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<text> <title> (Jun. 17, 1991) Victory Celebration </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1991 Highlights The Persian Gulf War:Desert Storm </history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> NATION, Page 22 AMERICA'S POSTWAR MOOD Making Sense of The Storm </hdr><body> 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. </body></article> </text>