TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/061791/0617100.000

Text File | 1992-08-30 | 16KB | 326 lines

                                                                                NATION, Page 22

AMERICA'S POSTWAR MOOD

Making Sense of The Storm



Victory in the gulf may not have achieved all that Americans
hoped for, but there are many reasons for glorious -- even giddy
-- celebration

By NANCY GIBBS -- Reported by Ann Blackman/Washington, Jordan
Bonfante/Los Angeles and William McWhirter/Chicago


    "There never was a good war or a bad peace," Benjamin
Franklin wrote to Josiah Quincy in 1773, expressing a simple
truth that helps explain why Americans cheer so loudly as the
victorious soldiers march through the center of town, leaving
behind a trail of limp ticker tape, burst balloons -- and
grumbling pundits. Some people will carp at the giddy excess and
point out that the U.S. is cheering while the gulf still burns.
They may be overlooking something that has changed in the way
Americans think about themselves and what their country has
achieved by war. It is at least possible that the great postwar
party now in progress is more a mark of national maturity than
of smugness and jingoism.

    The hoopla, to be sure, is partly triggered by the fact
that Americans have not had much else to cheer about lately,
that saluting the soldiers is a welcome diversion from a
sagging economy, racial divisiveness and other woes on the home
front. But the celebrations cannot be written off completely,
or even mostly, as escapism. The war in the gulf was one that
most Americans were willing -- but not eager -- to fight, and
that distinction has shaped their assessment of its ambiguous
aftermath.

    Last December, a few weeks before the smart bombs and
cruise missiles began to rain down on Baghdad, National Security
Adviser Brent Scowcroft posed a question: "Can the U.S. use
force -- even go to war -- for carefully defined national
interests, or do we have to have a moral crusade or a
galvanizing event like Pearl Harbor?" Put another way, Scowcroft
was asking whether a nation traumatized by its defeat in Vietnam
had grown up enough to accept its leadership responsibilities
in the murkier world that emerged with the end of the cold war.

    For a time last year, as George Bush searched for a
convincing rationale for transforming Desert Shield into Desert
Storm, he seemed to believe that Americans were not prepared for
this new era of limited challenges -- and limited victories.
The President's rhetoric suggested the view that only if Saddam
Hussein was painted as evil incarnate could Bush rally the
people behind him. Left unopposed, the President declared, the
takeover of Kuwait would allow Saddam to hold Western economies
hostage. On the other hand, Bush hinted, an American victory
would help usher in a new world order and improve prospects for
peace in the Middle East. Privately, he and his aides were far
less ambitious in their predictions of what the war would
accomplish.

    The evidence since the fighting stopped suggests that
Americans would have endorsed Bush's policy even if the
President had shared his more pessimistic forecasts about the
war's results. To most, turning back aggression and preventing
a despot from getting a stranglehold on a vital oil supply were
sufficient reasons for the use of American force.

    Yes, Saddam remains in power; yes, his defeated army
turned its guns on Iraq's own people, slaughtering tens of
thousands of Shi`ite and Kurdish rebels while allied troops
stood on the sidelines; yes, the restored Kuwaiti monarchy has
made no progress toward democratization and has itself been
guilty of human-rights violations; and yes, Secretary of State
James Baker's attempt to bring Israel and its Arab neighbors
together has met with nothing but frustration. Still, more than
3 out of 4 people questioned in a TIME/CNN poll conducted last
week by Yankelovich Clancy Shulman believe the war was worth
fighting.

    The complicated way in which Americans have assessed the
meaning of victory has led to some confusion about their
feelings. The outpouring of relief that erupted when the
fighting ended, for example, was first mistaken for euphoria and
is now at times wrongly taken for chest-pounding
superpatriotism. In fact, there were many reasons for the mood
of celebration, and most of them are laudable.



    Those who say that the parades are too gaudy and grand
might, for example, consider them as acts of contrition. "We are
overreacting a bit," says Troy Putman, an accountant in
Norcross, Ga., "but patriotism is such a great alternative to
what we have had. A major reason for the overreaction is that
we are looking over the shoulders of the gulf soldiers and
giving delayed honors to the Vietnam veterans."

    Back in 1972, when Tom Root returned from Vietnam as a
21-year-old Army corporal, he hid in an airport bathroom wishing
he could change into civilian clothes before running the
gauntlet of war protesters. When he and his Illinois National
Guard unit returned from the gulf last month, the parade
stretched 13 miles along an Illinois interstate. "The response
of the community was overwhelming," he says. "We were not
prepared for the homecoming we got."



