Triumphant Return

By LANCE MORROW Reported Dan Goodgame and J.F.O. McAllister/Washington and William Mader/London

The war was a defining moment, everyone thought.

What exactly did it define?

-- The end of the old American depression called the Vietnam syndrome -- the compulsive pessimism, the need to look for downsides and dooms?

-- The birth of a new American century -- onset of a unipolar world, with America playing the global cop?

-- Another chapter in an age of astonishments that has brought down the Berlin Wall, ended the cold war and begun preliminary work on the disintegration of the Soviet Union?

-- The first post-nuclear big war, almost as quick and lethal as one with nukes, but smarter, fairer, precisely selective in its targets, with no radioactive aftereffects?

-- The first war epic of the global village's electronic theater?

-- The apotheosis of war making as a brilliant American package -- a dazzling, compacted product, like some new concentrate of intervention: Fast! Improved! Effective!

-- The dawn of a new world order?

All of those and much, much more. Or somewhat less.

The enterprise is still surrounded by a daze of astonishment: that it should have been so quick, so "easy," so devastating in effect. That coalition casualties should have been so light. That the cost to American taxpayers will be relatively small ($15 billion or less if Japan, Germany and others honor their pledges of financial support). That Saddam Hussein should have been so cartoon-villainous (and incompetent as a military leader). That his soldiers should have committed atrocities that took the moral onus off the carnage that the coalition left in the desert.

The American mind may have sought out an innocent analogy: George Bush had -- unexpectedly, miraculously -- found the sweet spot. He and his men (Powell, Schwarzkopf, Scowcroft) had performed a miracle of American concentration and grace under pressure, after years when those seemed almost archaic American talents. Now Bush was rounding the bases while the baseball he hit was still rising in the air and might yet -- who knows? -- go into some orbit of higher historical meaning.

Whatever the significance of the war, most Americans, giddy with relief and pride and a still-permeating sense of unreality, savored the moment. The first soldiers to come home from the gulf started pouring off transports. A trooper arrived at J.F.K. airport and said, "We're proud of what we done. We know we done the right thing." At Hunter Army Airfield in southern Georgia, 104 troops of the 24th Infantry Division, still dressed in desert camouflage, climbed off the plane in the middle of the night to a raucous celebration in which military discipline instantly fell apart. Friends and relatives swarmed onto the field to engulf the soldiers. A trooper protested a brief military formation by shouting: "The women are waiting, and the beer is cold!" No one in Hinesville slept that night.

On a cloudless Friday afternoon, several thousand servicemen gathered at Travis Air Force Base northeast of San Francisco to welcome back 430 crewmen from the U.S.N.S. Mercy, a onetime supertanker converted into a hospital ship. (A skeleton crew will sail the Mercy home from the gulf, arriving in 28 days.) The crewmen were cheered at Travis, then rode in buses to the Navy's Oak Knoll Hospital in Oakland with a motorcycle police escort.

Along the interstate, knots of welcomers gathered, waving American flags and yellow ribbons. A few snapped to attention and saluted as the motorcade sped by. Navy ombudsman Denise Allshouse said, "This is just the start of the celebration. The major welcome will be when that big, white, beautiful ship comes home through the Golden Gate in a few weeks."

One of the welcomers was Carlos Melendrez, a Vietnam vet who noted the contrast between the welcome today and the one he got when he returned from his war: "The first thing I did at the airport was rush to the men's room and get rid of my uniform. I was ashamed. The guys and girls today can be proud to wear it."

George Bush had gone before a joint session of Congress three days earlier and made his way through something of the same incredulous, almost goofy daze, through washes of applause amid a sea of American flags. He took the triumph with grins and body English becomingly modest in a man enjoying a 90% approval rating in the polls and what in the conventional wisdom of the moment seemed the all but certain prospect of re-election in 1992.

Bush, vindicated beyond the imagining of most war leaders, delivered an emotional speech that brimmed with a pride entirely justified and a self- congratulation that was almost wistful. He urged on the nation the idea that "Americans are a caring people. We are a good people, a generous people . . . We went halfway around the world to do what is moral and just and right. And we fought hard, and -- with others -- we won the war. And we lifted the yoke of aggression and tyranny from a small country that many Americans had never even heard of, and we asked nothing in return. We're coming home now proud, confident, heads high . . . We are Americans."

Bush has never been comfortable with what he calls the "vision thing," but in the context of the gulf war and its aftermath his mind has grown fairly visionary. Three times in his speech Bush conjured up a phrase he has used much in recent months -- "new world order."

