COMMENTARY : Crossing a Mind Field for Peace : Power: Knowing how and when to use military resources requires sustained, serious analysis by the citizenry, not just those in academia.

There is nothing as stupid as common sense. At the end of last year, the common sense of the time asserted that, with the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, all the world’s problems were solved and the United States could retreat quietly to tend its own garden, far away from costly foreign entanglements.

With the Soviet threat evaporated, we hoped that we could forget about messy wars in the developing world and cash in the much-touted peace dividend.

Common sense was wrong, and in August Saddam Hussein showed us why it was wrong.

The end of the major conflict in international politics, the Cold War, did not spell the end of at least 30 other conflicts around the world, in places which Americans barely notice, like Ethiopia, Cambodia, Angola, Peru--and now the Persian Gulf.

Without the Cold War, we still live in a world of terrifying realities and equally horrifying possibilities. The risk of superpower nuclear war is nearly zero, but the risk of nuclear, chemical or biological war in some unhappy regions is even greater than it was at the height of the Cold War. We may not have to defend Western Europe, but now we face the imminent possibility of fighting distant battles in less hospitable settings.

Why is war this persistent? Is there a solution to the profound and manifold problems of the Middle East? What should we do when we fail to contain the ambitions of aggressive states? Is peace the absence of actual hostilities? How can we prevent a war in the Middle East? If we fail to avoid war, how can we make armed conflict produce desirable political results? In what ways is the new world order, whatever form it takes, better or worse than the period of the Cold War, or as historian John Lewis Gaddis calls it, the Long Peace? Does history hold any wisdom that can illuminate this dark time?

The difficulty in answering these questions underlines the need for the sustained and serious analysis of global conflict and cooperation. My program, Global Peace and Conflict Studies at UC Irvine, is one of many academic groups devoted to the serious examination of these issues.

We need to ensure that this is not merely discussion confined to the university, however; the dispassionate analysis of war, inspired by a passion for peace, should be a broader American and worldwide occupation.

Unfortunately, politics and war are fertile ground for glib opinions, since we as individuals seem to bear such small responsibility for such epic concerns.

In the present confrontation with Iraq, it is easy to believe in simple solutions--when the situation is anything but simple or clear. Neither simple negotiation nor simple saber-rattling will create a favorable conclusion.

The more complex answers--which entail difficult practical and moral choices--do not reveal themselves automatically. It takes a rigorous understanding of the Middle East, the Iraqi regime, the economics of blockade, the diplomatic art and military affairs to plot an effective course of action. Following the headlines, sadly, is not sufficient.

It may be true, as a Roman writer once said, that to have peace, one must prepare for war. It is even more important to follow another maxim: To have peace, one must study war.

Only if we know something about the proper and improper uses of violence can we do something useful with the fast military resources at our disposal. This requires a devotion not only to look at the face of conflict, but to acknowledge features of it that we find politically inconvenient or morally troubling.

The crisis in the Persian Gulf compels us to study war out of enlightened self-interest, either to keep Americans out of harm’s way, or to ensure that placing them in danger fulfills some greater purpose. We also study war because of what we owe to citizens of other countries, such as El Salvador and Lebanon, who, unlike us, cannot return from conflicts abroad to safer neighborhoods at home. To help these people, we need wisdom, skill and knowledge, not merely good intentions or common sense.