The most stunning, overwhelming victory in war is a beginning as well as an end. Diplomatic problems will persist long after the burned-out hulks of Iraqi tanks and the bodies strewn across the cratered battlefield are buried by sand. Political dangers will explode after the last of thousands of mines are dug up. Psychological reverberations will be felt when the final echoes of cheers for the victors have died away.
Saddam Hussein remains in power, at least for the moment, shorn of the military might that made him a menace but not of all capacity for troublemaking. Containing him may require not only a long-lasting arms embargo but also some sort of regional security scheme. Kuwait is liberated, but a smoldering wreck needing perhaps years of reconstruction. Then come the broader difficulties: trying to forge a stable regional balance of power -- or balance of weakness, as some commentators suggest -- and defuse the hatreds that have made the Middle East the world's most prolific breeding ground for war. French President Francois Mitterrand ticks off a laundry list of regional troubles that must be addressed: "The Arab-Israeli conflict, the Palestinian problem, the problem of Lebanon, the control of weapons sales, disarmament, redistribution of resources, reconstruction of countries hit by the war."
The U.S. emerges with new power and credibility; any pledge it makes to defend an ally or oppose an aggressor means far more than such a promise would have meant prior to Jan. 15. But the U.S. also urgently needs to define George Bush's vision of a new world order. To what extent is America ready to assume the role of world policeman? More specifically, under what circumstances might it -- and some of its allies -- again mount a military effort comparable to the one in the gulf? Certainly that cannot be done in response to every case of aggression anywhere, but how does Washington pick and choose? What kind of relationship can it forge with the Soviet Union, which gave crucial support to the anti-Saddam coalition but also served brief notice, in its efforts to mediate a political settlement, that ultimately it will follow its own interests?
Among Americans, the war has finally laid to rest all the ghosts of Vietnam. Self-doubt, deep divisions, suspicions of national decline -- the very words suddenly seem quaint. The problem now may be to contain the surge of pride and unity before it bursts the bounds of reason and passes into jingoism, even hubris.
None of that, however, can detract from the awesome speed, power and totality of the allies' military victory. The war, particularly its climactic 100-hour campaign, bids fair to be enshrined in military textbooks for as long as the annihilation of a Roman army by Hannibal at the battle of Cannae in 216 B.C. That is still a model for a strategy of encirclement, like the one followed by General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, the allied commander in the gulf.