Bush Faces Quagmire of Presidents Past: Part Vietnam, Part Hostage Crisis : Mideast: Bush confronts problems that have undercut the last four Presidents--and hostility from his conservative constituency.

The U.S. captives in Baghdad are not the only hostages being held by Saddam Hussein. George Bush’s place in history--and, to an extent in the future of U.S. politics--is now also a prisoner of Middle East fortune, much like Jimmy Carter’s 11 years ago. It is not a cheery comparison.

The rising pressure on Bush to gamble with a bold military stroke--instead of endless telephone conversations with world leaders--reflects this reawakening awareness: The Middle East has been a graveyard of recent Presidents’ ambitions. Bush’s assumed nonchalance in conducting war policy from a summer vacation home at Kennebunkport, Me.--as he seeks to avoid any similarities with Carter’s hostage fixation--does not seem reassuring. By digging in for a long regional military involvement, Bush risks a hemorrhage of strength, credibility and possibly even 1992 re-electability.

Over the last three weeks, the psychological guns of August have become increasingly troubling for Americans. The 1980s, a misleading prelude, were the historical equivalent of nostalgia night at the war movies. The invasion of the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada in 1983, the U.S. air attack on Tripoli in 1986, the invasion of Panama and overthrow of strongman Manuel A. Noriega in 1989, brought back everything reassuring about the old days--except John Wayne, Van Heflin and Betty Grable. Today’s new circumstances refocus a disturbing possibility of an embroilment combining the worst of Vietnam and the Iranian hostage crisis.

Even a successful strike against Hussein might not solve the problem. From a domestic and international political standpoint, Bush faces four principal difficulties and circumstances:

To begin with the politico-military equation, it’s already clear that the President, White House planners and the public approached Middle East involvement with a confidence built on the recent success of U.S. gunboat diplomacy in humbling tin-pot dictators without embroiling U.S. troops in Third World fighting. If the Middle East proves entrapping, voters may decide Bush acted too quickly in his commitment of U.S. troops to potential ground warfare on the Arabian peninsula. Disquiet has already been voiced by four voters out of 10 in two successive CBS News polls this month.

The economic reasons for committing U.S. troops could be the second basis for an autumn political debate. Despite Washington rhetoric about safeguarding oil supplies and prices, the United States gets only 4%-5% of its oil from Iraq and Kuwait. Moreover, until the August flare-up, oil and gas prices weren’t particularly high. Adjusted for inflation, a gallon of gasoline cost no more than it did in the early 1970s--before the OPEC upheavals began. Inflation-adjusted oil prices this spring were only about 25% of the peak reached in 1979-80. In related projections, economists have been predicting an annual increase in inflation of only .5% or so--far short of a mandate for U.S. military intervention.

Beyond the direct impact of oil price increases, the indirect effect--the fall-out on inflation, interest rates, bond prices, real estate and the stock market--appears far more menacing. According to one estimate, higher oil prices might cost the United States $50 billion worth of growth in the next year. By contrast, the decline in the U.S. stock and bond markets from August 2 to 22 shaved off something in the neighborhood of $300 billion in valuation--while raising the possibility of a further decline sharp enough to play havoc with junk bonds, leveraged buy-outs and other speculative legacies of the go-go years.

Indeed, much of what made the 1980s a boom decade for financial assets like stocks and bonds was the same worldwide disinflation--and regional deflation--that sent the value of farmland plummeting from Minnesota to Argentina and sandbagged oil economies from Texas to Nigeria to the Persian Gulf. For the international financial community to keep its 1980s speculative balls in the air, any renewal of inflation and commodity politics had to be beaten down. Oil could not be allowed to rise again. Hussein threatened this balance far more than Joe Sixpack’s romance with the Great American Gas Guzzler. But it’s not a politic reason for sending the 101st Airborne.

If the political cleavage between Main Street and Wall Street make these biases a touchy subject in the United States, they’re touchier in the Middle East. Poor Arabs, even in oil-rich countries like Iraq, hate the thinly populated gulf oil states such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Bahrain, which control a majority of the region’s petroleum and a larger portion of its wealth. By the end of the 1980s, these kingdoms, sheikdoms and emirates owned huge financial portfolios in London and New York that put them at least as much in the investment business as in the petroleum business. Oil price hikes that could threaten global finances were not their cause, either. But this affluence has made them the targets of Hussein’s strategy of raising both oil prices and class warfare in the Middle East.

Bush’s actions in support of the oil-rich states, committing the United States to what could be a lengthly military involvement, have created tricky constituency politics at home. History and current developments both suggest that if Washington cannot produce quick, favorable results, public disillusionment will set in along predictable lines. Women, for example, are much less enthusiastic over the U.S. Middle East involvement than men. In the CBS poll, a plurality of women thought Bush had been too quick to send in troops, while men disagreed by three-to-two. Let things go wrong and that gender gap could intensify. Geographic divisions are also likely--with New England being least pleased by Middle East fighting and rising oil prices and the Sun Belt most supportive.

But Bush’s most intriguing problem may come with conservatives--some already showing signs of “neo-isolationism”--who believe Bush, a 25-year member of the U.S. foreign-policy Establishment, is too anxious to return the United States to its Eisenhower Era role as “global policeman” and to protect the trilateral interests of Europe and Japan along with our own. Such populist conservatives as Patrick Buchanan and Robert Novak admonish Bush not to use U.S. troops at taxpayer expense to ensure oil supplies of Europeans and the Japanese. In this budget crisis era, they argue, U.S. resources and troops should be used only for direct U.S. interests--and not put into a possible no-win, desert-Vietnam situation.

Other conservatives have other doubts. Sen. John McCain of Arizona, a former Vietnam war hero, worries about the wisdom of committing so many troops to a potential ground war on the Arabian peninsula. Rep. Robert K. Dornan (R-Calif.) emphasized, “Americans don’t die for princes, sultans and emirs. It will only be a matter of time before Republicans ask why American boys are fighting to defend one monarchy and to restore another.” Let U.S. soldiers start coming home in body bags and these now peripheral criticisms will cut deeper.

Lastly, the White House faces a possible political problem with the timing of the Middle East crisis. Successful gunboat diplomacy can be forgotten quickly--the bombing of Tripoli in spring of 1986 was a non-factor by the November election--but continuing military impotence can embarrass an Administration on Election Day. Chinese Communist intervention in the Korean War in October, 1950, pushed back U.S. troops and hurt the Democrats several weeks later in the midterm congressional elections. Similarly, 10 years ago, Carter’s high poll ratings in the early days of the Iranian hostages crisis had turned to embarrassment when the first anniversary of the hostage-taking came on Election Day, 1980.

The other side of the coin, of course, is that an “October Surprise” diplomatic move or military triumph can be a strong election boost--like John F. Kennedy’s success in the late October 1962 Cuban missile crisis. White House officials would be foolish not to immerse themselves in these precedents and considerations along with more immediate circumstances of Middle East conflict and tensions.

True, a successful strike against Hussein could mute these any concerns and make Bush politically invulnerable in 1992. But of the last four elected U.S. Presidents before Bush, two were destroyed or undercut by embroilment in Vietnam and two were destroyed or undercut by situations involving U.S. hostages held in the Middle East--and the situation the United States now faces in the Persian Gulf could ultimately combine unnerving elements of both.