COLUMN LEFT/ ERWIN KNOLL : George Bush Closes the ‘Enemies Gap’ : It has been tough for the GOP since communism fell; lucky they’ve got Saddam Hussein.

The U.S. aircraft carrier Independence is on battle station in the Persian Gulf, thousands of U.S. troops are on a “training mission” in Kuwait and it is virtually certain that U.S. military aircraft will soon be bombing Iraqi targets once again.

President Bush delivered his ultimatum Wednesday, drawing a line in the sand and ordering Iraqi planes not to cross it. Hardly anyone believes Bush when he insists that he isn’t “trying to pick a fight” with Saddam Hussein. Nobody likes Saddam, so he makes a convenient enemy as our presidential election approaches.

The problem is that enemies have been in short supply since the end of the Cold War. Deprived of the serviceable communist menace that played such a useful role in American politics--and especially in Republican politics--for so many years, our President thrashes about, looking desperately for a hostile force against which he might rally his party’s dispirited constituency.

The lack of enemies--we might call it, for old times’ sake, the “enemies gap”--accounts for much of the obvious disarray in George Bush’s reelection campaign. It has been generations, after all, since Republicans had to run for office without an assist from the Red Peril.

Some enemies that might have come in handy this year simply were used up too soon. Ronald Reagan’s invasion toppled the leftist government of tiny Grenada, which had posed such a terrible challenge to the United States. The CIA helped dispose of the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Panama’s Manuel Noriega was seized, transported to the United States, tried and convicted before he could be cast as an enemy in the race for the U.S. presidency; it’s hard to get much political mileage out of an enemy who’s already rotting in prison.

The war in the Persian Gulf obviously peaked too soon. A year ago or a little more, when Bush brandished America’s swift and terrible success in the war against Iraq, he could easily have been elected President for life, and many Democrats wondered whether they should even bother fielding a candidate.

But the electorate is fickle and its memory short. Voters are easily distracted from even the most glorious military triumphs by high unemployment, soaring debt and national decay--unless a sufficiently grave threat to “national security” is at hand. Where is Saddam Hussein when the President of the United States really needs him?

Well, fortunately, Saddam is still around, still in power, still in Baghdad, still available for duty as a dangerous enemy of the United States.

We’ve learned a great deal, of course, since a yellow-beribboned America celebrated Bush’s great victory in the Gulf early last year. We’ve learned how the U.S. government sustained Saddam in power, aided him, armed him and cherished him as a strategic ally.

We’ve learned that despite Administration claims of surgical precision bombing carefully directed at Iraqi military targets, scores of thousands of civilians--men, women and children who had nothing to do with devising or carrying out Saddam’s policies--were slaughtered by America’s high-tech weaponry.

We’ve learned that the Iraqi people continue to suffer horribly under the sanctions imposed by the United States and its compliant allies. (“Civilians, especially children, elderly people and other vulnerable groups are dying in Iraq as a direct result of the Gulf War and the continuing sanctions,” 11 Quaker organizations reported early in August, urging that the sanctions be lifted.)

We’ve learned that the confrontation between U.N. inspectors and Saddam’s government that brought us to the brink of war in July was a fake: Quoting “a senior United Nations inspector,” the New York Times reported on July 30 that “the dispute over access to a government building in Baghdad began with a misunderstanding, and . . . the crisis might have been avoided.”

But the Bush Administration isn’t interested in avoiding a crisis right now; it’s interested in concocting one. So the Shiites of southern Iraq, whose plight never troubled the U.S. government while it coddled Saddam as a valued ally, suddenly become our responsibility and our cause.

Despite the President’s denials, it’s likely that the people of Iraq are due for still more death and devastation at the hands of George Bush, proving that one way or another, the enemies gap will be closed.

When the need for enemies is desperate, a recycled enemy is better than none.