Masters Of War

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.