Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, March 31, 1991                   TAG: 9103310273
SECTION: HORIZON                    PAGE: D-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: BY SCOTT HARRIS/ LOS ANGELES TIMES
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

WAR STUNS ANTI-WAR MOVEMENT/

But for the bloodshed, America's anti-war movement is not unlike the Iraqi army. Both forces had seemed formidable - and both crumbled in the fury of battle.

Only 10 weeks have passed since 47 of the 100 U.S. senators voted no to the resolution authorizing war. Polls at the time showed that four in 10 Americans wanted to give economic sanctions more time. In the early days of war, protesters numbering in the tens of thousands swarmed on the streets, and President Bush complained that the incessant beating of anti-war drums in Washington's Lafayette Square disturbed his sleep.

When it was over, however, the president proclaimed victory not just over Saddam Hussein, but the protesters as well. "There's no question about it," he declared the day after ordering a cease-fire. "The country's solid. There isn't any anti-war movement out there."

Many would dispute that assessment. But certainly, these are times that try a peace activist's soul. As flag-waving celebrations continue for a war that claimed relatively few American lives and bequeathed unto Commander-in-Chief Bush a 91 percent approval rating, anti-war activists are coping with the realization that Americans indeed love a "good" war.

They are left to wonder why their mission failed. They say they must search for other causes to support and to salvage lessons for the next war - one that will surely come.

"We've taken a tremendous blow and we have suffered," said Blase Bonpane, director of the peace-advocating Office of the Americas. "But I think we understand that our work has got to be permanent."

"We initially tried to prevent war, then we tried to stop it. Our job now is to try to create a political climate in this country so the kind of thing that happened in the Persian Gulf can't happen again," said Alex Molnar, a Milwaukee college professor and Marine father who founded an anti-war group composed largely of relatives of military personnel. Calling itself both pro-American and pro-military, the fledgling Military Families Support Network presented a new breed of activist while campaigning against the Persian Gulf War.

The anti-war movement's failure to affect the progress of the Gulf War could be measured not only in the shrinking size of protests and the fluctuations of opinion polls as the war continued, but in the perception that few of their arguments even received serious consideration in official Washington, the media and neighborhood debates.

Supporters of the Persian Gulf War - including many people who protested the U.S. role in Vietnam - suggest that peace activists lost this political battle wholly on its merits. After all, pro-war voices point out, there was little question who was wearing the black hat.

"This was God's gift to war-making," acknowledged anti-war activist Todd Gitlin, a University of California, Berkeley, sociology professor who is a veteran and scholar of the Vietnam-era protests. In addition to "a villain out of central casting," Gitlin said, referring to Saddam, the argument for war was aided by "a very cleverly staged movement" that included the buildup of forces in the region, the United Nations' approval and the vote in Congress.

But anti-war activists argue that the point wasn't whether Saddam is an evil man. The anti-war argument remains, fundamentally, that it was a conflict that could have and should have been avoided. Many say it was not America's fight; that a misguided foreign policy got the United States into the conflict; that it was a war that could have been halted earlier with much less death and destruction; that history may not be a kind judge on what, in retrospect, seems a lopsided slaughter.

"It's not a war that America should be proud of," said Carl Rogers, a co-founder of Vietnam Veterans Against the War who helped organize an ultimately unsuccessful campaign for a cease-fire during the aerial bombardment.