COLUMN LEFT : The Tempo of Doom Picks Up : No one said sanctions would work fast, but the White House seems determined not to wait.

Until last Sunday I’d never seen the Vietnam War memorial in Sacramento. The bronze statues and reliefs are striking: a nurse bending over some poor fellow who’s just had his arm sawed off; a B-52 with 750-pounders trickling earthward from its bomb doors; a GI reading, to judge from his expression, a Dear John letter; a POW. The names of California’s dead in that war run the circumference of the memorial’s outside walls. A parks worker was wiping the dust off them with a swatch of newspaper, watched by three men who looked like Vietnam vets.

The day before, I’d read another call from Henry Kissinger for the United States to go to war in the gulf, with bombers heading for Baghdad and those “surgical strikes” that Kissinger loves to summon in his prose. Many of the names on the wall in front of me belonged to men who died in Vietnam after Richard Nixon came to power in 1969, Kissinger in tow.

I walked round to see if San Clemente, whence flowed some of the orders that ended in those deaths, had paid human tribute to Nixon’s and Kissinger’s concepts of national security and honor. There were two: “Lt. Whynaught, Jeffrey L. 22” and “S.P.4 Goodman, Greg F. 22.” One often forgets how young are the soldiers sent to war. Whynaught and Goodman were senior to many of the names around them, hundreds of boys in their late teens.

There’s no doubt that the national sentiment now is not for war. In Congress they say the mail from constituents is running 5-1 or 10-to-1 against. The majority don’t see the point of it, fear the consequences of it, yet many are fatalistic. Send that big a force to the gulf, one often hears, and war is bound to break out. The President and his secretary of state amplify the rhetorical tempo of doom as they invoke the failure of sanctions “so far” and claim the consensus of the world that stiffer measures are justified.

Little bits of news or gossip augment the sense of menacing buildup. A newspaper in New Jersey reports that nurses in hospitals around Maguire Air Force Base are being put on 24-hour alert to expect casualties; a White House staffer tells a foreign journalist that one of the first targets of U.S. bombers over Baghdad would be the satellite uplinks. They don’t want footage of carnage coming through on CNN, or real-time interviews with the Iraqi leaders.

Knowing that everyone knows there’s no consensus at home, George Bush and James Baker exaggerate the degree of consensus abroad. Put the self-interest of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and the British aside--the Sabahs treat London as their money center and are a big prop to the pound sterling--and this consensus is where it was in mid-August. Germany, France and the other Common Market countries, plus the Soviets, support U.N. sanctions but as yet, nothing further. The effort to alter Japan’s constitution in order to send a token force collapsed in failure. Turkey’s prime minister stresses that Turkey is not interested in being one launch point for attack.

In Egypt and Saudi Arabia, some now question whether it is in the Arab interest to have Iraq devastated as it was by the Mongol Halagu in the 13th Century at the fall of the Abbasid Caliphate. Such destruction--called for by the Kissinger war claque--would leave Israel as the unchallenged military power in the region, with Iran as a potential threat.

So there is no international agreement as yet for anything beyond the U.N. sanctions, despite the huff-puff rhetoric from Baker, nor is there significance in the suggestion that these sanctions are not working. At the time they were first imposed the most optimistic timetable was, and still is, that Iraq would come under serious pressure only by next February or March or maybe even later in the year.

The timetable of the war party has always been brisk. Abuse of the War Powers Act to launch a war the people don’t want is best done swiftly, under cover of darkness, as Kissinger well knows. The timetable of the peace party has always been measured: adopt sanctions, enforce them, be open to negotiating proposals that could settle the crisis without further violence, reduce the vast U.S. ground deployment in Saudi Arabia and have any remainder under U.N. command.

Though there have been negotiating proposals and diplomatic opportunities, it’s amazing how Bush has wedged himself into the “no compromise” posture that cost so many lives in Vietnam. If the voices of restraint here had been as powerful in the early 1960s as they are today, those memorial walls in Sacramento and Washington need never have been, and countless Vietnamese would still be alive. Such voices should double in power now, lest new memorials be built tomorrow.