NEWS ANALYSIS : Leery Spain Ventures Out Into the World Via the Gulf : Allies: The government’s unreserved support of U.S.-led action against Iraq marks a turning point.

At the peak of the American flood of men and arms into the Persian Gulf, U.S. military jets landed at bases in Spain every two or three minutes. Serviced and refueled, the planes took off again to neighborhood complaints about noise, national ambivalence over their presence, and an unprecedented commitment by Spain’s Socialist government to their mission.

Strange doings in a country proudly aloof from foreign entanglements for nearly all of this century, with a government that sounded not long ago like the most anti-American member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. But improbable things happen when pride changes, a nonplussed and concerned Spanish public is discovering.

Unreserved support by Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez for the United States in enforcing the U.N. embargo against Iraq--reinforced by his decision to contribute to it with Spanish warships--marks a historic turning in Spain’s official view of itself and what sort of international shadow it should cast.

“Spain is getting its feet wet in the world,” said an admiring Western diplomat.

Polls say the Spanish people are still not convinced, but Spain’s performance so far has earned high marks, prompting a shared pride of achievement among normally distant military officers and Socialist politicians.

American supply and staging flights continue routinely, heaviest at the once-disputed Torrejon Air Base outside Madrid where all U.S. facilities will be turned over to Spain in 1992. Spanish shipyards are maintaining and repairing American ships. International blockade enforcers in Persian Gulf waters include two Spanish corvettes and a frigate.

“Our newspapers talk about ‘hundreds of American flights.’ Indeed. And so what?” said Inocencio Arias, an undersecretary at the Foreign Ministry. “The important part of Spanish public opinion is distrustful of our participation in an American military initiative, but in this case we have no argument with the United States. Iraq has broken international law in a most brutal and flagrant way and shouldn’t get away with it.”

The United States has decided to abandon its lion’s share of the Torrejon base after agreeing to demands from the Gonzalez government to remove a wing of 72 F-16s from Spain by 1992. Many of those fighters are now on alert at a base in Turkey, and in the present climate of Spanish-American gulf cooperation, discord over their departure seems as much ancient history as Gonzalez’s refusal to allow overflight by American bombers on their way to a raid against Libya in 1986.

“This has been a positive experience for Spain. We have been an inward-looking country with its back to Europe for decades. With the return of democracy in 1975, we began looking outward again. Now, we are participating in this crisis as a full partner of a modern and democratic Europe,” said Miguel Gil, a spokesman for the prime minister’s office.

Spain’s international projection in the gulf flies in the face of what one scholar has called a “culture of isolation” that began with the revolt of American colonies in the early 19th Century and accelerated with the loss of the Philippines, Puerto Rico and Cuba in war with the United States in 1898.

Spain sat out both world wars as a weak, irrelevant, self-consumed neutral. After a sapping civil war, the 1939-75 dictatorship of Gen. Francisco Franco cut off Spain not only from democracy but also as a principal beneficiary of the unprecedented prosperity that has accompanied it in the rest of Western Europe since 1945.

Under Gonzalez, Spain has moved step by step toward the mainstream. In the watershed year of 1986, it joined the European Community and NATO after prolonged national debate. By now, Spain is among the community’s loudest supporters of European integration.

Initially, Gonzalez seemed to underestimate the consequences of Iraq’s Aug. 2 invasion of Kuwait, but within a few days his government had authorized open-door use of bases in Spain for American ships and planes. He dispatched warships Aug. 26 in response to a call for action by the Western European Union, a regional defense alliance that Spain joined only last year.

“We will not opt for isolation. Spain has learned over the past 150 years that it’s cold being on the outside,” the Spanish prime minister asserted.

Gonzalez did not take his case directly to the leery Spanish people until 40 days after the invasion, though, when conservatives joined Socialists in a ringing parliamentary endorsement that failed to still popular qualms.

Old ways die hard. Parliamentary support “contrasts with the divided opinions and, above all, the bewilderment of many citizens in the face of events in the gulf,” said the Madrid newspaper El Pais.

From the outset, it has been painfully apparent to the government that a majority of Spaniards want no part of any overseas military action. There have been none since some disastrous sorties in Morocco between 1909 and 1927.

As Spain ventured into the gulf, one private radio station said that three-quarters of nearly 8,000 people it polled by telephone opposed participation there. About 300 intellectuals signed a declaration by Communist and other leftist parties supporting the intervention but opposing any Spanish military role.

In a September survey of 800 Spaniards of voting age, El Pais found that 54% opposed direct involvement, 64% said they felt badly informed by their government and, most tellingly, only 32% thought that Spain’s contribution in confronting Iraq should be at the same level as that of its European Community partners.

The fact that 150 of the 500 crew members aboard the Spanish vessels sent to the gulf are 20-year-old conscripts has roused ire across the country. Stung, the government promises that as a reward for gulf service, the draftees will be discharged early when the original three warships are replaced by sister ships later this month.

“Spaniards were delighted at a new stage of history when their country was integrated with Europe and among the richest and most modern countries in the world. They didn’t know that the price can be very high,” said Cambio 16, a news magazine.

Initial consternation has been replaced by microscopic examination by the news media of every Spanish step abroad, often accompanied by commentaries and dire editorial warnings. When Prince Felipe, the gangling, 22-year-old heir to the Spanish throne, sallied forth in his navy lieutenant’s uniform for a weekend visit to the ships in the gulf, newspapers complained how badly organized his mission had been. They noted that one weapons system aboard the corvettes was not working properly and that technicians dispatched to repair it were turned away because they lacked visas for the countries of the gulf.

All Spain knows that two sailors were scalded by hot soup and that a navy lieutenant broke his arm boarding a ship to be inspected. On blockade patrol, when the commander of a nearby U.S. warship suggested that a Spanish ship fire a warning shot across the bow of a suspect merchant vessel, the Spanish captain first had to call Madrid for permission. Tapes of his call quickly found their way onto Spanish radio stations.

As Spain regards the unfolding of its new persona with what amounts to delicious apprehension, it is clear that Gonzalez’s political future, like those of President Bush, Britain’s Margaret Thatcher and France’s Francois Mitterrand, can be strongly influenced by unfolding events abroad. In a Spain belatedly and anxiously emerging from isolation, that may be the biggest news of all.