AMERICA AS WORLD POLICEMAN? LET'S ASK WHY, WHEN, WHERE?

What a war! This time our soldiers will return to a hero's welcome. Patriotism and victory are coterminous, as the once disdained Vietnam veterans well know. America will savor this triumph for perhaps a generation. We have expiated the guilt of Vietnam with skill and speed beyond all expectations. By almost any rational definition, it was a "just" war.

This conflict superbly planned and executed with pinpoint firepower shows that America, properly cloaked with the blessing of Security Council allies, can be a world policeman if our genuine interests are at stake. One of many important tasks in the aftermath of Desert Storm will be to decide on when those vital interests truly are threatened. There is a monumental difference between fighting the right war for the right purpose against the right enemy and fighting the wrong war for the wrong purpose against the wrong enemy.

Although we may say otherwise, we make no pretense of worldwide intervention to establish American-style governments everywhere. We want to make the world safe for our democracy, not to bring it elsewhere with missionary zeal. Kuwait will never be a "democracy" as we understand the word. Moslem culture is characterized by a worship of authority, both spiritual and temporal this is at odds with the Western ideal of secular democratic institutions. Jefferson, Madison and Hamilton will never do a ghostly walk through the corridors of Islam.

President Bush's pledge to bring democracy to Kuwait is like sending a sweet valentine card dutiful, nominal and feeble. Although we will not bring democracy to the Middle East, our victory does insure that we will never have to trade in our Cadillacs for wind-powered scooters. We will counter the clever Japanese with the guzzling 10 cylinder Dodge Viper. Our inexplicable public policy is to consume more oil, not less, to increase dependency on foreign oil, not lessen it. That's why control of the supply of oil could not be yielded to Saddam Hussein. Further, the power of oil will be used to restore check-book authoritarianism in some form or other to Kuwait.

Deep pockets will prevail over any bill of rights. Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates all of these bastions of authoritarianism are, in fact, essential to the life style of the Western World. We revere our own fundamental freedoms, but in our day-to-day lives, we may revere oil even more. Our presence in the desert was a matter of "jobs," as Secretary of State Baker accurately, if not so delicately put it.

In the euphoria of overwhelming victory, it's too early to moralize about the limits of our learning curve. Some day we will have to delineate the precise scope of the new policeman role we have begun to play, in the name of a resurgent, strangely more militaristic United Nations. Strategic interests have to be clearly defined. The whole world is not within reach of our ability or need to rescue. We police only that which furthers the interests of Western civilization including automobiles and cheap imported energy. We aren't crusaders for the universality of democratic change; we are an industrialized superpower with a narrow scope of vital and sometimes selfish interests.

Defeat in Vietnam brought us to the outer limits of political paralysis. Victory in the Persian Gulf should not bring us to the outer limits of political hubris.