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At the end of the Battle of Rumaylah during the Persian Gulf War, the battlefield was scattered with the burned-out remains of 600 Iraqi tanks, armored personnel carriers, guns and trucks. Actually, it wasn't much of a battle. Only one American tank was lost--burned when an Iraqi tank exploded beside it--and only a single American soldier was injured.

Last week, in The New Yorker magazine, an article by investigative reporter Seymour Hersh raised serious questions about the commander who ordered this one-sided attack, Gen. Barry McCaffrey, a much decorated Vietnam veteran who is now President Clinton's chief adviser on drug policy. The article quoted eye-witnesses and senior officers who questioned McCaffrey's judgment for ordering an all-out assault on a retreating Iraqi tank division two days after the war had been halted by an American ceasefire. Even if the Iraqis had fired on McCaffrey's 24th Mechanized Division with rocket-propelled grenades, as his front line radioed at the time, McCaffrey's response--a five-hour tank, artillery and helicopter-launched rocket barrage--was all out of proportion, Hersh charges.

In an editorial letter, McCaffrey vigorously disputed some of Hersh's assertions. Hersh claims that "many" of the Iraqi tanks were loaded onto trucks with their barrels aimed to the rear, marking them as non-combatants. McCaffrey, who was exonerated by an Army inquiry, insists that the vanguard of Iraqi tanks was advancing in combat formation with guns loaded. The ceasefire was unilateral--the Iraqis hadn't agreed to it--and McCaffrey felt he had to shoot back to protect his troops. Hersh quotes witnesses who claim that the Iraqis posed no threat. McCaffrey says those witnesses were miles from the action.

A careful reading of the piece reveals that Hersh offers no real proof at his charges--which were aired, investigated and then dismissed by the military after the war--are true. Hersh was the journalist who broke the My Lai massacre, and he's looking for another. However, many of the generals quoted in the article have said in writing that they were misquoted. Moreover, McCaffrey has for the past few weeks been circulating to journalists, in a pre-emptive stroke of denial, innumerable letters written to him. These are by fellow Gulf War officers and men who were almost uniformly disgusted and angered by what they repeatedly cite in their letters as Hersh's attempts to get them to go along with what they perceived from the very start of the research as his attempts to "defame," to "judge" and even to "bury" McCaffrey.

Even stranger is that there is no mention, until an afterthought in the very last paragraph, of the unspeakable Iraqi atrocities in occupied Kuwait. Stranger still is Hersh's uniform portrayal of the Iraqi soldiers as nice, suffering young men trying to give up to confused Americans. In various quotes from American soldiers, he paints the picture: The Iraqi soldiers "barely qualified as soldiers...they looked pathetic...they were hungry, cold and scared...they were in the wrong place at the wrong time." Of course, these were the very Iraqi soldiers who had "occupied" Kuwait and who were responsible for repulsive tortures and killings. These were the soldiers who went on to massacre the Shiite Muslims in the south and the Kurds in the north, who continue to support Saddam Hussein and to defend his biological and chemical weapons. Until now, the post-mortem analyses of the Gulf War have questioned whether we should not have fought longer to destroy more of those Iraqi soldiers who went on to kill and oppress elsewhere.

The dispute will go on, but it misses the larger context. Operation Desert Storm was intended to be a one-sided slaughter. "We didn't go up there looking for a fair fight with these people," says McCaffrey. The "new American way of war," he says, is to pulverize the enemy with overwhelming force at the cost of the fewest possible casualties. When McCaffrey was a company commander in Vietnam, GIs fought the enemy from 20 yards away with rifles and grenades. Now the goal is to annihilate the enemy before it can get off a shot. Superior technology and training made this possible in Desert Storm. Time after time, U.S. tanks spotted Iraqi tanks through their thermal-imaging sights before the Iraqis even knew the Americans were close. The lethal range of the main gun of an American M1A1 tank exceeds that of the gun on the Iraqis' Soviet-made T-72s by almost a mile. At the Battle of 73 Easting on the second day of the gulf war, nine American tanks killed 28 Iraqi tanks in 23 minutes -in a driving sandstorm. Not a single American tank was scratched. In the battle of Medina Ridge, six American Apache helicopters destroyed 38 tanks. Since the Apaches were three miles away in darkness and rain when they fired their Hellfire rockets, the Iraqis literally did not know what hit them.

Such carnage was acceptable as long as it wasn't on TV. It wasn't until video cameras recorded American warplanes shooting up Iraqi cars and busses fleeing Kuwait on the so-called Highway of Death that President Bush decided to call an end to the massacre. A decade later, McCaffrey says he welcomes a public debate over the nature and goals of war. He worries that the American people--and even younger Army officers--have forgotten about the hard slogging of ground combat in Vietnam, and that they have an unreal view of modern warfare. In an interview with Newsweek, McCaffrey asks, "Do we understand that when we use military force decisively, we are actually killing people and breaking up their equipment? Do we understand that? Do you understand that when you actually apply power, you don't want a fair fight?"

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The Generals' War
The Inside Story of the Conflict in the Gulf
by Michael R. Gordon & Bernard E. Trainor
Gordon, the chief defense correspondent for The New York Times, and retired Marine general Bernard Trainor provide a definitive, behind-the-scenes account of the planning and execution of the Persian Gulf War.