To End a War.

TO END A WAR by Richard Holbrooke Random House, $25

RICHARD HOLBROOKE'S To End a War should be read by anyone who still believes that the relationship between the U.S. military and its political overseers is healthy.

Throughout his memoir of the U.S. role in ending the war in Bosnia, Holbrooke, recently nominated to become the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and a leading contender to be secretary of state in any future Democratic administration, portrays himself as having two adversaries in the Balkans: the Serbs and the U.S. military. As late as September 1995, when U.S. warplanes were bombing the Bosnian Serbs to force them to begin serious peace negotiations, Leighton Smith, the commander of all U.S. Navy forces in Europe, insisted that he did not have a "dog in this fight," Holbrooke contends.

At a crucial meeting at the White House just over a week later, William Owens, then vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told President Clinton, Secretary of State Warren Christopher, Secretary of Defense William Perry, and others that the Bosnian bombing campaign needed to end soon because the U.S. bombers were running out of worthwhile targets, according to this account. Holbrooke indicates twice that neither he nor Secretary Christopher believed that Owens was telling the truth. They believed that he and other senior U.S. military officials simply didn't support the bombing campaign and wanted it to end, so were purposely being misleading about the number of remaining targets. Having covered that bombing campaign and subsequently interviewed some of the people who participated in its planning and execution, I think that while many in the U.S. military did in fact oppose the bombing campaign, Owens was telling the truth. It appears likely that Holbrooke and Christopher didn't understand how effective precision bombing can be, especially against poorly defended targets that had been studied for years.

But the point is that the State Department's representatives came away from a meeting at the White House believing, correctly or not, that they were being lied to by the top representatives of the Pentagon. "I still wonder what might have been accomplished had we been able to continue the bombing for another two weeks," Holbrooke writes with evident bitterness, laying the blame for the shakiness of postwar Bosnia squarely at the feet of the U.S. military. One wonders how much more bitter this memoir might have been had the U.S. air attacks failed to impose peace on Bosnia.

Holbrooke continues his offensive against the U.S. military in the heart of the book, his account of the negotiations at Dayton, Ohio, in the fall of 1995 at which a peace agreement was finally devised. Again and again, he portrays the U.S. military as "minimalists" who rejected proposals that would have led to a more vigorous peace process--giving the NATO peacekeeping force a strong hand in capturing war criminals, arming the Bosnians so they could deter future attacks, and rebuilding Bosnia's political and industrial infrastructure.

As Holbrooke tells it, this civil-military distrust led in November 1995 to arm twisting by Vice President Gore. At yet another contentious White House meeting, Gore complained about administration policy being undercut in Congress by Pentagon officials. "Our military representatives on the Hill usually leave their audience more uncomfortable than when they arrived," Gore lectured, according to Holbrooke's account. This meeting appears to have led directly to the subsequent misleading testimony by Defense Secretary Perry that the U.S. military would be able to *get in and out of Bosnia within one year, a vow that no one in the U.S. military appeared to believe--and that has been proven dramatically wrong, as U.S. forces remain in Bosnia three years later.

Intrigued by Holbrooke's account of this pervasive distrust, I called Smith, who is now retired. He insisted that Holbrooke's book is riddled with inaccuracies. The allegation that he claimed he didn't have a dog in the Balkans fight, he said, is "absolute bullshit" In fact, he adds, during the bombing campaign, "Dick Holbrooke called me at a couple of points and asked me to slow down the bombing, and I said, `That's what we did in Vietnam and I'm not going to do it.'"

Smith's reading of Holbrooke: "He's a pitifully small person who tries to make himself look good at the expense of others.... He never really fully understood what was going on on the ground" Remember, these are the senior U.S. military officer and the senior U.S. diplomat charged with bringing peace to the Balkans. It's a hell of a way to run a railroad.

It is instructive to compare Holbrooke's memoir of negotiating an end to the Bosnia conflict with Winston Churchill's memoir of the far more difficult job of running World War II. Churchill wasn't afraid to treat his generals harshly. He pushed them hard, relieving those he found overcautious or ineffectual. On Jan. 22, 1942, in a typical cable, Churchill angrily told the First Sea Lord that the Royal Navy's slipshod defense of the west coast of Malaya amounted to "one of the most astonishing British lapses recorded in naval history."

But nowhere in his six long volumes of history does Churchill contend that his generals misled him, or failed to give their best effort, or didn't tell him the truth as best they could. By contrast, distrust between U.S. political and military leaders pervades Holbrooke's book. The only group of generals in Churchill's work who resemble the U.S. military as depicted by Holbrooke are the French officers who led France to defeat in 1940.

To be fair, Churchill provided his generals far steadier leadership than the Clinton administration has given the U.S. military. Churchill spoke the language of soldiers, and was also a gifted strategic thinker. As he told the House of Commons in July 1942, near the very low point of the Allied effort, "you will not get generals to run risks unless they feel they have behind them a strong government" The fastest way to repair the relationship between the U.S. military and its civilian overseers would be to give the military strong, sure leadership. When that happens, we will no longer have (to borrow a phrase from commentator Ralph Peters) so many generals who talk Sherman but act McClellan.

THOMAS E. RICKS is the author of Making the Corps, The Washington Monthly's 1997 "Political Book of the Year."