What does new world order mean -- in George Bush's mind? In the future of the world? Is it a rhetorical flourish in the same harmless league as his "thousand points of light"? Or does the phrase betoken some deeper American ambition -- a pattern of the Persian Gulf intervention to be extended elsewhere in the world as occasions arise?

The rest of the world has beheld the gulf war and its outcome, the riveting seven-month video, with expressions of admiration, awe, wariness, discomfort and, in the case of many Arabs, a sense of rage and sorrow and betrayal. Nearly everyone is puzzled by the idea of a new world order.

In his State of the Union speech last month, Bush honored the collaborative aspects of his vision: "What is at stake is more than one small country. It is a big idea, a new world order, where diverse nations are drawn together in common cause to achieve the universal aspirations of mankind: peace and security, freedom and the rule of law." But Bush's overall emphasis was on what British imperialists used to call "the white man's burden" -- America's mission as world policeman. His language and attitude sounded remarkably similar to the "pay any price, bear any burden" ethos that John Kennedy formulated in his Inaugural Address.

Bush said that "aggression will meet collective resistance." But "among the nations of the world, only the United States of America has both the moral standing and the means to back it up."

On Feb. 1, in a speech to soldiers and their families at Fort Stewart in / Georgia, Bush stated the thought more nakedly: "When we win, and we will, we will have taught a dangerous dictator, and any tyrant tempted to follow in his footsteps, that the U.S. has a new credibility and that what we say goes."

The benign reading of Bush's new world order is that with the end of the cold war -- presumably, the end of the old East-West struggle -- the powers of the world can find new configurations. The United Nations may be able at last to fulfill the hopes of its founders as a mechanism for collective security. The gulf crisis, under Bush's masterful organization, brought together an extraordinary new coalition, including the U.S., the Soviet Union, Egypt, Syria and 24 other nations, to confront an outlaw state.

The trouble is that order is a 19th century term that suggests Metternichian arrangements of large, heavy, somewhat static entities. History in the late 20th century seems to belong more to chaos theory and particle physics and fractals -- it moves by bizarre accelerations and illogics, by deconstructions and bursts of light. It is global history with dangerous simultaneities at work: instantaneous planetary communications coexist with atavistic greeds and hungers, like Saddam Hussein's: CNN looks in upon old, moldy evils. This bizarre new physics of history might well argue for some kind of ordering. But the new world order, the American version as Bush describes it, may not be new at all. It could be a lumbering and discredited apparatus, a revival of what seemed like a triumphal world-saving machine in 1945, that is effective only in the nostalgia of aging Americans. The world is a safer place now than it was two or three weeks ago. But if Bush's new world order is premised on the model of the U.S. as global intervener, making the old righteous American noises, then the world has a right to be nervous.

In 1945 Japan, Germany and most of the rest of Europe lay in smoking ruins. It is an utterly different world now. The coalition's brilliant desert campaign is not a repeatable model: history does not usually enact itself in black-and-white, good-guy-bad-guy melodramas.

Being the globe's sole superpower has limited application. It is enough to have shown the gun. It must be drawn only very rarely. Americans, liking to be liked, are sometimes astonished at the hatreds they arouse -- in the Arab world, for example, in Latin America and elsewhere -- hatred generally running south to north, from have-nots to one of the gaudiest of the haves.

! Still, Bush's talk of the N.W.O. has symbolic, cautionary force now that he and the coalition have given such a flawless demonstration of what can happen when the sheriff and posse get organized. The image of America abroad has changed dramatically because of the gulf war. Before the war, much of the world saw America as a fading power, riddled with self-doubt and persistent social problems, gradually being overshadowed by the economic might of Japan and Germany. Nowhere does condescension toward Americans achieve the exquisite and insufferable effects that it accomplishes in France. In the mid-1960s, some Frenchmen wondered if the Americans would ever make it to the moon if they insisted on calculating distances in feet and inches. Americans were considered "les grands enfants," powerful but childish. Not long ago, a University of Tours sociologist named Jean-Pierre Sergent argued that Americans would not go to war in the Persian Gulf because they cannot face reality, only simulated versions of it. Now, after the battle, a writer named Jean d'Ormesson allows that Bush, an apparent "simpleton . . . has revealed himself, to almost universal surprise, to be a steadfast head of state . . . He has restored America to the first rank of nations."

But America's status in the world is smudged and complicated by the realities of its long, slow rot at home.

