Sam to make them look like a bunch of dim-wits.

Successful deterrence, and successful deterrent war, can be justified only in terms of things that do not happen. It has been argued that if the French army had reacted violently to Nazi Germany’s violation of the Lucarno Pact in March, 1936, when Adolf Hitler sent troops into the demilitarized Rhineland, the history of Europe would have been changed. Hitler and his Nazi state might have been overthrown by a German military disgruntled over being led into a disaster. World War II might have been averted and the loss of tens of millions of lives avoided. But we will never know for sure, for history does not provide alternatives.

What is sure is that if the French had acted, carping critics would still be complaining about their Napoleonic complex, their unwarranted aggression and how poor Germany had been picked on just for exercising rights ruthlessly stripped from it by the unfair Versailles Treaty.

Was Saddam Hussein a nascent Adolf Hitler, as President Bush said? Again, we’ll never know, for he didn’t get a chance to launch his Middle East version of the Thousand Year Reich. But it is well to remember that not only the United States thought him a menace. So did the U.N. Security Council, which passed repeated resolutions condemning his aggression. So did 40 countries that provided military forces and equipment, including many Muslim states.

And they were not alone in their concerns. The war may have seemed to be a mistake in fashionable circles in New York, but it’s not a view likely to be echoed in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. At least for a time, a very real threat to Israel’s survival has been attenuated. And while a Middle East peace is not immediately at hand, the long-term effects of Arab armies emerging victorious from the battlefield may do more for the peace process than anyone can now imagine.

As in all wars, one’s point of view depends in large measure on where one stands. An editor in New York recently asked if I’d like to comment on the “awful” disparity in U.S. and Iraqi battlefield casualties. They may have seemed awful to him, but to me, with a daughter-in-law in the 3rd Armored Division spearheading the attack into Iraq, they were just about right.

There has been much hand-wringing about collateral damage as well. What’s needed is perspective. In World War II, Germany alone lost more than 1 million civilians to Allied bombing, and in the fire-bomb raid on Tokyo on March 9, 1945, 83,793 people were killed, more than the 80,000 killed at Hiroshima or the 35,000 killed at Nagasaki with atomic bombs. Was it worth it? Ask the survivors of the Nazi death camps. Or those freed from the terrible yoke of Japan’s Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.

And to those who complain that Middle East peace is not at hand, Mao Tse-tung comment on Taiwan seems appropriate. “It may take several hundred or a thousand years,” he supposedly said, “but in the long run it will all work out.”

In “Triumph in the Desert,” Random House’s commemorative on the Persian Gulf War, Peter David, the international editor of the Economist, came to a common-sense conclusion. “Throughout history,” he wrote, “military victories have been followed, first by relief, and then by disappointment. The people of America and Britain and all the other countries that contributed to the victory in the Gulf should not allow their inevitable disappointments to cloud their final judgment about the war. It was not a war that ended all wars. . . . It was, however, a necessary war, which righted an obvious wrong and stopped a bloodthirsty tyrant in his tracks. That is reason enough for pride.”