The Fire Last Time: What doves, and hawks, got wrong in the first Gulf War.

Advocates of a war on Iraq can be forgiven for some exasperation with the doves' demands for a debate. For one thing, these demands often serve as a substitute for their actually engaging in it by taking a clear position. For another, the hawks tend to think that we already had this debate -- twelve years ago. James Robbins recently wrote on National Review Online: "The same [antiwar] points are being made today as [in] 1990, frequently by the same people." The doves made fools of themselves then with predictions of military disaster; why should their counsel be sought now?

Robbins has the critics dead to rights. Many of the antiwar arguments really are remarkably similar: The Iraqi army is highly loyal to Saddam Hussein and will fight to the end; the Bush administration lacks sufficient support from Republicans, the American public, the Europeans, or the Arabs to go forward; action will only provoke Hussein to use weapons of mass destruction; Israel will be drawn into the war, and the "Arab street" will rise up against us. Then as now, Pat Buchanan was charging the hawks with pursuing Israel's interests rather than America's.

Above all, the critics warned that there would be massive American casualties. Chris Matthews, then a columnist, wrote, "The casualties will strike at the heart of the country." Barbara Boxer, then a congresswoman from Marin County, said that 3-4,000 dead was "the best- case scenario." Robert Novak and the late Rowland Evans reported that the minimum was 20,000 casualties. A ground assault on Iraqi-occupied Kuwait would mean "tens of thousands of U.S. dead," warned Buchanan. Sen. Paul Wellstone spoke for all of them: "We stand on the brink of catastrophe."

In the event, the public and the allies supported Bush, the Iraqi army turned out to be a paper tiger, and fewer than 150 Americans lost their lives in combat. The fact that the Cassandras were spectacularly wrong last time does not, of course, prove that they are wrong this time. But one might have expected them to issue fewer confident predictions of doom, or even to reconsider their assumptions. Nothing of the sort has occurred. The above worthies and their like-minded peers seem to have learned only one thing from Gulf War I: Don't put specific numbers on casualty estimates. We are still sure to get mired in the next quag. Hardly anyone even bothers to call the anti-warriors on their statements from 1990-91.

There is no accountability in the world of punditry (and a good thing, too, for those of us who bet that Al Gore would be our 43rd president). But there are other reasons that Gulf War I has not damaged the doves' standing, and some of those reasons hold lessons for the hawks.

The debate this time is different in several ways. Political circumstances have changed. Some of the changes have made it easier for the hawks to prevail. This President Bush is more popular than his father was in the run-up to the last war. The public, made hawkish by last year's terrorist attacks, is more supportive of action against Iraq than it was then. Among conservatives, the opinion leaders who opposed the first Gulf War are much less influential than they were in the early '90s. Buchanan, Joseph Sobran, and Samuel Francis have all been marginalized: a result of their opponents' ruthlessness, they would say; of their own folly, the opponents would retort.

On the other hand, the debate this time is murkier. The administration has not always communicated a clear purpose. The first Bush administration had internal disagreements about Iraq as substantial as this one does, but it mostly kept them internal. The Democrats, most of whom opposed Gulf War I, especially in the Senate, are being circumspect this time. The polls make them leery of opposing the president outright on Iraq. Instead, they keep raising the bar for action. Tom Daschle first wanted Bush to explain why we had to end the Iraqi regime. Now he's asking why ending it is more urgent than it was two years ago.

This war is different from the last one, most importantly, in its objective. Gulf War I aimed to restore the status quo ante Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, not to overthrow the Iraqi regime. This difference has led some of yesteryear's hawks, or apparent hawks, to become doves for this season. Opposition to war with Iraq includes not only those who wrongly predicted a debacle in the last war, but many of those who led that war.

In relation to Gulf War I, then, many contemporary hawks are fighting a two-front battle, criticizing both the first Bush administration's peacenik critics and the administration itself, for not driving on to Baghdad. That second line of criticism reportedly drives former president Bush up the wall. It's easy to sympathize with him. Madeleine Albright last year carped that Bush should have "finished the job in the Gulf War." Never mind that she opposed Gulf War I herself, would surely have condemned Bush for recklessness if he had gone on to Baghdad, served in an administration that left every element of Iraq policy weaker than it had found it -- and now opposes going to war to do the very job she now says should have been done in 1991.

It is not quite true, as the former president has claimed, that nobody at the time wanted to force regime change in Iraq. (National Review and the Wall Street Journal both called for it. Perhaps Bush pere, who never appeared to pay close attention to their advice, missed those editorials.) But it would certainly have been a startling enterprise. Neither our allies nor the public had been prepared for a campaign to do anything more than drive Iraq from Kuwait. Maybe everyone would have gone along with Bush had he seized the moment -- in the months after the war, polls found the public disagreeing with the early end to the war and favoring Saddam's removal from power -- but maybe they wouldn't have. Nor was Bush foolish to fear the possible consequences of tyrannicide. An occupation of several years might have been necessary to keep Iraq from flying apart and other wars from breaking out; Congress had not signed on to that. Finally, Bush had reason to hope that victory in Kuwait would itself lead to a better situation in Baghdad.

If Bush's decision was not obviously foolish at the time, however, in retrospect it can be seen that it was a mistake -- indeed, America's worst foreign-policy mistake of the last 50 years. (Or rather, mistakes, since the rebellions later that year provided an opportunity to strike again.) In time, Saddam Hussein came to be seen as having outfoxed us. We looked weak and irresolute, and our ability to lead an anti-Iraqi coalition in the region accordingly declined. In truth, we were irresolute, and inattentive: Our resolve to contain and to undermine the regime weakened. Our continued presence in Saudi Arabia, itself a consequence of the Iraqi regime's survival, was meanwhile a provocation to Islamists.

And so both hawks and doves regard Gulf War I, in different though overlapping respects, as a failure. That shared assessment makes it very hard for the hawks to use the doves' opposition to it to discredit them. The assessment is, however, an overstatement. Our achievement in the war, though too limited, was real. The world would have been a much worse place over the last decade -- and it would be a worse place now - - had Ba'athist Iraq been allowed to absorb Kuwait (let alone if it had also annexed portions of Saudi Arabia).

Such an Iraqi victory would have radicalized regimes throughout the region and the world. Especially if America had sent troops to the Gulf and then refrained from using them -- which is what the Democrats voted for in January 1991 -- anti-Americanism would have grown more assertive worldwide. Aggression would have been rewarded with wealth and prestige, and other dictators would have drawn the appropriate lesson. Saddam Hussein would probably have gotten his nukes sometime in the last decade.

The lesson that hawks should draw from Gulf War I, then, is not just that the doves were wrong (although they were) or even that the hawks stopped too soon (though they did). It is also that our war aims were inadequately defined. They could be again. Is our goal the elimination of Saddam? A non-totalitarian Iraq? Or a fledgling democracy there? Should a freer international market in oil be among our objectives?

It would be quixotic to expect a political settlement for a post-war Iraq to be worked out before the fighting begins. Nor do all of our war aims necessarily have to be declared explicitly. But it is not too soon for us to reach some agreement on what we imagine victory would look like.