The Gulf Conflict 1990-91: Diplomacy and War in the New World Order.

The al-Sabah family has returned to power in Kuwait; George Bush has left the White House and taken up residence in Houston; Margaret Thatcher has been elevated to the House of Lords; Mikhail Gorbachev has lost his office in the Kremlin; but Saddam Hussein, who may well have had the most difficult and dangerous job of the lot, remains in the presidential palace in Baghdad. Saddam seems to combine Mussolini's penchant for self-promotion, brutality, and delusions of military grandeur with the survival skills of the canny and prudent Franco. One has to add, of course, that the Iraqi dictator and his regime might disappear tomorrow. Saddam's durability is evidence of his ruthless skill in manipulating factions within Iraq as well as the weakness of the forces working for open and democratic societies in the Arab world.

So long as Saddam Hussein remains the ruler of Iraq, the debate over the Gulf War of 1990-91 will doubtless have a certain edge to it. That edge is sharpened by the resentments and fears of Saddam's victims inside and outside Iraq, and by regrets over the failure to eliminate him. Those of us who believed that the war was both necessary and justifiable have found new arguments since the war in Saddam's brutal treatment of Kurdish and Shi'ite minorities, and in Iraq's extensive and ingenious covert nuclear weapons program. For those who thought the war was a disaster arising from greed and ineptitude, leading nowhere, the foolish and criminal Western dealings with the Baghdad government, the grievous sufferings of the Iraqi people during and alter the war, the exaggeration of Iraqi misdeeds in Kuwait, and continuing patterns of injustice in the Middle East remain strong counterarguments. This debate, however, goes on at the edge of a rather broad public consensus that is simultaneously pleased with the military success and low casualties of "Desert Storm," disappointed with the unsatisfactory aftermath in both Iraq and Kuwait, and condemnatory of Saddam Hussein as a tyrant and aggressor.

This new study of the diplomatic prelude to and the military strategy of the Gulf War is the joint work of Lawrence Freedman, a distinguished strategic theorist who is professor of war studies at King's College, London, and of Erraim Karsh, who has written extensively on politics and war in the contemporary Middle East. Their argument will largely confirm the public consensus, and is unlikely to alter the views of those on either side of the moral debate,

Despite the scholarly care and the sophisticated judgment about international politics and diplomacy that Freedman and Karsh bring to this work, their coverage of the war is limited in three very important ways. The first two of these limitations are unavoidable; the third is not. First, the Iraqi view of many key events is simply unavailable except in a highly propagandized and self-serving form. On many matters. Freedman and Karsh, like the rest of us, are reduced to intelligent conjecture. Second, we are still too close to the events, and too many matters in the Middle East are unresolved, to fit the 1990-91 war with any confidence into a larger pattern of regional developments. Here the authors avoid both long-range speculation as well as any unsubstantiated broader claims.

Third, the focus is confined to high politics and diplomatic and military strategy. A striking indication of this approach is given in a five-page listing of dramatis personae, which includes almost no one below the level of ambassador or undersecretary. Very little is said about the experience of the war by the soldiers, the Western and other hostages, the Kuwaitis under occupation 0r in exile, or the Palestinians in Kuwait and after expulsion. Of course, such perspectives would have lengthened an already long book: but their absence precludes the human depth, immediacy, and poignancy that should be present in a major study of war. It also means that many of the issues that most concern the moral critics of the Gulf War are not illuminated.

Nonetheless, the book is a very valuable resource. It provides a readable and reliable account of the course of events, and is particularly informative on the ways in which Saddam first encouraged and then undermined the diplomatic initiatives promoted by the French and the Soviets. The Gulf Conflict also pays considerable attention to the diverse political interests within the coalition, though it does this better with the Western partners than with the more closed and secretive Arab members of the alliance. It offers a crisp and thoughtful set of conclusions about the war. which it sees as Saddam's responsibility and as his great gamble to recover from his desperate economic situation. Finally, while the book is not driven by a just-war argument, it makes many points that are clearly relevant to an evaluation of the war in terms of just-war theory. Especially notable in this regard is the authors' argument for accepting a much lower estimate of Iraqi military casualties than the initial 100,000. which they see as vitiated by systematic overestimates of the number of Iraqi soldiers in the theater of war before hostilities.

Despite the limitations I've mentioned, The Gulf Conflict serves to remind us of some crucial facts: Iraq's invasion of Kuwait was an unjustifiable act of aggression, it was condemned by an overwhelming majority of states, and it was successfully reversed. These are points that we should not lose sight of in a season of moral dissatisfaction.

Martyrs' Day: Chronicle of a Small War, by Michael Kelly, Random House, $23, 354 pp.

During the Gulf War, some of the most detailed and astute reports were published in the New Republic and came from Michael Kelly, now a reporter at the New York Times. First from Baghdad, as the air war began in January, one dispatch included a mind-bending description of a "smart" bomb turning a corner. Then, after the ground war freed Kuwait, came the stories of the victims of Iraqi humiliation, degradation, torture, and murder. Next, the rout of the Iraqi forces outside Kuwait City caught with the spoils of war in an allied air trap was captured in the telling details of bodies frozen in flight from the searing flames of bombs and exploding gas tanks. These, plus postwar acCounts of Kurdish rebels and refugees and the citizens of Baghdad still living under the dual siege of Saddarn Huusain and economic sanctions are gathered in this readable and important book. As the war shrinks to an abstraction and the debate about its political and moral justifications--or lack thereof--proceeds, Mr. Kelly's book is both a corrective (to the abstractions) and a vivid reminder of the people on the ground. Kelly was one of the few journalists to elude military control. That he also knew how to see, how to write, and how to tell a story is a gift and a tool to those who continue to puzzle over the Gulf War.