Review of Rick Atkinson, Crusade: The Untold Story of the Gulf War (New York: Houghton-Mifflin, 1993), 560pp., $24.95.
Rick Atkinson has written an excellent account of the victory of the U.S.-led coalition against Iraq in the Persian Gulf War, a work impressive for both the breadth of its research and for the drama of its narrative. That said, perhaps the most serious problem with the book is its somewhat misleading title.
The title--Crusade: The Untold Story of the Persian Gulf War--comes from one of two epigraphic quotes, this one from Karl Shapiro, identified as an "American poet"; "Every war is its own excuse...That's why they're all crusades." (The other epigraph, from the Duke of Wellington, contains far more truth: "Nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won.")
Unless one regards all wars as crusades, it would be hard to find a war in American history that less resembled a crusade. The term crusade more aptly describes some previous American wars, and in particular the two World Wars, which were fought for the objective of total victory and which tend to confirm Tocqueville's assessment that democracies are slow to go to war but difficult to restrain once aroused. The Gulf War, however, was a war fought with almost dispassionate skill by an all-professional military. It was a war which demanded almost nothing from the American civilian population, not even higher taxes. It involved almost none of the massive mobilization of popular sentiment that has characterized a number of American wars and, on the crucial vote, the Gulf War gained only a slim majority of support in the Congress.
