Bliss it was in that dawn to be wrong . . .

THE RUBBLE from the World Trade Center was still burning when the first so-called peace protesters took to the streets more than two months ago. Anxious to emulate the powerful coalition that pressured the United States to abandon Indochina three decades earlier, they would have us believe that our cause is unjust, our strategy illegal, and our goals unwise.

Fortunately, to date they have been totally ineffective. The American people fully understand what happened on September 11 and why our government must respond decisively in self-defense after years of empty threats to hunt down and punish terrorists. Even within the academic community, criticism of the war effort is thus far subdued. But things can change. The public rallied around President Lyndon Johnson when he first ordered air attacks against North Vietnam: Between July and August 1964, LBJ's approval rating shot up from 42 percent to 72 percent, and the Gallup Organization attributed it to his tough stand in Vietnam. But little by little, in the following years, that support was lost.

War is by its nature a horrible thing, and we should not ignore the temptation for idealistic students, hoping to emulate the great protests of the 1960s, to be lured into the streets by radical faculty and peers. The Constitution quite properly protects the right of even uninformed and misled citizens to peaceably assemble and petition their government for a redress of grievances. But there is one thing we can do: We can educate our country about what really happened in Vietnam and about the actual consequences of the peace protests. For one of the great enduring myths from our tragic Vietnam experience is that the protesters were right, and that their courageous actions ultimately ended years of folly and brought peace to a troubled region.