Domestic Political Scene Shifts Like Sands of Desert : Washington view: Response to military intervention no longer is reflexively dividing along traditional liberal and conservative lines.

The bright glare of the Persian Gulf crisis is illuminating not only the glimmers of a post-Cold War international order, but also a potentially dramatic change in the domestic political landscape.

Both the general surge of support for President Bush’s decision to confront Iraq with American forces and the isolated notes of objection may signal shifting alignments in the foreign policy debate. This first crisis after the end of the ideological struggle with the Soviet Union suggests that the domestic response to foreign military intervention no longer reflexively divides between liberal dissent and conservative zeal, the pattern that has existed since the Vietnam War turned sour.

So far, Bush has faced only a handful of critics on the left--and, just as surprisingly, almost as many on the right.

Freshman Democratic Sens. Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, Tom Harkin of Iowa and Terry Sanford of North Carolina have raised cautions about how much the United States should risk in the confrontation with Saddam Hussein. But no Democrat has been nearly as critical of Bush as conservative columnist Patrick J. Buchanan, one of the country’s most ardent Cold Warriors.

“Before we send thousands of American soldiers to their deaths,” Buchanan wrote earlier this week, “let’s make damn sure America’s vital interests are threatened.” Though they are unlikely to inhibit Bush in the short run, these objections point to possible new alliances on foreign policy issues as the United States moves out of the Cold War that has dominated its politics for the past 40 years. With the Soviet threat effectively eliminated, some leading conservative thinkers are beginning to join the common liberal call of the past two decades for the United States to reduce its overseas military commitments and focus its resources on securing its economic strength.

“In terms of foreign policy and defense issues, you’re seeing a bit of a realignment in the U.S.,” said Ted Galen Carpenter, director of foreign policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington. “In a sense, it goes back to the pre-World War II period, when you had the isolationist--or noninterventionist--movement that drew from liberals and conservatives. . . . I think you are likely to see some of that in the future.”

But there are conflicting forces at work, too, that complicate Carpenter’s equation and point toward a more complex and fluid realignment. That could result in liberals and conservatives arraying in shifting coalitions on each potential conflict, depending on their analyses of its impact on American national interest, not its transcendent ideological implications.

In this case, with oil supplies at risk, the overwhelming fact of the crisis’ first month is not the depth of opposition, but the breadth of support across the political spectrum for the President.

“As of today, there is as broad a bipartisan support for what the President has done . . . as I have seen for a presidential action that involves the potential use of military power,” said California Rep. Mel Levine (D-Santa Monica), a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

Most dramatic has been the paucity of Democratic criticism.

At one level, this reflects the historic tendency of Americans to rally ‘round the flag when soldiers are at risk. But the enormous Democratic assent for Bush’s aggressive response, following the relative silence over the invasion of Panama, hints that the end of the Cold War may also encourage some liberals to revert to the interventionist traditions that dominated the party until Vietnam.

At the least, the widespread Democratic support suggests to many a form of ideological vertigo similar to that affecting Buchanan and other conservative critics of the engagement. If conservatives routinely supported intervention abroad against pro-Communist Third World guerrilla movements, many liberals just as instinctively resisted it. But this conflict, notes Richard J. Barnet, co-director of the leftist Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, “is a much different situation than the classic counterinsurgency intervention of the post-war era. This does look more like the Second World War.”

Similarly, during the Cold War, liberals increasingly worried that foreign military engagements might escalate into a planet-threatening confrontation with the Soviet Union. But with the Soviets generally supporting the condemnation of Iraq, that concern has been erased. At the same time, the Soviets’ cooperation in sanctions against Iraq has allowed President Bush to work through the United Nations--exactly the course that the left has traditionally urged on Presidents in times of crisis.

Some Democrats also privately concede that the congressional support for Bush reflects the Democrats’ eagerness to deflect longstanding Republican charges that they lack the fortitude to fight for American interests abroad.

And the interest of Israel in the region may also be buttressing Democratic consent for the buildup. Levine insists that concern about Israel has not been “a triggering mechanism” for support of Bush’s policy on the left. But many of the liberals traditionally most skeptical of U.S. military intervention abroad are also passionate supporters of Israel and may see the American confrontation with Iraq as a chance to eliminate a mortal threat to the Jewish state.

“There are those people with an interest in Israel who feel . . . a war would work in their favor because it would wipe out a perceived hostile leader,” said Stanley K. Sheinbaum, a veteran activist in liberal and Jewish causes in Los Angeles.

Other analysts, such as Alan Tonelson, the author of an upcoming book on redefining American foreign policy interests, say that potential critics have been muted primarily by the lack of good alternatives to the course Bush has pursued in the crisis’ first weeks.

Even Kerrey--though concerned that the United States is assuming too great “a preponderance of the (military) commitment” and convinced that “part of the problem is of our own making” for failing to pursue energy independence or earlier measures to contain Hussein--nonetheless agrees that Iraqi “withdrawal from Kuwait does need to be our hard, non-negotiable point. Saddam Hussein cannot be permitted to escape as an Arab hero.”

