TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/051391/0513101.000

Text File | 1992-08-30 | 5.5 KB | 127 lines

                                                                                NATION, Page 18

Masters of War


A new book offers fascinating details -- but no shockers -- about
the Pentagon's role in the gulf

By STANLEY W. CLOUD/WASHINGTON

    If war is hell, the gulf war was -- for the U.S. anyway
-- closer to heck. It was over in 42 days. American forces
suffered about 140 casualties. The returning U.S. troops were
hailed as heroes. Publishers seized the upbeat, patriotic moment
and flooded the market with quickie biographies of America's
four-star master of flanking movements and teddy-bear tears,
General "Stormin' Norman" Schwarzkopf.

    And now comes Bob Woodward, the General Motors of
journalistic authors, with his new book, The Commanders (Simon
& Schuster; $24.95). This is not just another quickie. Fortified
with an advance of undisclosed magnitude, Woodward and his
researchers worked on the book for more than two years. They
interviewed 400 anonymous sources and pored over piles of
documents and notes. Yet the 398-page book is not what they had
in mind when they began.

    The original plan was to investigate how things do and do
not get done in the peacetime Pentagon. In mid-research,
however, two unexpected events -- the invasion of Panama and the
gulf war -- forced Woodward, a former naval officer, to change
course. Instead of analyzing military decision making, he
exploited the sources he had already developed and wrote what
is known in the trade as a "ticktock": a detailed reconstruction
of how and why the nation was led into battle. In an
introductory note to the book, Woodward, an assistant managing
editor of the Washington Post, rather pretentiously describes
this exercise as falling "somewhere between newspaper journalism
and history."

    Actually, it is journalism in hard cover. History requires
analysis, context, good writing and -- something Woodward never
provides -- footnotes, sources, some kind of record that
scholars and other readers can check to determine how well the
author has done his job. Although The Commanders lacks all that,
Woodward does provide interesting insight into how a democratic
government functions in times of crisis. If there are no
eye-popping disclosures, there are many new details. Among them:

    -- General Colin Powell, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, had serious personal reservations -- as did Schwarzkopf
and other senior U.S. officers -- about President Bush's
determination to switch from defense to offense in the gulf.
Powell, in particular, is portrayed as worrying about the
possibility of getting bogged down in a costly, open-ended land
war, and as being "in real agony" about Bush's often inflamed
rhetoric. Woodward writes that Powell, like most Democrats in
Congress, for some time favored a defensive deployment in Saudi
Arabia plus economic sanctions against Iraq. Once he had
received his orders and had been assured of adequate forces on
the ground, however, Powell appears to have saluted and done his
job. Similarly, says Woodward, Secretary of State James Baker
started out favoring sanctions but eventually came around to the
President's point of view.

    -- The idea for outflanking Saddam Hussein's Republican
Guard with the bold "Hail Mary" movement to the west, as
described in loving detail by Schwarzkopf during his famous
victory press conference, actually originated in the Pentagon,
not with the general.

    -- Powell quietly assigned Lieut. General Calvin A.H.
Waller to Schwarzkopf's staff "to act as a calming influence"
on the volatile Desert Storm commander.

    -- Defense Secretary Dick Cheney felt that the anti-Saddam
coalition was shaky and believed that Congress was not prepared
to authorize the use of force on short notice. According to
Woodward, Cheney also thought the White House's handling of last
year's budget negotiations with Congress was "inept" and "raised
fundamental questions about whether Bush and the Cabinet knew
what they were doing."

    -- National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft was an
unrelenting hawk during the Administration policy debates. "For
Scowcroft," Woodward writes, "war was an instrument of foreign
policy, pure and simple."

    Had the gulf war ended in disaster, some of the
disclosures in The Commanders, especially those dealing with
Powell's doubts, might have become a cause celebre. But the war
was a military triumph, notwithstanding the terrible suffering
of the Kurds and Shi`ites after their unsuccessful postwar
uprising against Saddam. Woodward's descriptions of prewar
debates and concerns thus seem to reflect no more than admirable
prudence. Powell in particular emerges as just the kind of
wartime general a nation wants: one who sees problems before
they happen and guards against them.

    In the final analysis, The Commanders, in spite of some
rather shameless Page One hype last week in the Post, breaks
little new ground about the war itself. Woodward devotes only
his final six pages to the actual fighting, and hardly mentions
such things as allied targeting procedures for the air war, the
failure of Iraq's vaunted Republican Guard to mount a serious
counterattack, and the Pentagon's success at using its
unprecedented control over press coverage to win public
acceptance of the war. Omissions of that kind seem all the more
glaring in a book written by a co-star of the Post's legendary
Watergate investigation.