Libya raid a giant step for U.S. . . .

In the use of military force, democracies often sacrifice efficiencyto purchase legitimacy. It seems imperative for post-Vietnam Americato be seen to exhaust, redundantly, the economic and diplomatic"alternatives" - which actually are nothing of the sort.

In 63 months in office, Ronald Reagan, who came to office withan unearned reputation for recklessness, has disproved the suspicionthat he is eager to use U.S military assets. The use of them againstLibya marks another stage in the slow emancipation of the UnitedStates from several servitudes. One involves the "lessons" ofVietnam, another misplaced multilateralism.

The "lessons" of Vietnam, according to people who mostinsistently invoke them, are self-evident and unanimous in raisingdoubts about the morality and utility of military force. However,many in the Reagan administration believe that one lesson of Vietnamis that violence is not necessarily economized by delaying it oradministering it in minute doses.

In Vietnam, violence was unnecessarily protracted and futilebecause it was administered in accordance with theories that were tooclever by half. Finely calibrated escalations and pauses weresupposed to manipulate and educate the enemy. But the enemycorrectly read the cleverness as irresolution.

Today the wrong question is: Did the raid "teach Khadafy alesson?" Gracious. Americans desire a foreign policy that isdidactic or therapeutic, instructing or curing difficult regimes.However, Reagan has wisely applied to the raid the rhetoric ofpreemptive deflation, warning that it was not supposed to solve, at astroke, the problem of Libyan terrorism. His most important wordswere these seven: "If necessary, we shall do it again."

Khadafy's terrorism has been a success, so far. It has beengiving him what he seeks from it: pleasure and prominence. Ideally,repeated U.S. military actions should put him in the position of thepitcher who stood on the mound 60 feet 6 inches from the plate andthrew the pitch that became Willie Mays' first home run. The pitchersaid: "For the first 60 feet it was a hell of a pitch." Khadafy maystill be ahead, but the United States has just begun to swing at him.

The slow, stately minuet of diplomacy that preceded thelong-delayed response to Libyan terrorism has at least helped withtwo "So what?" questions.

It is said that an attack against Khadafy guarantees himrhetorical support from Arab nations and reveals that the UnitedStates can not bring along its allies. To both facts the rightresponse is a question: So what?

An ancillary benefit of the raid is a demonstration - redundant,one would have thought - that, as a political force, the "Arab world"is a figment of the imaginations of people eager to find reasons forthe United States not to respond to terrorism. And the primarybenefit of the raid was the demonstration that the United States willnot forever use multilateralism as a cover for inaction.

It is hard to feel dismay about the fact that the U.S. raidcaused collateral damage to the French Embassy in Tripoli. Franceis, with Italy, especially conspicuous among the U.S. allies thatpractice appeasement of terrorists in order to deflect violencetoward Americans.

This week France complicated U.S. self-defense by refusing toallow U.S. aircraft to fly over France. In the 1980s, the FifthRepublic is free to behave as badly as the Third Republic did in the1930s because the United States is unlike France. It is unlikeFrance not only in scale, but also in kind, for which France shouldbe thankful.