Hollow Victory (H)

``Was it really a war,'' he asks, ``or little more than a live-fire exercise?'' In this plain-spoken analysis of the 1990-1991 conflict, defense expert Record ( Beyond Military Reform ) cuts through the post-Gulf War euphoria to remind us that Operation Desert Storm was a distinctly one-sided affair. He assesses Iraqi fighting power and Saddam Hussein's qualities as generalissimo and concludes that both were grossly overestimated. Highly critical of prewar U.S. diplomacy toward the Iraqi dictator, Record counts Saddam's survival and postwar behavior as a major American political defeat. Though he agrees that Desert Storm validated the merit of the all-volunteer military and the wisdom of the Pentagon's strategy of relying heavily on reserve components, he warns that there will be ``more Iraqs''--bids by other Third World states for regional supremacy at the expense of U.S. security interests--and that the enormous advantages enjoyed by the U.S. military in the Gulf War are unlikely to recur. Record's intelligently skeptical appraisal of the so-called great victory of the Allied Coalition is a bracing antidote to the self-congratulatory literature on the war. (Apr.)