COLUMN RIGHT : Patriotism Doesn’t Mean Mindlessness : Conservatives, too, have ample reason to keep faith with their original doubts about this war.

Many people are disposed to believe that once a war has begun, their critical faculties must be suspended for the duration--in the interest of patriotism. Certainly we must all hope, now that war is under way, that it is brought to a successful end as soon as possible, with minimal loss of life. But it is not necessary to change one’s mind about the advisability of a war simply because it has started. In fact, those who resist a war before it has begun, but then feel obliged to support it once the shooting starts, may be compared with those who resist fires but throw on the gasoline once the blaze is under way.

Still less can the merit of a war be determined by its military success or failure. But that is what I hear from some of my conservative friends. Nice to be on the winning side, after all that humiliation in the 1960s and ‘70s, they say. Obviously, that is no argument at all. By the same token, of course, if things were to go unexpectedly badly for us, the cause could still be meritorious.

By the logic of President Bush’s description of the ruthless Iraqi dictator, those who serve in Saddam Hussein’s army have little choice in the matter. In which case, maybe it would have made more sense to go after the tyrant rather than those subjected to his tyranny.

In the 1970s, Congress passed a law against the assassination of foreign heads of state. No doubt there were sound reasons for this restriction. But in a situation where evil is said to be concentrated in one man (remember all the analogies to Hitler), assassination, unlike war, would seem to have the great advantage that innocent lives are spared--on both sides of the trenches.

Bush’s aggressiveness in dealing with the Iraqi dictator is exceeded only by his meekness in dealing with the Soviet dictator. Yet it is Mikhail Gorbachev who has 30,000 nuclear weapons. Hussein has (or had) a few hundred Scuds. Yet it is Hussein who has been inflated into a threat to world peace. In describing Gorbachev, on the other hand, Bush uses words like cooperation and partnership.

There is something very odd about this. And it goes back long before Bush. Official Washington has seldom described the Soviet Union in the apocalyptic terms that have been reserved for Iraq. Yet the course of the war to date suggests that Iraq never constituted a threat to us or to the world. With the Soviets, we sign pointless and perhaps even dangerous treaties, which they break with impunity. The Washington world view that emerges is unmistakeable: Power calls for prudence. But Third World countries can be either bribed or bullied.

The repeated U.S. demand that we be reimbursed by our allies is another unattractive feature of this war. This mercenary attitude not only (and understandably) feeds suspicions about going to war for commercial reasons (o-i-l, as Bob Dole tactlessly spelled it out on the Senate floor). It must also arouse a real suspicion about the wider justification for the war. For if the national interest really had been at stake in the Gulf (there is a different sense in which it is now at stake, because lives are at stake), it would be a very minor thing if other countries were to benefit. Free riders should be welcome--as they were in World War II. That they are not suggests that our demand for burden-sharing is, in reality, a disguised demand for responsibility-sharing.

Bush continues to justify our involvement by reference to his fixation, the “new world order”--in which “diverse nations” can achieve “peace and security, freedom and the rule of law.” But in practice, the order he envisions will tend to make the world more safe for dictators, just so long as they refrain from crossing national borders. The great threat to freedom today normally comes not from external aggression but from dictators who lord it over their own subjects. External aggressors can even be liberators. Was it a bad thing when Tanzania invaded Idi Amin’s Uganda in the late 1970s? (Was it a bad thing when the United States invaded Panama in ‘89?) If dictators know for sure that they no longer need fear external attack, their security will only be enhanced. True, this is a system that will rid the world of reckless dictators, like Hussein, but not cautious ones, who are arguably more dangerous.

Bush has made full use of the United Nations to justify our involvement. But the United Nations is so organized that “internal matters” enjoy the equivalent of diplomatic immunity within its councils. It is a mutual-aid society for a gang of governments. Maybe liberals will reconsider their support for the organization, now that it has been used to provide cover for an all-out attack on a small country.