COLUMN LEFT : ‘For This We Went to War?’ : A man is imprisoned for wearing the wrong T-shirt, and ‘justice’ is restored in Kuwait.

Until the need arose to liberate the sheikdom of Kuwait, it is fair to say that few Americans could have found it on a map. The question now arises whether Kuwait itself has any better grasp of the world.

Back on March 11, to express its gratitude to the United States, the Kuwaiti government took out a full-page ad in the Washington Post featuring a foreshortened map of the Middle East, in the much-copied manner of artist Saul Steinberg. The first hint of something amiss is the fact that Kuwait is shown to be one-quarter of the size of Iraq (in fact, Iraq is about 25 times larger). The whole of Central Europe is occupied by Hungary--no sign anywhere of Germany. Cyprus has disappeared from its usual moorings in the Mediterranean.

As a number of angry Arab readers made clear in the paper’s letters page a couple of weeks later, these were not the most egregious offenses. Several pointed out that the map failed to show the Israeli-occupied West Bank or Gaza--an odd omission for an Arab state. One Lebanese reader noticed that the cartographer had made his country vanish, swallowed up by Syria--an accurate enough geopolitical comment, perhaps, but not one that would pass muster in any atlas. Others noted that both Yemen and Qatar were misspelled, and that Yemen still appeared as two separate countries.

Now a second version of this ad has appeared in the current issue of Time magazine. The retouchers have been busy, but not busy enough. Lebanon is back as a sovereign entity, but Greater Israel is still intact, with not a trace of the occupied territories. The accompanying text has also been updated, with Americans now thanked for “defending the ideals your country stands for.”

Americans may be forgiven for asking what the restoration of Kuwait’s ruling Sabah family ever had to do with those ideals. It was bad enough to watch the returning emir renege on earlier vows of democratic reforms, and to learn that King Fahd of Saudi Arabia had summoned national security adviser Brent Scowcroft in late March to insist that the United States cease all this tiresome talk of democracy in Kuwait--the good monarch having no interest in seeing such a thing flower next door to his feudal tyranny. But Kuwait hit a new low with last week’s show trials of alleged collaborators with the Iraqi occupation.

If the full story of the Gulf War is ever written, Adnan Abdel-Hassan Ali will surely merit a footnote. He is the young man who was sentenced to 15 years in jail, to be followed by deportation, after a trial that was troubled by none of the niceties of due process--no defense, no presentation of evidence. His sole publicly disclosed offense was to have worn a T-shirt bearing the image of Saddam Hussein. (To put this sentence in perspective, it is two years longer than the heaviest imposed on the principal leaders of China’s Tian An Men Square democracy movement last winter.) Ali said that he wore the shirt only to sleep in; in any event, it was a common enough article of clothing in pre-invasion Kuwait, which helped bankroll Saddam Hussein during his eight-year war with Iran.

The international outcry that has followed Ali’s sentencing prompts the same question as the smaller fiasco of the botched map: Whatever one thinks of the Kuwaiti royal family, can’t it find better PR? This is not an idle question, since politics is increasingly a game of image and illusion.

A survey conducted in late March shows that 91% of Americans regard a dictatorship that violates human rights as a serious threat to international security and the United States’ interests. After last week’s trials, what else is one to call the government of Kuwait? It is to overcome knotty contradictions like this that lobbyists and PR firms ply their trade.

During the Iraqi occupation, a group known as Citizens for a Free Kuwait paid $7 million for the services of Hill and Knowlton, Washington’s leading public-relations and lobbying outfit. But, according to a recent profile in the National Journal, when the firm put in an additional bill of $15 million for the rest of 1991, the Kuwaitis bolted. The government of Kuwait is now represented by the Rendon Group, a smaller concern. To judge from the Kuwaitis’ latest public-relations disasters, they are getting less than expert advice.

To those who plan to attend a victory parade for U.S. troops, I suggest a banner. Or better yet a T-shirt. A portrait of the emir, perhaps, superimposed on that map of how Kuwait sees the world. And a slogan--something like “For this we went to war?” It may prompt a few boos from the more gung-ho elements in the crowd, but it probably won’t get you 15 years.