By John Mintz and Steve Vogel
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, December 19, 1998; Page A17

Television sets aboard the USS Enterprise, launching pad for continued air strikes against Iraq, were tuned yesterday to the live CNN coverage of the House impeachment debate back in Washington. But what appeared to animate the U.S. forces aboard the carrier in the Persian Gulf was not that their commander in chief was fighting for his political life, but that he had finally given them the go-ahead to punish Saddam Hussein.

"The timing I haven't seen as an issue," commanding officer Capt. Marty Chanik said in a telephone call to Norfolk yesterday. "Certainly, everybody's interested [in the impeachment hearings], but I'll also say everybody is focused on the mission."

"There's very little discussion on board with respect to [the debate], mainly because we're so busy," Chanik added.

Since the Vietnam War, the U.S. military has been reluctant to take part in overseas action without the overwhelming support of the American public and the nation's leaders. Although opinion surveys since the attack began Wednesday have shown 70 percent of the American public supports the bombing, and the House itself on Thursday gave a 417-5 vote of support to the troops, some military personnel expressed unease about the attack's timing in interviews this week.

But those concerns appeared minimal compared with the military's enthusiasm for a White House green light, for the first time since the Persian Gulf War, to military planners in selecting bombing targets in Iraq.

The F-15 pilots from the 1st Fighter Wing at Langley Air Force Base in Hampton, Va., had a name for the planned U.S. attack on Iraq that Clinton aborted last month while U.S. combat jets were airborne: "Operation Just Kidding." This time, they're ecstatic the president is largely giving the U.S. military its head in attacking Saddam Hussein.

"We thought last [month], and now, [the attack] is exactly the right thing to do," said Col. Hawk Carlisle, hours before once again heading for the Persian Gulf.

"The 'Wag the Dog' scenario, although it's being thrown around, is not a factor to us," he added, referring to a recent film in which a president hires a Hollywood producer to feign an overseas war to distract attention from a sex scandal.

Many military officials have been suspicious of Clinton since it was revealed during the 1992 campaign that he had pulled strings to avoid the draft during the Vietnam War, and since he said during his first term that gays should be allowed to serve.

In the past, officials said, they also have chafed at what they thought was White House micro-management in selecting bombing targets in planned and actual Iraqi air campaigns. Some expressed chagrin over restrictions imposed during a September 1996 cruise missile assault on Iraq, when they were limited to targetting only a few remote desert radar sites.

"The frustration after that mosquito swat in 1996 was palpable," said one Air Force colonel. "We need to roll thunder on Saddam, and now we're being allowed to do it. There are some damn happy people at the Pentagon, from [Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Hugh] Shelton on down."

"I can tell you nine out of 10 people in the military don't care about how Clinton reached his decision to strike, what the politics of it were," said the colonel, who is highly critical of the president's personal ethics. "We just think it's a job we have to do, so let's get to it."

One retired general who helped plan the bombing campaign during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, who did not want his name used, said military officials were also deeply frustrated by a planned air attack on Iraq last February that Clinton ultimately called off.

White House officials eliminated so many proposed targets out of fear of killing Iraqi civilians, he said, that "ultimately it didn't support any strategy at all. ... The campaign back in February wasn't accepted by the military. ... This plan has much more acceptance than that one."

"The weaker the White House, the more the military feels it has leverage, although that's never articulated," the general said. "In fact, it's an essentially abhorrent idea to military people, because they can only operate in a chain of command under civilian leadership."

In any case, he said, "most military people don't worry about whether this is 'Wag the Dog.' Their attitude is: This is the job I've been given; do it."

A soldier-on-the-street article in the Pacific Stars and Stripes newspaper sampling military opinion on the air strikes this week found concern that Clinton might not let the assault continue long enough to truly damage Iraq's power structure. But it also found widespread endorsement of the mission.

"I supported [Clinton] for what he's doing," Dan Valentino, an Air Force supply supervisor at Misawa Air Base in Japan, told the paper. "But I wonder if the same thing is going to happen like in 1991, when we stopped short of going all the way."

Gunnery Sgt. William Cawthon of the 3rd Support Battalion at Camp Foster, Okinawa, told the paper that the attack wasn't designed to divert public attention from impeachment. "Some critics could say that, but this guy Saddam Hussein has been a knucklehead for a long time," he said.

Said Sgt. David Bethea at Yongsan Garrison in South Korea: "We've given [Saddam] many chances to get his act together, but he hasn't. I think the president is justified in the actions he and the Security Council have taken."

"The military's morale will generally be positive for this operation in Iraq," said Charles Moskos, a military sociologist at Northwestern University.

But Moskos also echoed ongoing military concern about Clinton.

"This is an administration that is tone deaf on military values," Moskos said. "In President Clinton's first six months in office, he was the most disliked president ever, by the U.S. military." A one-third reduction in uniformed personnel since then haven't made him any more popular, he said.

Responding to military unease over the standard being applied by the White House to Clinton's sexual indiscretions, compared with the possibility of court-martial for military officials in similar situations, top military officials have reminded subordinates in recent months that the Uniform Code of Military Justice forbids officers from using "contemptuous words" about the president.

One Air Force general who served in Desert Storm, noted "a little irony" that will not be lost on many U.S. military personnel: "We're punishing Saddam because he lied that he would let the inspectors look at his weapons. Our leader lied about his private life. I guess it's a contest about who's got the better liar."