ASHINGTON - When Dick Cheney arrives next week at the Philadelphia convention, the Republican Party plans to celebrate the former defense secretary's role in winning the Gulf War. But the celebration may be dampened by one inconvenient fact: Nearly 10 years to the day after Iraq invaded Kuwait, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein is still in power.
Hussein's survival is a bitter memory for Cheney, whose term at the Pentagon during the Bush administration from 1989 to 1992 generally is viewed quite favorably, even by some of the usual critics of defense secretaries. The Gulf War victory symbolized Cheney's power in the Pentagon, and he played a larger role in war strategy than is widely known. But for all the smart bombs and successes, the victory is often considered incomplete.
Indeed, Cheney's tenure at the Pentagon was marked by a blend of clear achievement and seeming contradiction. He greatly increased defense spending in his early tenure, but then oversaw a 25 percent reduction in the Pentagon budget. He urged construction of a costly missile defense system known as ''Star Wars'' but also sought to kill a variety of military programs that were popular in Congress. He mostly left battlefield decisions to the generals, but also helped devise the stratagem that sped the war to its conclusion. He oversaw the armed forces, but received a series of deferments and never served in the military himself.
Mostly, according to Brent Scowcroft, the director of the White House National Security Council during the Bush administration, Cheney ran the Pentagon in a ''hands-off'' manner.
''But he was decisive when he wanted to intervene,'' Scowcroft said. ''He fired the chief of staff of the Air Force for stepping out of line. He killed programs he didn't think were worthwhile. He had a lot to say about individual targeting'' during the Gulf War.
Cheney swiftly took the Pentagon's reins. Just one week after taking office, he publicly upbraided the Air Force chief of staff, General Larry Welch, for talking to congressmen about new nuclear-missile programs without authorization.
Later, in January 1991, shortly before Operation Desert Storm got underway, Cheney fired General Michael Dugan, who had replaced Welch as Air Force chief of staff. Dugan's offense was telling reporters that air power alone would defeat Saddam Hussein. For one thing, Cheney disagreed with this position - he believed US ground forces would ultimately be needed to push Iraqi troops out of Kuwait. But more than that, Dugan was speaking out of turn, presenting as US policy a view that was not.
But in general, Cheney was not a boat-rocker. He was seen at the time, and is still remembered, as a highly competent manager who knew how to deal with Congress and the public, and who also emerged as an able diplomat, serving as Bush's emissary with Saudi Arabian and other Middle Eastern officials in holding together the allied coalition after Hussein invaded Kuwait.
''He did an excellent job on the Gulf War,'' said Franklin Spinney, who has been a systems analyst and a well-known gadfly inside the Pentagon for over 20 years. ''He stayed out of the military's hair, gave them the support they needed. He did what secretaries of defense are supposed to do, and did it well.''
During the early stages of planning for the Gulf War, the commander, General Norman Schwarzkopf, presented a combat plan that called for sending US troops directly at the center of the Iraqi line to drive the enemy forces from Kuwait.
Cheney thought this a bad idea and he rejected it. Scowcroft confirmed that a frontal assault was the recommendation from the field and also opposed it. He and Cheney believed it might be more effective, and cause fewer American casualties, to send troops around to the left of the battle front and attack the Iraqis from the rear - the famous ''left hook'' that Schwarzkopf eventually adopted with such success.
Cheney says his best decision was to suggest Colin Powell become chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But Cheney wasn't afraid to rebuke his friend. Powell, in his autobiography, ''My American Journey,'' recalls that Cheney was upset with him for questioning the idea of liberating Kuwait. Powell thought it made more sense to defend Saudi Arabia's oil fields.
''Colin, you're chairman of the Joint Chiefs,'' Powell quoted Cheney as saying. ''You're not secretary of state. You're not the national security adviser anymore. And you're not secretary of defense. So stick to military matters.''
Cheney himself had to stick to military matters when it came to ending the Gulf War without capturing Hussein. When the war ended, the United States and its allies did not try to go to Baghdad and oust Hussein. But Scowcroft said that was not Cheney's decision.
