COLUMN RIGHT : Crisis Tests Bush’s Power of Persuasion : Americans will support a President who can recommit them to American principles.

Ever since the first Iraqi trooper stormed into Kuwait, George Bush has been in a fix. Letting such aggression go unchecked would have been intolerable to him; getting his countrymen’s support for checking it, however, has proved to be nearly impossible. Between hand-wringing on the left and saber-rattling on the right, most Americans have yet to see a good reason to take further steps against Saddam Hussein than the U.N. sanctions their President was able to pull together in early August.

Bush’s burden is a rhetorical one. Not rhetorical in the jaded sense--a cover for something only a little short of duplicity--but rhetorical in the highest sense of persuading the people by educating them as to the political necessity of the hour.

As far back as Pericles, who had to bolster his fellow Athenians in their protracted fight with Sparta, democratic statesmen have known the problem President Bush now faces: How does one inspire self-interested individuals to pull together as public-spirited citizens willing to make the supreme sacrifice?

The key, of course, is to appeal to that special sentiment we call patriotism. But in America, that has always posed special difficulties. Originally, patriotism literally meant devotion to the fatherland; America, with its dedication to principles deemed permanent and transcendent, changed all that. In America, patriotism is as much a dedication to abstract principles as it is to the fatherland in any historic sense. Thus any American President’s appeal to our sense of patriotism goes beyond America itself; the American way of life is, in a very real sense, more than America.

To say the least, at this juncture in our history the President has an especially difficult task cut out for him, for Vietnam bruised our patriotic sentiments in profound ways. Military action by this country is seen in a far dimmer moral light than before our disaster in Southeast Asia. Thus Bush has a double burden: He must resuscitate the moral propriety of our most basic principles at the same time that he must embolden our political resolve to use force to check Iraqi aggression.

To his credit, Bush seems to have abandoned two of the early rationales for the U.S. military deployment. Americans are not likely to support mass casualties of their countrymen in order to ensure the flow of oil to the industrialized world, or to recover territory for a nation of the super-rich. What he must do is demonstrate how the immediate problem of Iraq and Kuwait is connected to a far larger concern that is dear to the American heart: the commitment to a higher good--to those truths we hold self-evident. In brief, he will have to revive Americans’ loathing of tyranny. That, not oil, is the essence of the American faith; only that is worth fighting for.

The President must persuade us that Saddam Hussein is to be fought not merely because he has invaded, occupied and all but obliterated a neighboring nation. Rather, he is to be fought because (as Jefferson put it) after a long train of abuses, evincing invariably the same design, the dictator has now taken his tyranny beyond his own borders. By so doing, he is not a threat merely to Kuwait, nor merely to the gulf region. He has become a threat to legitimate government everywhere. Hussein is to be stopped not because his actions offend other governments, but because his actions violate nothing less than, as Thomas Jefferson put it, “the laws of nature and of nature’s God.”

Bush’s task is tough, but it is not impossible. It has fallen to virtually every President to remind us of the abiding articles of our republican faith. At critical moments in our history, our leaders have proved to be precisely that. But on those occasions their leadership has been more the result of poetry than policy papers, more a matter of inspiration than analysis. That is why the speeches and addresses of our greatest Presidents are prized as much as literature as political history.

And therein lies the task for President Bush. Somehow, he must stir our collective soul, inspire us to a recommitment to the special obligation that America has to the moral direction of the world. He must, as Abraham Lincoln so vividly put it, touch within us “those mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land.”

In this awesome task, Bush could have no better guide than Lincoln, who exhorted skeptical Americans of his time to “have faith that right makes might,” and by that faith be encouraged to “dare to do our duty as we understand it.” Our duty is to defend something higher than our own interests. Bush’s duty now is to make clear what that something higher is.