Some analysts have compared the postwar situation in 1991 with the aftermath of World War I in 1919, with the punitive peace that eventually led to the rise of Hitler and Nazism. The situation of America in 1991 might be compared in some ways with that of Britain in 1945, after World War II. The Second World War was a "good war" for British scientists and engineers, and at its end, everyone expected them to usher in a new age of prosperity. But Britain's R. and D. capabilities were never sufficiently transferred to private industry. Because the British government was determined to remain a great power, it skewed research and development toward defense. Said Sir Henry Tizard, the father of radar and the government's chief science adviser between 1946 and 1952: "We are a great nation, but if we continue to behave like a great power, we shall soon cease to be a great nation." Britain, like the U.S. now, suffered from a profound neglect of its educational system. It was what one scientist called "an invisible crisis. Nothing dramatic is going to happen for years . . . Then we shall wake up and find, like the Venetians in the 17th century, that all that makes our living has slipped away."

"Today the world! Tomorrow America!" goes the rueful joke. George Bush seems likely to confine himself to the first half of that formula, at least until after the 1992 election.

In his speech to Congress last week, Bush suggested that with the war ended Americans "must bring that same sense of self-discipline, that same sense of urgency, to the way we meet challenges here at home." A new cliche sprang up, a variation on the '60s line "If we can send a man to the moon, surely we can . . ." The new version holds that the American talents demonstrated in the gulf war should be applied to the nation's social problems. In Boston a youth- corps director named Michael Brown said optimistically, "We set our mind to something, and we did it. We marshaled resources; we had a strategy." On local radio call-in shows, Brown hears people proposing that General Schwarzkopf organize an assault on homelessness. "You can almost picture it," says Brown. "Schwarzkopf stands next to a big chart and says, 'Here are the issues keeping people homeless, and here is what we are going to do.' "

Neither political nor economic realities give hope that the nation's social problems -- homelessness, health care, crime, drugs, a decline in industrial competitiveness, and so on -- are going to be conquered soon, or even seriously addressed. At least not by government. The nation has the money but not the political will. Bush's basic approach will be to stand pat for the next 20 months, for the most part giving only lip service to domestic issues rather than risking his now enormous prestige in legislative battles that he might lose. Bush's political advisers calculate that the Democrats will pursue the "Churchill analogy" -- arguing that Bush and his party, like Churchill and his, served stoutly as wartime leaders but are not suited to the quite different challenges of leadership at home. Churchill, of course, was unceremoniously dumped as Prime Minister after the war in 1945.

The Republicans plan to counter with the Thatcher analogy -- the thought that Bush, like Margaret Thatcher, will translate victory in war to greater political strength at home. Bush and his handlers figure that the Democrats, leaderless and badly divided, will not be able to agree on a positive domestic program of their own and will be reduced to criticizing the Republicans. At a time when most of the country is optimistic and appreciates Bush's leadership, the Republicans will try to present the Democrats as part of the old depressive crew: negative, carping, whining, pessimistic, unconfident, unpatriotic.

Having patched together a minimalist domestic "agenda," Bush will keep the focus on foreign policy. The postgame show in the gulf, possibly including intensive diplomacy among the Arab states, Israel and the Palestinians, will occupy the President and the nation's attention for months to come. So will diplomacy with the splintering Soviet Union and Bush's efforts to improve trade relations with Japan, Europe and Mexico.

Bush in fact has few domestic convictions. His agenda has been shaped almost entirely for partisan political purposes. His crime package, for example, is intended to portray Democrats as soft on thugs.

It should not be a foregone conclusion that George Bush will be re-elected. These are times that prove Proudhon's formulation: "The fecundity of the unexpected far exceeds the statesman's prudence." Americans should enjoy the moment of victory for just that long, a moment, and after that, look beyond the war and consider that their country cannot for very long assert its authority, moral or military, unless it can bring its realities at home into closer alignment with its persona in the world.

Standing before Congress in his triumph, George Bush would not have thought of the line that General George Patton (the real Patton's words, spoken by George C. Scott) uttered at the end of the movie, after Patton's dazzling tank dash across Belgium and Germany to defeat Hitler's armies in 1945: "For over a thousand years, Roman conquerors returning from the wars enjoyed the honor of a triumph, a tumultuous parade . . . The conqueror rode in a triumphal chariot . . . A slave stood behind the conqueror holding a golden crown and whispering in his ear a warning that all glory is fleeting." One imagines that if there had been a voice whispering in Bush's ear, it would have sounded like Richard Nixon's -- confiding, sepulchral, full of its dark shrewdness.

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT: TIME Charts

From a telephone poll of 1,000 American adults taken for TIME/CNN on March 7 by Yankelovich Clancy Shulman. Sampling error is plus or minus 3%. "Not sures" omitted.

CAPTION: Which of these are the lessons from the war with Iraq?

Do You think the U.S. should be playing the role of world policeman, fighting aggression wherever it occurs?

% Does the American performance in the war give you more or less confidence in the following: