February 25, 1991

How many light bulbs does it take to change a city? Many New Yorkers may not have noticed yet. But, block by block, the city is getting darker at night.

Allied troops drove deep into Iraqi-occupied Kuwait on Sunday, reaching the outskirts of Kuwait City before nightfall, according to senior officers. To the west, powerful armored columns and a huge fleet of helicopters stormed into Iraq, heading northeast toward Basra in an effort to isolate Iraq's elite Republican Guards. It was the biggest American-led assault since World War II, and it touched off one of the largest battles in decades, spread across a front 300 miles wide and involving more than a million combatants and support troops.

If the ground war ends in an allied victory in the Persian Gulf by late March, with relatively few casualties, the American economy will almost certainly receive a boost. But many economists doubt that peace by springtime would be sufficient in itself to end the recession. The two great benefits that are likely to follow an early victory are a rise in consumer confidence and a drop in oil prices to the prewar level of $18 a barrel or less. More confident consumers, in turn, would spend more. And lower oil prices would give them more to spend, by reducing outlays for energy.

There is an expression among some New York City teachers that tries to capture the stream of perplexing, paradoxical or just plain maddening rules and memos that come their way almost daily. "Up the down staircase," teachers will say and shrug stoically, using the title of Bel Kaufman's 1965 novel about a rookie teacher's first disillusioning months. Sometimes the phrase is the pedagogical equivalent of "Catch 22."

The faces were solemn, the prayers fervent. The ground war had begun at last, and across the New York metropolitan area yesterday people at religious observances turned to one another for comfort and spoke of personal sorrow and national sacrifice, of fears for loved ones and hopes for a swift end to bloodshed in the Persian Gulf. Many rallied behind the long-anticipated invasion, saying it was justified and unavoidable, a necessary hardship to drive Iraq out of Kuwait and Iraq's President, Saddam Hussein, from power. The best to hope for now, they said, was quick success and a safe return for the troops.