On the day following President Bush's war ultimatum, I had an impromptu lunch with men and women who are on the fast track to leadership in the U.S. armed forces and intelligence services. As we were far from Washington and they were for the moment living outside the chain of command, we could speak freely.

The young field-grade officers are part of a group of peers immersed in an intense course on defense, foreign policy, and domestic politics at a major university in the East. As a former member of the U.S. House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee I have been a visiting lecturer in the program for several years.

Over our lunch table, these "best and brightest" confessed their private anguish over the premise of America's invasion of Iraq, the abandon with which the U.S. has engaged in recriminations with major NATO allies who disagree with us, and the risks inherent in what former Secretary of State James Baker estimates to be a 10-year occupation of this Muslim country.

Ironically, as these "troops" spoke their minds, American civilians who share their concerns are accused of not "supporting our troops."

The effect of such logic is, of course, to use our troops as "human shields" to prevent an honest questioning of the war's assumptions - the very kind of questioning my officers were engaged in when I lunched with them last week.

Does anyone think the warriors at my lunch table opposed our troops? If you do, your "troop support" is selective indeed. My advice is for supporters of this war to stop smearing those who oppose it. Many opponents could actually be said to "support" the troops in the most effective way - by trying to keep them out of harm's way.

Several aspects of this war trouble the officers I met. I've heard concern about those aspects again and again from civilian war critics. The apparent unraveling of Western security alliances that kept the peace since World War II and helped win the Cold War alarmed several officers who spoke to me. They don't see a new order emerging to take their place and are uneasy about America's riding alone in a troubled, dangerous world.

"The winning arithmetic for America is addition (of friends), not subtraction," one officer said.

In an age of global terrorism and nuclear-tipped hostility, other officers are edgy about a justification for making war not when a nation is attacked, but when it thinks it may be attacked. Such a doctrine puts the world on a first-strike military basis, in which nations are encouraged to shoot first and ask questions later. This has the inconvenient result of destroying the whole idea of deterrent defense.

Some of my other lunch partners foresaw peril in pinning down our armed forces in a long occupation of Iraq when mobility and rapid response should be the hallmark of our defense against shadowy threats that can pop up anywhere across the globe.

For other officers, a long presence in Iraq is a dubious and potentially self-defeating idea. "We can believe we are 'liberating' the country," one said. "But the Islamic world may see our presence as an occupation by people with predominately Christian and Jewish values - and that could be explosive."

The same officer, a decorated veteran of the Vietnam War, worried that U.S. forces billeted in Iraq will represent a "target rich environment" for Islamic extremists and Iraqi tribal factions that have had no experience with democracy.

If this nation's future military leaders can harbor qualms about this war, civilian critics ought to be able to harbor them, too - without being heckled by others who haven't thought as carefully about the war as these military men and women.

Fact: Millions of citizens who oppose the war also support our troops. I, for one, especially support the ones who lunched with me and let their hair down last week.

Les AuCoin is a professor of political science at Southern Oregon University in Ashland. He represented Oregon's 1st District in Congress for 18 years (1975-93).

Copyright 2003 The Register-Guard

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