KINDER'S COMMENTARY: LESSONS OF HISTORY ARE CLEAR: THERE WILL BE MORE FIRST BATTLES

Channel-surfing late one evening earlier this year, I came across a C-SPAN broadcast of a speech House Speaker Newt Gingrich was delivering. He was discussing the dramatic reductions in our military that have occurred since the Gulf War. As Gingrich the historian is wont to do, he cited a rather obscure book by an historian whose name escapes me. However, the title was, when coupled with Gingrich's compelling explanation of it, unforgettable: "First Battles."

This book deals, Gingrich explained, with the first battles in many of our wars that have occurred over the course of American history. The overriding lesson of the book is that America's pattern is to allow the gradual but steady depletion of what military strategists call our "force projection capability" until we find ourselves provoked into unavoidable armed conflict. And then the war comes, and American boys die, or are taken prisoner, in ghastly, disproportionate numbers. All because the politicians didn't have the stomach for the tough and often lonely battle needed to maintain the military budgets that are plainly demanded by America's leading role in the world.

The most riveting example is Pearl Harbor. In bleak, early 1942, as Japanese air, naval and ground forces swept down the Pacific basin to victory after victory, American Army grunts trained with broomsticks representing the guns our shrunken, prewar forces didn't have. The few survivors of the Bataan Death March, among so many others, can testify to the awful price they paid.

Every Memorial Day and Veterans Day, and some Dec. 7ths, many of us gather to honor the sacrifice of these men and women whose heroism served our country so nobly. We listen to (or deliver) tributes and lectures reminding us of the timeless and unmistakable lessons of history. Among them: "Only the dead have seen the end of war." From now on, perhaps these speakers had better get a copy of the "First Battles" book Gingrich cited.

History repeats: Also from television news, just this week, someone interviewed an Air Force general with three or four stars on his shoulders. This general flatly stated that our Air Force is today "half the size it was eight or nine years ago, with four times the commitments around the world." Chilling. The mind runs to vital locales for American national security, such as Bosnia, Somalia and Haiti.

And now, Saddam. As the week unfolded a series of escalating, you're-such-a-meanie, paper resolutions flowed from the United Nations. Saddam's response: Expel our weapons inspectors, whose job it is to look for the chemical, biological and nuclear weapons he is building.

Our president, whose recitation how he "loathes" the military still echoes, and whose administration's mindset was revealed in the attack on the Marines launched this week by the assistant Army secretary he appointed, apparently believes he can talk his way through anything. Truth be told, there is some justification for this belief on the part of William Jefferson Clinton, after he has spent a lifetime doing precisely that. Will it work with the butcher of Baghdad?

I recently took some guff for opining that Mr. Clinton is incomparably our most corrupt president ever. But none of his innumerable corruptions, neither petty or grand, can compare with his abdication of our nation's responsibility to meet the military challenges that face us still in a dangerous world. None compares with the future American lives his actions are sacrificing today.

Write it down: There will be, in America's future, another "First Battle." What price, exactly?

~Peter Kinder is assistant to the president of Rust Communications and a state senator from Cape Girardeau.