Tales of the Desert: Searching for Context for the Persian Gulf War

Journalists and soldiers have long looked askance at one another. William Tecumseh Sherman sourly recalled in his memoirs, "Newspaper correspondents with an army, as a rule, are mischievous. They are the world’s gossips, pick up and retail the camp scandal . . . They are also tempted to prophesy events and state facts which, to an enemy, reveal a purpose in time to guard against it . . . Time and moderation must bring a just solution to this modern difficulty." They have not. The Gulf War, moreover, reflected a worsening of the relationship between the press and the U.S. military. Many soldiers, even those who had entered the service after the withdrawal of the last U.S. forces from Vietnam in 1973, shared the view that the Vietnam debacle had stemmed in large part from the malicious and hostile reporting of the American press. For their part, reporters were often dealing with an alien world of which they had no firsthand knowledge before the crisis and which they regarded with suspicion and perhaps some intellectual disdain. Having in most cases isolated the press on the battlefield and outshone them in briefings, officers occasionally gloated at the discomfiture of a profession they neither understood nor respected. But, like the one-sided victory over the Iraqis, the military’s victory over journalists may merely pave the way for more ambiguous and harder-fought struggles in future years.

The journalists of the Gulf War did not set it in a larger context, but the significance of the conflict has proved no less elusive to those who have studied it since 1991. Was it a watershed event in military history, the mark of an impending revolution in military affairs, or did it merely confirm the wisdom of betting on big battalions? Was the inability to bring down Saddam Hussein a failure of American policy, or did it reflect cunning calculation that a weakened but intact Baathist regime would serve American interests? It will be years before such questions receive satisfactory answers. Meanwhile, a number of authors have produced serviceable narratives that at least make the war’s outlines clear.

PAST PERFECT

The first wave of publications came from journalists, sometimes working in teams, who cobbled together hasty book-length accounts of the Gulf crisis and war, which were soon superseded. The second came from the U.S. government, and included a report by the Department of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff to Congress, as well as various volumes produced by the services. (Having directed one such study, I leave it to others to comment on these efforts.)

In the past year a third group of studies has emerged from journalists and analysts who not only covered the war but studied it at some length. Rick Atkinson’s Crusade fills the niche of narrative history well, although there is less of "the untold story" here than the title promises. Atkinson, a fluent if occasionally florid writer, goes in heavily for the anecdotal and technological aspects of the story, although he gives a serviceable account of the crisis and war. The book has attracted attention because of its unfavorable portrait of Norman Schwarzkopf, but this actually occupies little space; combat vignettes and accounts of committee meetings dominate the book. Here, too, contemporary journalistic practice, as exemplified in the works of Bob Woodward, has corrupted the art of historical narrative. Two expedients in particular produce a false sense of omniscience: the practice of presenting the mere recollection of remarks as a quotation (uncited), and the pretense of describing a person’s innermost thoughts. All that notwithstanding, Atkinson’s book reads well and has an interesting tale to recount.

Some of the war anecdotes are quite telling. Atkinson describes one of the first U.S. pilots taken prisoner shouting to fellow Americans, "If you can hear me, let me remind you what we were told back in Saudi before the war started: there’s nothing up here worth dying for." Herein lies one of the major departures of this war, which was also reflected in the injunction of the air commanders to their pilots: "No target is worth an airplane" (the notable exceptions being cases where enemy units are engaged with friendly forces or during search-and-rescue missions). In this and other respects, the pall of Vietnam lay over allied commanders. The generals of the Gulf War had served as field-grade officers in Vietnam. They may have abhorred what they knew or had heard of civilian micro-management of the war, but more quietly, yet no less violently, they despised the military’s waste of human life in Southeast Asia. They came away from Indochina cynical about politicians and political purposes, but determined to conduct the next war competently, violently and fast. As part of the retooling of the American military after Vietnam, they invested themselves emotionally in the welfare of the rank and file to a degree unprecedented in American history. If a choice came between the lives of their soldiers and a margin of political advantage at war’s end, the former would win every time. Thus, Atkinson’s title is perverse: it was the commanders’ refusal to think of the war as a crusade that shaped their tactics, their operational style and the way the war ended.

TOO SERIOUS FOR GENERALS