A striking but little-noted contrast between the gulf war of 1991 and the war to which we are building up - some stubborn part of me wants to believe it isn't inevitable - is in the costs of the war and who is expected to bear them. The contrast is worth exploring.

As many noted at the time, the United States not only persuaded other countries - chiefly Saudi Arabia, Japan, Germany and Kuwait - to pay for the 1991 Persian Gulf War, but might have made a small profit of $2 billion or $3 billion.

Andrew Bacevich, who now teaches international relations at Boston University, was in the military in Germany shortly after the war. He told me on the phone recently that repairs to any equipment that had been in the gulf were charged to a special account, even if the wear and tear had really occurred in Germany months later.

The war went so swimmingly from a financial point of view that pundits for a time discussed it as a model for the post-communist world: The United States uses its military to put out brush fires and defuse problems and the rest of the world pays the bills and is grateful for the stability.

It hasn't quite worked out that way.

U.S. taxpayers paid full freight for most of the Clinton administration's desultory excursions into nation-building with bombs, in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo and beyond. Now that Bush II wants another war with Iraq, not only is no other country offering to pay the bills, we have to bribe other countries to join up.

This sole superpower business is getting to be expensive.

Nobody knows the direct cost of waging the war itself. It wasn't included in the budget Bush presented to Congress - one that already included the biggest increases in domestic nondiscre- tionary spending in decades and the biggest deficits yet.

Former Bush economic adviser Larry Lindsey, in one of those moments of relative honesty that the political class calls gaffes, last September offhandedly estimated the cost at about $200 billion. That was an estimate rather than a considered calculation, and it would be prudent to treat it as a lowball estimate. The first gulf war cost about $60 billion. The equipment is more expensive now, and the objective more ambitious. It is unlikely to be over in 100 hours.

What about subsequent occupation/transition costs? Tough to figure. Nobody knows how long the United States plans to stay. Economists cited in a recent International Herald Tribune article estimate the seven-year cost of failing to rebuild Bosnia at about $15 billion - and that's not including the costs of NATO soldiers, humanitarian aid and resettlement of a million refugees. Iraq is bigger and probably more intractable.

Then there are the costs of getting others to go along.

Just a few weeks ago Israel was asking for $8 billion in commercial loan guarantees over and above the just less than $3 billion a year in aid it gets virtually automatically - the ongoing bonus for going to Camp David with Jimmy Carter (Egypt gets about the same). Israel also has asked for $4 billion in additional military assistance.

What the United States gets for this is unclear. An agreement from Israel not to enter the war and aggravate Arab countries if Iraq launches only a few missiles? The aid is not contingent on progress in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Then there's Turkey, recently rebuffed (correctly in my view) by France, Belgium and Germany after a request for NATO help if Iraq counter-attacked Turkey after a U.S. attack on Iraq. But don't weep for Turkey. It's getting AWACS and Patriot missiles anyway. And it's exacting a high and rising price for any agreement to allow U.S. forces to use bases in Turkish territory.

A couple of weeks ago the United States was offering about $14 billion in direct aid and loan guarantees, up from a previous estimated price of $10 billion. Now the offer is around $26 billion ($6 billion grants, $20 billion loan guarantees) and Turkey says it's still too small. Turkey wants more like $32 billion, claiming it suffered costs in the last gulf war that were never compensated, expects to incur risks and costs this time, and needs a carrot to offer the Turkish people who, according to polls, overwhelmingly oppose a U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Turkey also wants to occupy some of the oil fields in the Kurdish regions of northern Iraq - and probably a guarantee from the United States to squelch any possible upstart Kurdish rebellion.

Russia had an $8 billion oil deal, providing support services, equipment and the like, with Iraq. It is likely it is being coy just now in hopes of getting the best deal - not only a guarantee that U.S. taxpayers will cover that $8 billion in expected revenue if war makes the deal go sour, but a decent cut of the Iraqi oil spoils after the war.

France was cut out of the oil spoils after the first gulf war, and many thought it was holding out to get a guarantee of the spoils this time. But it might just be acting on principle or on irreducible hostility to war, so maybe it won't be in at the kill.

Qatar, which has welcomed U.S. troops and equipment, is getting something, but nobody seems to know what or how much. Oman and Yemen have to be getting something. Djibouti, where U.S. intelligence operatives are tracking al-Qaida and building infrastructure, will be getting money and aid, but again nobody knows how much.

In 1991 the world paid the United States to drive Saddam out of Kuwait. Now the United States has to bribe people to be allies. What does that tell us about the wisdom and prudence of the current cause?