January 17, 1991

In one long moment yesterday, word that the United States had attacked Baghdad swept the country. In split-level suburban homes on the East Coast where dinner was in the oven, in big-city restaurants in the Midwest where bars were jammed with the happy-hour crowd and in skyscraper offices on the West Coast where people were still at work, there was an odd mixture of apprehension, sadness and relief.

Early reports of American success in attacking Iraqi military positions sent Japanese stock prices and the yen sharply higher, while oil prices in Asia tumbled. The financial markets appeared to express relief at the early signs that the world economy would not suffer major damage from a war in the Persian Gulf. Anticipating a brief war that would rout the Iraqis, and with no reports of Iraqi counterattacks or defensive operations, traders reversed themselves after an initial burst of nervousness and moved ahead with optimism and unusual energy.

The United States and allied forces Wednesday night opened the long-threatened war to drive President Saddam Hussein's army from Kuwait, striking Baghdad and other targets in Iraq and Kuwait with waves of bombers and cruise missiles launched from naval vessels. "The liberation of Kuwait has begun," President Bush said in a three-sentence statement confirming the start of the attack that was read by his spokesman, Marlin Fitzwater, shortly after the raids began.

I AGED 60 years at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last weekend. My eyes gradually sank into my face behind increasing folds of skin; my jowls grew heavy, pulling down my chin in cascading wrinkles; the lines from my nose to my mouth seemed carved by more than a lifetime's cares. And all I was doing was looking at a computer screen. The I.B.M. exhibit where this happened could show only the aging of flesh; the aging of bone structure is still being worked on. The software, developed by I.B.M. with QMA , is to be used by law-enforcement agencies in searching for suspects long at large, and by the National Center for Missing and Abused Children in searching for children.

A brief Persian Gulf war would test one of the great assumptions about the national recession: that Iraq's invasion of Kuwait precipitated the recession and an American military victory will make the economy rebound. But evidence is accumulating that the recession has taken on a life of its own and will probably endure. The phenomenon that links the gulf crisis and the economy, in the minds of many economists, is public confidence, which deteriorated sharply after the invasion on Aug. 2. Those who measure public confidence -- the Conference Board and the University of Michigan's Survey Research Center -- at first said the gulf crisis had precipitated the deterioration, in part because of rising oil prices. Now they argue that other factors are unnerving Americans, inhibiting the spending that invigorates the economy.