    The celebrations also welcome the return of American
competence, which may explain why the parades include weapons
as well as soldiers. "We tested our war machinery, and we know
we have the most sophisticated war machine in the world today,"
says Ben Perkins, a union organizer in Detroit who personally
opposed the war from the start. "We've got a new sense of
patriotism, and I guess that's good, but that was a hell of a
price to pay for it."

    The hope, of course, is that the impression of U.S.
technological pre-eminence will bring other rewards. "If there
is a long-lasting effect of the war, it is the tremendous
confidence that Americans have rediscovered in themselves, in
their industries and in their country," observes Sheldon
Kamieniecki, a specialist in political opinion at the University
of Southern California. In the past decade, he argues, Americans
came to believe they could not produce reliable products and had
lost the technological war to Germany and Japan. "This was built
in to the American psyche during the '80s on so many talk shows
and in the intellectual debate over the U.S. decline," he says.
"The war really removed that in a profound way that will be long
lasting, well past the year 2000."



    The mood in the streets also touches on America's role in
the world, another area where people's attitudes have become
more sophisticated than in years past. What Americans wanted
more than anything else, argues University of Denver
psychologist Paul Block, "is some proof of our control of the
international situation, to make things go the way we want them
to, to prevent people from doing what we consider to be wrong."
The swiftness of the allied victory would deter future invaders;
America's leverage in war would be the best guarantor of peace.

    But that does not mean most people are eager for the U.S.
to be the world's policeman. "The changing nature of power will
take more patience than what we've seen before," says Joseph Nye
at Harvard. "True, America is No. 1, but No. 1 isn't what it
used to be." For all the exhortations and promise of a new world
order, most people harbor a healthy cynicism about the chance
of bringing lasting peace to an ancient war zone.

    Most Americans were never beguiled by visions of a new
world order and are more grateful for what was actually won than
embittered by the failure to obtain what was never achievable.
"We want so badly to be proud of our nation and ourselves," says
Gil Rene, whose wife Denise was called to the gulf last October
by her reserve unit three days after their wedding. "Well, it's
over now," Rene adds. "We got the job done, all right? Let's
move on. It didn't change the world, or world politics. It
didn't change anything. They all still hate us in the Middle
East."

    People are applying the same sense of patient pragmatism
to the country's homegrown troubles. Once frustrated critics
asked why, if America could land men on the moon, it could not
cure its domestic ills. Now they ask the same question about
the easy win in the gulf. In the weeks just after the war,
Democrats longingly predicted a backlash at home from
expectations raised and then dashed. What would happen, they
mused, when Americans woke up the next morning to find the
homeless still outside their doors, the addicts still shooting
each other, their schools firing teachers for lack of funds?
"People want to have their money back -- for their
neighborhoods, for their streets, for their kids, for
themselves," says Boston city councilor David Scondras.

    Here too, it turns out, the public is more realistic about
the limits of power. Far from being a victim of his own
success, the President seems to float high above the domestic
problems, insulated even from disapproval of his own policies.
The TIME/CNN survey found that only 39% of the public applaud
Bush's handling of the economy, while 71% feel he spends too
little time on domestic affairs. Yet his overall approval rating
flutters around 72%. "People are perfectly capable of believing
in a national ascendancy and not linking it to our inability to
solve our social problems," says Kamieniecki. "That unfortunate
dichotomy is part of the reason we don't solve our social
problems." The same forgiveness extends to the President's
failure to bring a speedy end to the recession.



    With household budgets -- not to mention state and fiscal
coffers -- so empty, some parade organizers are finding it hard
to justify the sums they are spending. Seattle ended up
canceling its event for lack of funds -- but that may have been
a blessing, since several of the organizers had quit in a
dispute over who should participate. In Washington, Desert Storm
Homecoming Foundation president Harry Walters defended the $12
million price tag for last weekend's colossal event by arguing
that "the cost of war is high, the price of freedom higher. What
does it cost when you bury a person or cut off his leg? How do
you celebrate for 540,000 soldiers who came home alive? What's
the cost of celebrating that? I don't know. The pencil pushers
aren't guiding people on celebrating this war."