Support for Bush on the left is far from universal, and those who are intrinsically skeptical of U.S. military intervention are beginning to raise their voices.

“We are being deluged with phone calls,” said Gavrielle Gemma, a coordinator of the Coalition to Stop U.S. Intervention in the Middle East, a group launched last week by former Atty. Gen. Ramsey Clark. “There is a tremendous undercurrent of resentment and fear and antagonism about what the Bush Administration is doing.”

The coalition, whose members include a diverse assortment of smaller leftist organizations, has called for immediate U.S. withdrawal from the region, arguing that the U.S. presence “was designed . . . to usurp Arab, and international, peaceful and diplomatic solutions.”

Other, more centrist liberal activists are urging that the United States reduce its military presence, replace its forces with troops from other nations, particularly Arab states, and step up efforts to negotiate a solution with Hussein.

Some, such as Barnet and former Democratic presidential candidate George S. McGovern, believe that the crisis opens a window for wider negotiations on the entire range of Mideast flash points--including the development of chemical and nuclear weapons by Iraq and Israel and, as Hussein has suggested, Israeli control of the occupied territories.

Still others on the left want to press Bush to ensure that Saudi Arabia and other allies pick up a substantial share of the operation’s cost--a notion seconded by Burton Yale Pines, senior vice president at the conservative Heritage Foundation. Pines, like many liberals, also supports an eventual replacement of many U.S. forces with troops from other Arab nations.

“I’m not sure where the dispute between liberals and conservatives will come,” he said.

Revealingly, conservatives have spent more time arguing among themselves than with the left. One camp--led by former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, columnist William Safire and former Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard N. Perle--have called for decisive military action against Iraq. Their views dominated the public debate in the early stages of the crisis, though they have faded this week as both sides have backed away from immediate confrontation.

With less fanfare, a number of other conservatives--including Buchanan, National Review senior editor Joseph Sobran and former National Security Agency Director William E. Odom--have questioned whether a military victory could be won quickly, or would be worth the price. Buchanan has taken the most extreme position, arguing in a column this week that a Persian Gulf war would be a “quagmire” and that the United States should not escalate beyond the economic embargo--even if that fails to drive Iraq from Kuwait.

“If it works, it works; if it fails, it fails,” he wrote. “Kuwait is not worth the loss of the 82nd and 101st Airborne, and that’s pretty much the asking price.”

Similarly, Carpenter of the Cato Institute is urging that the United States reduce its military presence in the gulf and give Arab states “the greatest latitude to work out a settlement” with Iraq that might not include a return to the status quo in Kuwait. To avoid war, he said, “there may have to be a compromise on Kuwait.”

These arguments against intervention emerge from a deeper debate roiling the right. While many conservatives maintain that the end of the Cold War offers no excuse for reducing U.S. commitments, other conservative thinkers--reviving views common in that camp through the early 1950s--say that the United States can turn its attention inward now that the threat from the Soviet Union has essentially collapsed.

This conviction can lead to sentiments virtually indistinguishable from those at a gathering of Americans for Democratic Action.

“The time when Americans should bear such unusual burdens is past,” former U.N. Ambassador Jeane J. Kirkpatrick writes in the upcoming issue of The National Interest, a conservative foreign policy journal. “With a return to ‘normal’ times, we can again become a normal nation--and take care of pressing problems of education, family, industry and technology.”

The immediate danger of conflict in the gulf has at once accelerated and clouded this larger reassessment on the right. On the one hand, it has highlighted the doubts some prominent conservatives hold about the U.S. role as the world’s global policeman. But the desire to back the President, and the belief that the United States must demonstrate resolve now that Bush has drawn a line in the sand, are also strong.

As a result, while these intellectual currents eventually could unsettle the GOP coalition on foreign policy, they are unlikely to threaten Bush in the near term.

Kirkpatrick, for example, though questioning whether the invasion of Kuwait truly threatened vital American interests, has offered reluctant support for the mission--while remaining critical of any move toward war.

House Republican Whip Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) maintains that the Buchanan line has no support among conservatives in Congress. “There is an overwhelming sense among conservative elected officials that our pro-freedom stand around the world has worked . . . and that in the practical world of real power the U.S. has to remain involved,” he said.

Exactly how heavily involved, though, is a question that conservatives seem certain to debate with increasing intensity long beyond this crisis. That question “does represent something very profound about the debate that is going on in the conservative community about America’s role in the post Cold-War world,” Pines said.

Events in the gulf may make these debates over how great a burden the United States should bear in this new era more than abstractions and ultimately fray the domestic coalition Bush has stitched together.

But, for now, Bush stands in an enviable position. In the midst of ideological instability, he appears to have found a solid center on which to stand. “What’s remarkable here is this President and the country now have a chance to do something together,” said one senior House Democratic aide who deals with political and military matters. “And, so far, he has not squandered that opportunity.”