Schwarzkopf's 100 Hours: Too Few?

STOPPED SHORT -- SCHWARZKOPF. That headline in the hawkish Washington Times last week stung President Bush into a mercifully brief but nonetheless unfortunate and ironic tiff with the nation's newest idol. Unfortunate because the White House cast it in terms of who said what to whom when, thus obscuring a genuinely important question: Was the cease-fire Bush ordered after 100 hours of the ground war premature? Ironic, because the White House could easily have won that debate.

The spat started when David Frost interviewed for public television the top allied commander in the gulf. Schwarzkopf said he had recommended that the U.S. keep fighting, since his troops could have "made it a battle of annihilation" that, by inference, would have finished Saddam's regime. To many listeners, it sounded like a man praising his boss's magnanimity, but Bush decided he could not afford the impression that he had "wimped out," as an aide put it. His advisers put out word that the general had raised no objection when Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Colin Powell phoned Schwarzkopf on Feb. 27 to tell him the President was about to order hostilities stopped.

Which was neither here nor there. Schwarzkopf would have made privately to Powell any recommendation that the allies keep fighting; when told in effect that he had already been overruled, he would of course abide by the decision of the Commander in Chief. At week's end the general closed the debate with a graceful apology. But that didn't necessarily settle the substantive question of whether the U.S. had in fact stopped fighting too soon.

The answer almost certainly is no. Doubtless Schwarzkopf's troops could have destroyed more of the troops and armor that Saddam is using to suppress the revolts that broke out almost as soon as the war ended. But that would have meant continuing a horrible "turkey shoot" of fleeing Iraqi forces after the war had effectively been won. The allies' goals were to drive Saddam's forces out of Kuwait and cripple Iraq's offensive military capacity. Both had been achieved before the 100 hours were up.

Continuing the war would have been seen by the world, with reason, as a pointless snuffing out of lives. Critics may argue that the same Iraqi soldiers who were spared went on to slaughter anti-Saddam rebels. But on balance the decision to stop the bloodshed the moment victory was assured was right -- and very American.