''That has nothing to do with Cheney,'' Scowcroft said. ''He wasn't the decision maker. The president was the decision maker and the NSC agreed when we stopped the war. Cheney was no more responsible for it than anyone else.''
In any case, Scowcroft acknowledged, ''We assumed (Hussein's) own military would take him out because he had suffered such a disastrous defeat.''
Retired Marine Corps Lieutenant General Bernard Trainor, who co-authored a book about the Gulf War called ''The Generals' War,'' said in an e-mail interview yesterday that Cheney attended a White House meeting where Bush and his advisers discussed an early end to the war ''but Cheney was not a major player in the discussion.'' Still, around that time, Cheney was so convinced that Hussein would soon be out of power that he bet a Trainor colleague a dinner that Hussein would be gone in six months.
Cheney lost the bet.
The Gulf War was only one aspect of Cheney's tenure. He had to deal with no less than the restructuring of world power with the end of the Cold War. The Soviet empire was collapsing, the Berlin Wall was crumbling, Mikhail Gorbachev - a new type of Soviet leader - was talking peace. The whole rationale for the US armed forces over the previous 40 years - the Soviet threat - was coming unraveled.
Many officials advocated cutting the budget, devising radical arms control proposals. Cheney resisted these notions, fighting rearguard battles within the Bush administration. Cheney presented defense budgets that cut spending, but cautiously. He distrusted Gorbachev, thought that he would not last long and that his successor might be even more hostile to the West than those before him.
Bush was beginning to pay more attention to his budget director than to his defense secretary. His secretary of state, James Baker, and his national security adviser, Scowcroft, were advocating more daring arms-control proposals over Cheney's objections - and Bush, more often than not, went with their counsel.
''Cheney is not a fan of negotiated arms control,'' Scowcroft said. ''He said, `We ought to make our own decisions.' He was not out in front on arms control. He said, `Hey, we are winning now, we have the Soviets on the run.'''
Even the conservatives on the congressional armed services committees were willing to cut the budget more deeply. In mid-1990, the widespread word was that Cheney was out of touch with the changing times.
Still, by 1991, Cheney was starting to adapt. Cheney eventually agreed to the arms control proposal being pushed by Scowcroft and others.
Cheney also killed a number of major weapons systems, most notably the Navy's A-12 Stealth fighter - which, at $30 billion to $60 billion, was the biggest program ever terminated by a defense secretary.
He also tried to kill the V22 vertical take-off aircraft, the F14D fighter jet, and the Seawolf submarine. Ironically, Democratic congressmen, fearful of the resulting job losses in their districts, restored them to the budget.
Cheney also moved to cut the armed forces by a half-million troops, and to shut down more than 40 military bases that, as a result, would no longer be needed. He also held the B-2 Stealth bomber program to 20 planes, when the Air Force wanted at least four times that number.
These moves marked quite an evolution for Cheney, who, while he was a congressman in the early-to-mid 1980s, behaved as a straight-line hawk. He supported every major weapons program, and voted to scrap the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.
John Isaacs, head of the Council for a Livable World, a pro-arms control group in Washington, said yesterday that Cheney's record as defense secretary, especially after 1990, ''showed an individual capable of breaking the mold ... He showed a nimbleness in adapting to a post-Cold War national security environment and proved willing to make tough decisions against politically popular weapons systems.''
Not that Cheney suddenly became a dove. He cautioned against deep cuts in the military budget. In Nov. 1990, when Scowcroft and Baker were hailing the post-Soviet ''new world order,'' Cheney saw ''potential power vacuums'' arising from these global shifts - ''the kindling, if you will, for potential conflagrations across the globe.''
He predicted that by the Year 2000, over two dozen nations would have ballistic missiles, 30 would have chemical weapons, 10 would be able to deploy biological weapons. None of these predictions have nearly come true, though Cheney's pessimism about the risks of proliferation is more fashionable now than it was then.
