COLUMN LEFT : Among the People, No Lust for War : Ordinary Americans are making calculations that took years to develop about Vietnam.

Monday morning, the day President Bush addressed the U.N. General Assembly, found me a mile or so away from U.N. headquarters at Rockefeller Center, discussing the gulf crisis on the Phil Donahue show with Ralph Nader and Richard Barnett of the Institute for Policy Studies. What struck me in the course of our highly critical examination of the Bush Administration’s policy was that not a single member of the large studio audience called for war or suggested that this was a cause in which American lives might justly be sacrificed.

This was a crowd of about 200 people, from New York area and around the country, who’d sent in for tickets to be in a Donahue studio audience weeks ago. By far the loudest cheers followed charges from Nader that the people doing well out of this crisis are the oil companies, the arms manufacturers and the big agricultural and commercial interests who had been urging appeasement of Saddam Hussein before the invasion took place.

The studio reaction was certainly striking to me in light of the torrent of stories in the press, plainly intimidating to the Democrats, suggesting that Bush’s policy since Aug. 2, the day of the invasion, had won overwhelming popular backing. No doubt there is support for the rapid and entirely proper imposition of sanctions by the U.N. Security Council in the wake of Iraq’s seizure of Kuwait, but that’s where the certainty seems to end. That same Monday morning, the papers carried reports of a poll conducted for a bipartisan group of political consulting firms. The results showed that just one in 10 Americans favors war at this point. Nearly half of the thousand people surveyed said they thought that if the Bush Administration launched a war it would lie to them and claim the Iraqis started it.

American soldiers in Saudi Arabia tell reporters that the thing that worries them most is the possibility of loss of public support back home, as happened in the war in Vietnam. The ingredients of just such a loss of confidence are already there. The fact that right up until the invasion the State Department sent out strong public signals that the United States would not take sides in any Arab-Arab border dispute is now sinking into the popular mind.

There were gasps from the Donahue audience as U.S. Ambassador April Glaspie’s amiable discussions with Hussein in Baghdad on July 25 were scrolled down the studio TV monitors. The audience followed with keen attention suggestions that what the Administration was actually doing in the pre-invasion days was trying to nudge Kuwait into halting its overproduction of oil beyond OPEC guidelines and thus allay Hussein’s furious charges that the emirate had declared economic war on Iraq.

Hussein: “Twenty-five dollars a barrel is not a high price.”

Glaspie: “We have many Americans who would like to see the price go above $25 because they come from oil-producing states.”

From the questions raised by this exchange--after all, the President and secretary of state have roots in the Southwest--it is no great leap to strenuous questions about the leap of oil to $40 a barrel. Why have oil prices risen 100% in response to a supply drop now running less than 2.5% of world output? How come U.S. oil companies exported oil to Europe in September because prices were higher there? These are the sorts of questions that the folks in Donahue’s studio applauded.

If war is the extension of politics by other means, it is also a particularly dramatic display of the class system. Rich men start wars and poor people fight them. The day after Bush’s speech to the United Nations came details of the budget deal hatched on Capitol Hill. Toss the colossal red herring of the capital gains tax fight to one side and the outline of one more familiar plot to shaft the middle-class wage-earner looms into view.

The people on the receiving end of the proposed tax package are the people already bruised by the rising gas prices and among them are those who will be doing the fighting and dying in any war in the gulf. On one TV program, I saw a soldier in Saudi Arabia say that he thought he and his fellows were there to knock a few cents off the price of gas at the pump. What will he think as he reads of the prospective gas tax increase of 12 cents a gallon?

An inevitable consequence of any substantial war is domestic political upheaval as the bodies come home and people figure out who is doing the bleeding. There are signs that in this crisis people are making the calculations that it took them years to get to in Vietnam. Let us hope that President Bush reflects on this as he is belabored by the urgings of the war faction.