"I don't know about the rest of the American people, but I care," the President told People magazine. "Kids there who were passing out leaflets in Kuwait were picked up by the Iraqis. They were 15 or 16. They were tied to a stake in a square in Kuwait and then they were made to wait 'til their parents came and then they were shot. Does the world give a damn about that any more? I do, and I think those kids out there in the desert understand, too."

A senior Bush adviser was asked before the war why the lives of the Chinese young people were less a subject of vocal American moral outrage than the lives of the Kuwaiti young people. "Regimes doing it to their own is different because there's relatively little you can do about that," the White House official replied. "And the President thinks it's particularly horrible when an outsider comes in and visits these horrors on people."

Of course, Saddam Hussein has killed his own people, too, and with poison gas, but when he did it the United States was still in its time of Middle East pragmatism, hoping that Mr. Hussein's Iraq, however brutal, could be kept on a leash while continuing to balance the fanatacism of Iran. The United States had, after all, been hoping for that since Iraq invaded Iran in 1980.

The President's newfound vocal morality may make it more difficult for him to make the sort of trade-offs that he has made to keep the anti-Iraq alliance together, or it may at least give his critics ammunition when he does. The most dramatic of these maneuvers included refusing to strongly criticize Mikhail S. Gorbachev after Soviet security forces killed 21 pro-independence demonstrators in the Baltics, and posing for a smiling picture with Hafez al-Assad, even though the State Department notes that the Syrian leader's record on human rights is almost indistinguishable from Saddam Hussein's and even though it is believed that Syria is harboring the perpetrators of the bombing of Pan Am flight 103.

Political leaders must use moral rhetoric to justify wars because they have to defend, both ethically and politically, the act of killing people. On a purely cynical level, it is necessary to build a consensus. As Nietzsche once wrote, "Morality is the best of all devices for leading mankind by the nose."

But the United States is a nation with a streak of piousness and a belief that morality must be part of public policy, and leaders who fail to morally engage Americans risk a backlash. Patrick Glynn of the American Enterprise Institute noted that when Lyndon Johnson tried to keep Vietnam on a back burner and avoid a moral dialogue, fearing that his social programs might be swept aside if war fever raged and the political right benefited, the war protesters started the moral debate for him.

Mr. Bush may be known for the malleability of his political principles, but his advisers say he truly believes he has the moral high ground in the gulf. As one of his aides earnestly put it, the week America went to war: "This is not about oil. This is about right and wrong."