Spaniards’ Feelings on the War Are Ambiguous and Confused : Europe: Madrid’s contribution has been vital but indirect: use of its bases for refueling and loading planes.

A huge hand-drawn poster stretches across a wall inside the Autonomous University of Barcelona in Bellaterra these days. It displays a caricature of Saddam Hussein and a cartoon of Uncle Sam and proclaims, “Neither Saddam nor Uncle Sam. Students for Peace.”

The university is a hotbed of peace protest now and thus hardly representative of public opinion in Spain. Yet the mood in Bellaterra offers insights into the ambiguous and confused feelings of many Spaniards about the war in the Persian Gulf.

Bellaterra is not really a university town. The campus lies alongside a village of suburban homes about a dozen miles west of Barcelona. But only a few professors live on or near campus. Although student dormitories are under construction, none exist now. Most students and professors reach school by a half-hour train ride from downtown Barcelona.

Bellaterra sometimes seems isolated: It takes three weeks for an airmail letter to get there from Washington. Yet it has not been isolated from news of the war.

Television in Spain is covering the war thoroughly, and the Madrid and Barcelona newspapers have been publishing special war editions. The circulation of El Pais, Spain’s most influential and widely distributed newspaper, rose from its usual 450,000 to 1 million Thursday and 750,000 Friday. The headlines make the peace protest students seem far from the mainstream: “Spaniards Blame Saddam.” “Parliament Supports Government Policy in the Gulf With Only 17 Votes Against.”

Yet the detail in the stories reveal more ambiguity than hinted by the headlines. An El Pais poll reported that 63% of Spaniards blame Iraqi President Saddam Hussein for the war while only 5% blame the United States and only 19% blame both. But the poll also reported that 65% believe that the war could have been avoided, and 67% support a limited role, at most, for Spain in the conflict.

A poll by the Barcelona newspaper La Vanguardia on Sunday revealed similar ambiguities. While 52% of those polled expressed total agreement with the Spanish government’s position in the crisis, those who disapproved of military action outnumbered those who approved 46% to 42%.

After a parliamentary debate Friday, the Congress of Deputies supported Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez’s policy in the gulf by a vote of 296 to 17. The Socialist leader was scathing in defense of his policy. He ridiculed pacifists. “It is simply not true that those who love the peace never wage war,” he said. “If the democracies had not gone to war in 1939, the Nazis would surely dominate Europe today.”

When a spectator in the public galleries pulled out a placard demanding “No to the Intervention. Peace,” Gonzalez interrupted his speech to say, “I would suggest they send something of that kind to Saddam Hussein.”

Yet while the Spanish government’s support for the allied gulf effort has been impressive and vital, it has also been indirect. Spain has let the United States use all its air bases for refueling and loading of planes on their way to the gulf. Spanish ships are in the gulf to help enforce the economic embargo against Iraq. But Gonzalez has promised again and again that no Spanish forces will take part in any military action against Iraq. He obviously believes that Spanish public opinion would not accept this.

Soon after word of the first air strikes reached the campus in Bellaterra on Thursday, the students staged a protest march from the campus to the nearby town of Cerdanyola. Student organizations then voted to strike, emptying classrooms by early afternoon.

Even pupils at the elementary school attached to the university’s department of education showed anger. They made insulting remarks about Americans, and a handful of youngsters, appointed by teachers to speak for their fellow pupils, wrote a statement demanding an end to hostilities.

It is not clear that the protests in Bellaterra were the first in Spain that day, but they were the first to make the afternoon television news shows. By nightfall, reports streamed in of protests and strikes by university students throughout Spain.

In some ways, it is surprising that peace protests in Spain are not greater and that public support for the government is not smaller. For several decades, many Spaniards have harbored a distaste for the United States and a suspicion of its military policies.

Much of this distrust stems from the 1950s, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower embraced the dictator Francisco Franco--in a news photograph that still infuriates many Spaniards--and delivered military aid to him in exchange for the use of Spanish bases.

Resentment over American support for Franco accounts for the Spanish government’s difficulty in winning approval for continued membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in a referendum in 1986, and for the protracted and acrimonious negotiations between Spain and the United States on the 1988 renewal of the treaty allowing American use of Spanish bases.

Distrust of the United States, however, has been overcome in the present crisis by Spain’s intense desire to play a role in Europe after so long a period of isolation under the Franco dictatorship.