COLUMN LEFT : Not So Fast Into the Iraq Syndrome : An exhilarated America must not lose sight of the vast problems that remain.

The President has declared the Vietnam syndrome dead and gone, and one feels the martial mood gathering. A relieved and exhilarated America runs the risk of plunging--or being stampeded--into an Iraq syndrome.

Proclaiming that gloating is bad taste, gloaters find it self-evident that the timely application of American force gets fast results without drastic side effects (to Americans, at any rate). Pundits ask whether any government in the so-called Third World dares defy the lone superpower from here on out. Having won the grandest victory in American military history, can’t we rely on the smartest bombs in the West to keep our casualties affordable?

The so-called Vietnam syndrome--so named by President Reagan as if it were a disease--was always more a disposition that a position: a disposition against war as an extension of foreign policy. This was no simple mood, but a compound of moral and practical assessments. The moral feeling was that America wasn’t entitled to throw its weight around the world; the practical was that America shouldn’t enter wars it couldn’t win.

No sooner had the Vietnam syndrome been diagnosed than Republican presidents probed for its weaknesses and worked up the scale for an override. Despite $2.5 trillion in military budgets during the ‘80s, the public still felt enough of a disposition against war that Congress kept the Pentagon from sending more than a couple of dozen advisers to El Salvador. The Reagan Administration was forced to keep aid to the Nicaraguan Contras underground. Evidently more politic were in-and-out weekend wars--Grenada in 1983, Libya in 1986, Panama in 1989.

Iraq was something else. But even in the Gulf, to override the Vietnam syndrome Bush had to proceed cleverly and get all the breaks, and Saddam Hussein had to do everything wrong. Bush put his facts on the ground; summoned the U.N. Security Council; assembled a multinational coalition; used sanctions as a stepping-stone to war, and dared Congress to say no. Hussein, fresh from years of American appeasement, saw nothing coming.

If every war astonishes, as Dwight Eisenhower said, so does every victory and every peace. But, of course, moments of victory are moments of peril, as the Allies’ World War I and Israel’s 1967 war amply suggest. Moreover, syndromes derived from the last war or the last revolution ill-dispose us to cope with the next crisis. Thus, the World War II syndrome engendered the Vietnam War; the crushing of the Iranian and Guatemalan reformers in 1953 and 1954 brought us the Iranian and Cuban revolutions.

The risk now, of course, is that Bush and his successors will grow giddy with victory. Instead of shoring up genuinely multinational institutions to enforce the peace, they may be tempted to resort to cruise-missile diplomacy. Instead of taking serious steps to detoxify from oil addiction, they will drill for offshore drugs--just one last fix. Instead of taking pride in the mustering of sanctions that the CIA in prewar December thought effective, they will drop that impressive weapon from their armory. Instead of blocking arms sales, they will go on tilting casually toward this year’s favored tyrants.

Still, cooler heads must know that the heady victory over Iraq won’t be repeated easily. As the pundits have suddenly discovered, Iraq was not Nazi Germany any more than it was Vietnam. Lacking significant industry and a serious air force, Saddam Hussein was even more vulnerable than most experts suspected. The desert, Iraq’s isolation and the lack of sanctuary permitted tactics that wouldn’t have worked in Vietnam--and won’t work against the cocaine farmers and guerrillas of Peru or the Philippine insurgents. Moreover, even President Bush, with his nearly triple-digit popularity, won’t be able to muster Security Council permission to parachute commandos into El Salvador.

Evidently, Americans can be convinced that a Noriega or post-Aug. 2 Saddam Hussein is worth warring against. But look at what victory doesn’t settle. As the logos and music of showdown fade, there remain tens of thousands of dead Iraqis, while hundreds of thousands of people sleep in our own streets. After the carnage, Arab rage and Israeli fear remain.

Instead of an Iraq syndrome, a better moral might be: No more Iraqs. Meaning, no more tilts toward dictators of choice; no more reliance on arms sales as America’s--or anyone else’s--supreme export; no more neglect of the Palestinians, leaving them to rely pathetically on the lies of the next Arab pseudo-savior, and, finally, no more fantasies that Patriots and Tomahawks can save us from the sins of appeasement.