NEWTON'S LAW: BLACK-AND-WHITE SITUATIONS DON'T EXIST IN THE REAL WORLD

Maybe the automatic weapons should have tipped us off. Small-arms fire as it relates to jubilation usually makes for an incongruous exercise.

Still fresh in our memories are those scenes of Kuwait's liberation, when allied soldiers went through the front door of the besieged capital while Saddam Hussein's boys were fleeing out the back.

Joy was unrestrained and the people of Kuwait City, babbling excitedly in their exotic tongue, heaped thanks and planted kisses on any Westerner who would stand still. It was Christmas Day, prom night and World Series victory celebration rolled into one.

Then, there were those pesky guns. Out of nowhere, as though granted by entitlement, rifles appeared in the hands of Kuwaitis, who fired them quite liberally into the skies, hooting in the Arabic equivalent of a rebel yell.

Many of the weapons were left behind by Iraqis as they scampered north. Some, the Kuwaitis said, were privately owned and hidden for months from the invading force. In Kuwait, etiquette may allow gunplay only during celebrations but not in the national defense.

This convention might also be excused for certain atrocities. Kuwait has no minister of manners to rule on such things.

We find in most people a prevailing instinct to be needed. Who needed the United States more last August than the Kuwaitis? Think of it this way: ours is a nation exemplified by cowboy movies. When the bad guys kill the sheriff and run roughshod over a helpless town, men in white hats show up to set things straight.

In Kuwait, we found this same circumstance, with nondescript, wretched masses getting kicked around by an evil land baron. In our cinematic mind's eye, the Kuwaitis were good-hearted, if pathetic, folks with doe-eyed children and high aspirations about freedom and a good life.

America sure looked good in that white hat and held up its end of the script. The Kuwaitis, however, have been a disappointment.

Think what that must be like for our secretary of state, James Baker, to travel to Kuwait City, as he has done this week, and see what American young people lost their lives to liberate.

In trying to put together some constructive path to Middle East peace, Baker must also busy himself with bridling the gluttonous and undisciplined Kuwaitis.

Do you think, Baker must ask the emir in the guarded language of diplomacy, that you could get your boys to quit grabbing women as they leave church and raping them in public?

Would it be possible to have more of the infrastructure repaired before your chandeliers are polished for the seventeenth time?

Could, by any chance, those celebratory rifles be stowed before any more Palestinians are snatched from the streets and executed?

This is like the person who, in a fit of conscience, brings to his house a homeless person for Thanksgiving dinner ... only to discover later that the good silverware has been stolen. Compassion comes hard at such real-world moments.

Despite our dismay that the Kuwaitis have not fit into our cookie-cutter image of them, we did the morale thing in liberating their country.

With clearer vision then we move north to help the Kurdish refugees in their fight to stay alive, knowing that getting mixed up with these perpetually displaced people will bring short-term relief without long-term solutions.

Our compassion will save lives, our humanity will remain intact, but the Kurds' struggle will go on. In a black-and-white world, things might be different. All the gray we encounter makes life and diplomacy a little trickier.