    That most of the funds are coming from private donations
(the Pentagon kicked in $6 million) raises some problems of its
own. Shameless commercialism is once again proving to be the
grease on America's engine of self-congratulation. Corporations
booked airtime as though victory were a sporting event.
Budweiser suggested that Chicago tavern patrons show their
patriotism by buying one for the boys in uniform. The Brach
candy company began offering "three patriotic candies in special
patriotic packaging," reminding anyone who didn't know that
"from the shores of Tripoli to the desert sands of Saudi Arabia,
E.J. Brach Corp. has always supported America's military." All
profits will be donated to the U.S.O.'s "Operation Welcome Home"
fund.

    Elsewhere Operation Welcome Home captured the battles of
postwar America very neatly. New York Post columnist Ray
Kerrison deplored the fact that General Norman Schwarzkopf,
representing a military that bars homosexuals from its ranks,
would be serenaded in New York City's ticker-tape parade by the
Lesbian and Gay Big Apple Corps Band. The Village Voice
suggested selling charred mannequin limbs along the parade
route. Families of the victims of Pan Am Flight 103 objected to
Syrian participation in the Washington parade, on the grounds
that the country sponsors terrorism.

    Many returning soldiers express some embarrassment at
being so lavishly feted when the war was so short, the toll on
the other side so heavy. Marching alongside Vietnam veterans
hammers home the point that the "whole Persian Gulf war didn't
amount to a bad weekend in Vietnam," says Tom Storey, 44, a
truck driver who loaded bombs onto Phantom jets during some of
the heaviest fighting in the late 1960s. "There were times in
Vietnam when we took more casualties in two days than they did
in that whole thing."

    It may be because victory was so swift that the
celebrations are lasting so long. Only one huge parade followed
the end of the Civil War, and World War II was not much
different. The reason, historians explain, is that people were
so desperate for their lives to return to normal, after so many
years of tension and suspense and sacrifice. Some returning gulf
troops are starting to feel the same way, particularly
reservists who are eager to reassemble the pieces of the lives
they dropped on 24 hours' notice. "The first few parades,
they've been happy about but after a while it's becoming more
of a job than a celebration," says Sergeant First Class Maurice
Finsterwald of Fort Hood, Texas. "A lot of parades are on
weekends, and the soldiers are looking forward to having the
time off."

    When that time off finally comes, the soldiers and their
families will finally have a chance to sit back and consider
what has changed -- and what hasn't -- since they were last
together. Many soldiers' marriages, shaky before Desert Storm
began, became casualties of the war. Tom Hacker, of Sterling,
Ill., marched off to the gulf with his National Guard unit in
January. He came home to a hero's welcome in May and a pink slip
from the hardware factory where he had worked as a tool-and-dye
man. "I felt terrible about it, but the state of orders and the
circumstances of business made it necessary," says Stan
Whiteman, the personnel manager at the factory. Said Hacker: `It
was like a kick in the teeth."

    The strains of reunion have been hardest for veterans who
are single parents. Last November, June Cooper of Mesa, Ariz.,
left behind her son Jason, 4, who is deaf in one ear, when the
403rd Combat Support Hospital, an Arizona reserve unit, was
called up. The boy spent weekdays with the director of his
preschool and weekends with his grandparents. When Cooper
returned after a six-month tour of duty in Saudi Arabia, she
found it was a struggle at first. "Jason just clung to my side,
everywhere I went -- he even followed me to the bathroom. He was
always asking, `Mom, where are you going now?' So for the first
two or three weeks when I got back, I tried to spend as much
time with him as I could."

    But for most veterans, these are times for quieter
ceremonies: the thanks for loyal neighbors and friends, for care
packages, for letters; the new appreciation of the simplest
freedoms; and the chance to put behind them a war that came by
surprise, and mercifully ended before it could create a new
generation of martyrs. It is because their sons and daughters
were spared that people will line the streets while the soldiers
pass by, but that should not be mistaken for gloating, or
amnesia, or indifference to the suffering that continues in the
shadow of the war.

    To return to Scowcroft's question: depending on who is
drawing them, the lessons of Vietnam fall into two categories.
To Bush, America's defeat showed that if the U.S. goes to war
it must go to win -- with overwhelming force instead of gradual
escalation. To his critics, the message was that America must
not go to war without the solid support of Congress and the
people. In the gulf, both propositions were put to the test, and
both were vindicated: the U.S. accomplished much, if not all,
it set out to, at a gratifyingly low cost in lives and treasure,
while carefully obeying every constitutional dictate and
maintaining a surprising degree of public unity. That, and not
mere triumph, is what is worth celebrating in an orgy of flags,
marching men and patriotic songs.