Two military precedents flicker almost subliminally through the mind when Americans imagine war with Iraq: the conflict might look like the Six-Day War. Or it might look like Vietnam.
Those are the hypothetical extremes: best case, worst case. Americans in a muscular frame of mind (not quite trusting it, however) like to think that they might repeat Israel's 1967 victory: the brilliant lightning strikes, the armies flashing across the desert, the war over quicker than Saturday-morning cartoons.
At the other emotional pole, the depressive version presents itself, all darkness: a memory of Vietnam's self-delusions and waste, its follies on an epic scale, its nightmares of the unforeseen.
In the four months since Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, the nation has been drifting amid vivid, dangerous possibilities, sleepwalking. It has been a long, strange time. Rarely before has a nation had such leisure for premeditation of war -- or for premonition of its consequences.
Television brought Vietnam into America's living rooms only when the fighting was well under way. This time, Americans are watching the preparations in the sand on television every night: an instant, electronic diary. "We are being told how many casualties we can expect on the first day, on the second day," says Alan Chartock, a political scientist at the New Paltz campus of the State University of New York. "The enemy is talking to us, giving us nightly forecasts of doom."
The crisis, half a world away, has become a presence of bizarre intimacy. The nation's designated killers in the desert look very young on camera and confess that they are scared. Soldiers say hello to the nation on the morning < television shows, like kids away for spring break at some overheated, militaristic Lauderdale. One trooper proposed marriage to his girlfriend back home via satellite.
In earlier wars, people cheered, the soldiers went marching off, the battles got fought, then after a time the bodies -- and the cost of it all -- started coming home. Reality had its cause and effect, its dramatic pace. Now the natural rhythms of warmaking have gone electronic -- a good thing, possibly, but disconcerting. Time gets dismantled somehow; slaughter gets projected into the hypothetical. The adrenaline rushes prematurely; the cost gets reckoned before the deployment. So much anticipation overworks the nerves. The process causes hallucinations and jitters. Normally war begins without such neurotic projections.
A tentative, uneasy atmosphere has settled over the American mood. Says former United Auto Workers president Douglas A. Fraser: "I'm not one who thinks we shouldn't be there. I think there is general support for being there. But there is general apprehension about a shooting war. Forever and a day, people will say, 'If he had waited until June, we wouldn't have had to have a shooting war.' "
The circuits of the historical imagination have been overloaded anyway. The end of the cold war, the "peace dividend," even the "end of history," as announced by one thinker -- all these came tumbling by chaotically, and then immediately darker themes set in: recession and the apocalyptic clouds in the gulf.