COLUMN LEFT : Avoiding the Viet Syndrome: A New Fallacy : Advocates of sudden, massive force claim the reason for Vietnam trauma was the gradual way the war was fought.

When Secretary of State James A. Baker III told Congress that any assault on Iraq would be carried out “suddenly, massively and decisively,” he was issuing the Bush Administration’s final verdict on the lessons of Vietnam. The United States does not intend to lose another war because the politicians forced the soldiers to fight with one hand tied behind their backs.

Giving the generals what they want may, however, force the United States to “win” self-inflicted wars that need never have been fought at all, and whose ruinous human costs have not been spelled out to a fearful public. That is the danger in the gulf, and it is diminished only marginally by Saddam Hussein’s decision to release his foreign hostages. That is good news, but it says nothing about his willingness to get out of Kuwait by Jan. 15. At the same time, it snaps one of the few thin emotional threads that has bound the U.S. public to President Bush’s policy of brinkmanship.

Once Desert Shield was increased to 400,000 troops, with no prospect of rotation, the alarming logic of the new doctrine of massive force became apparent. Logistics began to drive policy. Conventional wisdom is that such a large force risks destabilizing Saudi Arabia; reducing the numbers would mean a loss of face; just being there may oblige them to fight--and soon, before March 17, the start of Ramadan. (This parody of cultural sensitivity to Islam is perhaps the most ludicrous aspect of the whole affair. Has it really not occurred to Washington that the still-smoking rubble of an Arab nation, humiliated by the infidel, would transform the holy month into a time of anti-American rage and vengeance for millions of Muslims?)

The fallacy of the new military doctrine is in the premise that the basic reason for public trauma over Vietnam was the way the war was fought, with a slow hemorrhaging of American lives. This implies that the problem can be addressed by a change in military strategy. This narrow reading ignores the larger lesson of Vietnam, which is that war is politically untenable if it lacks public support. Any war fought for dubious or ungraspable motives has the same potential for grief, alienation and division--and this time public sympathy is already at levels it did not fall to in Vietnam until 1968.

This time around, anti-war sentiment would not make the cruel mistake of blaming the soldiers and the veterans. In these four months of waiting, the troops in the desert have entered our living rooms with a greater electronic immediacy than their counterparts in Vietnam. Even if the Pentagon managed to keep the media away from front-line combat, we know these kids already--those beardless pilots, straight out of “Top Gun,” who speak of victory with all the nervous bravado of youth; that stolid Marine whose wife ended their satellite linkup on one breakfast TV show by wishing him “Semper Fi, babe.” At least three out of 10 of the dead would be blacks and Latinos.

And the manner and number of their deaths would be sickening. As a culture, we have devised many ways of concealing the realities of modern war. We strike bold postures, naming our aircraft Avenger and Apache, our missiles Hellfire and Patriot. In brisk bureaucratese, we speak of “smart weapons” and of “getting the job done.” Official casualty predictions for a gulf war are classified, but the Pentagon has acknowledged that enough blood supplies are in place to treat 4,000 casualties a day. That’s a much heavier casualty rate than at Iwo Jima. The most pessimistic defense analysts think 30,000 Americans could die in a single month of desert combat--close to the battlefield toll of the entire Korean War.

In this war, the dead might be the lucky ones. “Things are going to happen to people that we have never seen before,” one weapons designer told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. Field hospitals are good at digging out shrapnel and amputating limbs, but they have no clue how to deal with the arcane and nightmarish injuries that new hi-tech weaponry would inflict on armored vehicle crews in the desert: things like “blast lung” or “metal fume fever,” the results--often externally invisible--of heat, light and shock waves and vaporized metal. Governments choose not to publicize this kind of information, writes weapons expert Donald Kennedy in the Army journal Armor, “for fear of its effects on their armed forces.”

In correcting the mistakes of the last war, military thinkers often set in motion the mistakes of the next one. And while the generals may have put the Vietnam Syndrome behind them, the Iraq Syndrome may be only just beginning.