NEWS ANALYSIS : Gulf Lesson: War Has a Place in ‘New World Order’ : Geopolitics: Bright hopes of a collective security without the use of force dim with the attack on Iraq.

President Bush called his decision to go to war “an opportunity to forge for ourselves and for future generations a new world order,” but Operation Desert Storm is not likely to be the war to end all wars.

The breathtaking air assault on Iraq suggests that military conflict will be as much a part of the new order as it was of past eras. That is the increasingly widespread assessment among U.S. analysts.

Indeed, the launching of Desert Storm sprang directly from Bush’s conclusion that its predecessor--Operation Desert Shield--did not work. His decision that war had become necessary to force an Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait marked the collapse of the unprecedented international effort to resolve the Persian Gulf crisis through diplomacy.

“War is, of course, the failure of diplomacy,” a senior U.S. official conceded.

“It’s not the bright new world as quickly as we thought,” concluded Joseph Sisco, undersecretary of state in the Nixon Administration.

“With the new world interdependency, with regional issues globalized, with modern technology and weapons of mass destruction now in the hands of a number of regional powers--all superimposed on old enmities and territories issues--warfare is going to be more dangerous,” he said.

And the 28-nation coalition that held together against Iraq during the diplomatic phase may have difficulty maintaining its unity during a military conflict, especially if Israel now retaliates against Iraq for this morning’s missile attacks against Tel Aviv. If the coalition breaks, then collective security may not be a reliable element in the new world order either.

“In the excitement of last August, with all the U.N. resolutions, it was easy to be enthused about a collective security system and the rejuvenation of the United Nations,” said Augustus Richard Norton, a senior fellow at the International Peace Academy in New York. “But maybe our enthusiasm was misplaced. It could well be that by using force in this case, any appetite for future exercises in world order diplomacy or collective security will be dampened.”

“There’s no guarantee that we’ll be better off if we win,” added Adm. William J. Crowe Jr., a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Within the first 24 hours of the beginning of the campaign to liberate Kuwait, military and political analysts were already cautioning against excessive expectations about the operation’s broader implications.

“It’s a very effective beginning, but it’s too early in the day to determine that this is going to work,” said Harold Brown, secretary of defense in the Carter Administration. “Many of us were skeptical that the end of the Cold War meant the end of military force as an instrument of international relations. We’ve been proven right.”

For every positive side of the initial coalition success, analysts identified a downside. Even a quick and decisive military victory to liberate Kuwait may not offer the right guidelines for the new order.

“Either way it goes, it has a problem,” Crowe said. “If it goes badly, we’ll be in the soup. It will probably preempt American intervention for a long time.

“If it goes well, it may not teach us the right lesson. It could encourage us to do something stupid in the future. If we dash into Iraq and cut off Kuwait and do it in a month, then some people will want to do something else (afterward),” he warned.

“If it’s short and sweet, then it’s a damned powerful lesson,” Norton said. “It may well make regional powers think twice about gobbling up their neighbors.

“On the other hand, most conflicts in the world today are not between states but within states, so the conflict in the gulf is irrelevant to the wars of the 1990s,” he added.

The average person lives through 500 wars in a lifetime, according to Anthony Cordesman, a military analyst and specialist on gulf conflicts. “No one should have any illusions about the future.

“We live in a world when at any given time there are 25 border conflicts and usually 35 insurgencies,” he said. “While the end of conflict is not without hope, there will be as many divisions and as much tension in the Mideast after we get out as there was before we went in. One of the most cherished illusions is that the United States can bring an end to the Arab-Israeli conflict.”

Forcing Iraq out of Kuwait also may not diminish the worldwide arms race. “One effect of this crisis is that it will raise the appetite of all countries, developed and Third World, for high-technology weapons because they are seen to have worked in the hands of the coalition,” Brown said. “Although few countries are going to be as aggressive as Iraq, those that think of themselves as threatened will want superior technology for protection.”

The call for a new disarmament effort after Operation Desert Storm is already growing.

“People may be more reluctant to use force if we win, but that is not enough,” said Cordesman. “No matter how this ends, we must take strong measures to control arms as the next step. We can’t afford to let Iraq rearm. We can’t afford to let Iran benefit. And we can’t allow a situation where we push arms into Saudi Arabia to stop either Iraq or Iran.

“This odd business of trying to find a pillar on which to center policy is something that does not work. The idea that one northern gulf state is better than another is an illusion that is only going to lead to conflict after conflict in the region,” he said.

Predicted Crowe, “We’re going to be in for a decade of trauma, no matter what happens.”