PERSPECTIVE ON THE PERSIAN GULF : Something Worth Going to War For : America’s principles have served us--and the world--well; standing up to barbarism is one of them.

There has been a remarkable amount of loose talk about our national objectives in the Persian Gulf. Most disappointing is the twaddle about how we are there to preserve low oil prices. This bald statement on national TV came from Rep. Joe Kennedy (D-Mass.), one who argues vociferously and often for precisely that--New Englanders typically use oil to heat their poorly insulated homes. That is merely one more example of the level of public discourse in our country. The right public figure can work both sides of any particular street without notice in the media.

President Bush has announced that we are in the gulf to protect vital national interests. What does that mean?

America’s survival as a nation has never been seriously threatened. Even in 1814, when British troops marched into Washington, then did a half-hearted job of burning it down, the Brits had no illusions about conquering us; their objective was to teach us a lesson. The Mexican-American War was essentially a border dispute; Mexico couldn’t even handle the Texans, much less all of America. The Civil War was an internal affair, and can be ignored. The Indian wars--which were not wars at all in any military sense--merely settled a region; the Sioux had no pretentions about overthrowing our government. The Spanish-American War had the net effect of securing the sea approaches to our country, but Spain was scarcely able to govern itself, and offered no threat to America. That takes care of the preliminaries.

Did Germany threaten U.S. national security in 1917? How? It was simply not possible to send a battle fleet across an ocean and have it fight a battle when it got there. For Germany to have landed its national army on our shores was even less possible. America was almost entirely self-sufficient in all raw materials, already had the most powerful economy in the world and a large enough Navy that the Germans would have been ill-advised to come looking for it. There was no direct threat to our survival in 1917.

What about World War II? Imagine for a moment that today’s political figures were in Washington when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. They would say it was a mistake to send our battle fleet to Hawaii in the first place--as the fleet commander said right before the President fired him!--where it was both ill-prepared to face an attack and unduly provocative to Japan. It was our fault, they’d say. We forced them to attack us by being insensitive to their views.

As far as the Philippines go, well, we were going to cut those islands loose in July, 1942, anyway, so that’s no great loss, is it? Are we going to fight a war for that? And if the Japanese want to knock over the colonial empires of the Brits and the Dutch, again, so what? Why should American boys die to protect colonial empires?

It is a shame what they’re up to in China, of course, but China was never ours to lose, was it? Instead, look, why don’t we open negotiations with the Japanese? They’ll probably offer compensation. We can settle this thing peacefully.

What about the next part? Germany declared war on us several days later. Now wait a minute, they would have said, this is crazy. How can Germany hurt us? Let them declare war. Do we have to acknowledge it? Of course not. Do we want to send American boys in that direction, too? To do what? Save Communist Russia, decadent England and an already conquered France? What do we care? This business about the Jews is disturbing, but it just can’t be as bad as some of those reports, can it? Anyway, it’s not our concern. This is a regional European problem. We can negotiate for the release of Americans stuck in Germany, and reach some sort of agreement with Hitler.

Now, if the reader finds this too terribly grotesque, think again.

America has had the luxury throughout its history of not having its national existence directly threatened by a foreign enemy. Yet we have gone to war. Why?

The United States of America is not a piece of dirt stretching mainly from the Atlantic to the Pacific. More than anything else, America is a set of principles, and the historical fact is that those principles have not only served us well, but have also become a magnet for the rest of the world, a large chunk of which decided to change course last year. Those principles are not mere aesthetic ideas. Those principles are in fact the distillation of 10,000 years of human social evolution. We have settled on them not because they are pretty; we settled on them because they are the only things that work. If you have trouble believing that, ask a Pole.

But there’s a funny thing about principles: They must be applied with consistency. A principle applied only at a convenient time or place is mere ideology. Integrity is the most respected of virtues for the simple reason that integrity means acting on principle, not for advantage. As it is with individuals, so it is with nations. Principle is what gives life meaning.

It has been a principle of American foreign policy for a very long time that to tolerate aggression invites more aggression. We punish thieves not to restore what they have stolen, but to keep them from stealing again, and to deter others from stealing. What is true for criminally inclined individuals is equally true of countries, with the added dimension that nation-state-sized criminals can steal and kill on a vast scale. If we applied the ideas now being expounded in Washington by the political left to the local level, police would work only in the affluent neighborhoods. I mean, just because some elderly black woman is mugged for her welfare check, does that mean that a white banker in suburbia should get excited about it?

Only if he’s something more than an unfeeling, self-centered ass.

The American political scene has lost touch with America’s own foundations. No one likes war, most especially those who are most likely to be exposed to it. But war is not discouraged by running away from it any more than criminals are discouraged by the absence of police. Those people must be confronted sooner or later, and sooner is better. The dictum is clear: All that is required for the triumph of evil is for good men to stand by and do nothing.

To say that the rape of Kuwait does not concern America’s vital interests is strategically unsound. To disregard a country with the savage propensities of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in such close proximity to more than half of the world’s energy reserves is astoundingly myopic. To assume that Iraq will go no further makes Neville Chamberlain seem a perceptive realist. Perhaps it reflects the teaching of history in our schools, or more likely the literacy level of some American politicians, but people who ought--and are paid--to know better are saying these things.

To say that America cannot be the world’s police officer may be true. It is also true that the police are unable to solve every crime, yet we do not disband them. Our vital interests are at stake. The economic security of the industrial world depends on the oil in the Persian Gulf. If we do not recognize that fact now, someone will make it even more clear at a later date. But the broader issue is that, having defeated world communism, America can now make it clear that aggression of any kind will not be tolerated, that barbarism is and will forever be a thing of the past. That’s a principle worth standing for, and it is in our power to do it.

In short, we can make it clear that we stand for something. Standing for something is what got us here. Economic security is a vital American interest, but principles are even more vital, for it is our principles that created our economy--and our country.