So, Who Won the War? Depends on the ‘Spin’ : Politics: Now that the fighting is over, Gulf War II--the battle to cash in on the glory--is in full swing.

Admit it. The last time you stopped to think about the question, you decided Saddam Hussein was the big loser of the Persian Gulf War and George Bush was the chief winner.

Ha! Here in the nation’s capital, that sort of thinking is strictly kids’ stuff, for amateurs only.

Listen to the way a pro handles the issue.

“Everybody is drawing their lessons from the Persian Gulf,” William Bennett, the former drug czar and Ronald Reagan-era secretary of education, said in a recent speech. “This former educator will draw his.

“It seems to me there are very clear lessons for American education from the Gulf,” Bennett continued. “I think that Desert Storm showed the value of homework.”

See how it works?

Wall Street gnomes look at every world event and ask: “How does that move the market?” Hollywood thinks of every cataclysm as a potential script. And in official Washington, the favorite game is “winners and losers.”

Barely does the ink dry on the morning paper before the capital’s hordes of analysts, spin-masters and politicians begin speculating about how the news might be used to someone’s political advantage.

And so, with the Gulf War over, Gulf War II--the war to cash in on The War--is in full swing.

Virtually anyone can play. Washington think tanks are busy toting up the score to see whose Middle East experts were the least egregiously foolish. Members of Congress, including many who opposed the war before it began, are clambering over each other to sponsor new benefit programs for Gulf War veterans--programs that, if enacted, would provide benefits notably more generous than those given to the veterans of far bloodier wars: World War II, Korea, Vietnam.

Republican strategists hope to use the war, and the predominantly Democratic opposition to it, to convince voters once and for all that Democrats cannot be trusted with the nation’s security.

Some Democrats hope to fight back by persuading the same voters that the government’s success in winning a war shows that a little more vigor on the domestic front could vanquish enemies at home as effectively as those abroad.

Across the Potomac River at the Pentagon, the Air Force is busy arguing that its flyers had to do double duty in the Gulf because Navy pilots couldn’t hit the broad side of an Iraqi bridge. Navy admirals, for their part, are quick to point out that it was their Tomahawk cruise missiles that blinded Iraq’s air defenses in the first place, giving Air Force flyers a clear sky.

Representatives from Saudi Arabia, Israel, Egypt and Great Britain are all eager to tell anyone who will listen about how much they contributed to the allied war effort. And virtually everyone in Congress seems eager to tell representatives of Japan and Germany that they did not do enough.

Washington, says John Buckley, a onetime Republican party official turned public affairs consultant, is like “a summer camp that has wars between the blues and the reds. . . . It’s a city where there is a constant game of capture the flag.”

And these days, there is no bigger flag to capture than the one that flew over U.S. troops in the Persian Gulf.

Bennett’s comment, made in a speech last week to a newspaper publishers group, shows one of the chief ways the game is played. Take a favored conclusion that you have hammered on for years--in Bennett’s case the virtues of homework--find a major event that can be turned to your advantage, then blast away.

“Norman Schwarzkopf went to Vietnam. He learned some things,” Bennett said in explaining his conclusion. Schwarzkopf, the allied commander in the war, finished his stint in Vietnam, went back to his books, studied hard and figured out what had gone wrong and how it could be made right. And behold, victory: proof of the value of hitting the books.

The same day Bennett was making his speech linking Desert Storm to homework, House Majority Leader Richard Gephardt (D-Mo.), in a speech of his own, tried to use the war to tout the Democrats’ social policy agenda.

“If we could defeat Saddam Hussein and the Iraqis in such a short period of time with such excellent military effort,” he said, “I guess the question that all Americans today are asking is, ‘Why can’t we do some of that here at home on education, on health care, on infrastructure, on the other challenges that we face?’ ”

Gephardt’s notion of what “all Americans today are asking,” of course, is not shared by Republicans.

In GOP eyes, says Texas Sen. Phil Gramm, voters are asking about “an issue of judgment.” Most Democrats in Congress, Gramm has repeatedly noted, voted against Bush’s request in January to authorize war against Iraq.

Now, he argues, that vote “reinforces what the public has believed for 20 years: that Democrats are not reliable on national defense, national security and international leadership issues.”

In the handbook of Washington survival, several approved methods exist for deflecting such attacks.

One of the most useful is humor. Sen. Bob Kerrey (D-Neb.), a much-decorated Vietnam veteran discussed in Washington as a potential presidential candidate--and remembered outside Washington as the sometime boyfriend of actress Debra Winger--is one of several Democrats who have been pilloried by Republicans for voting against the January war resolution. In recent days, he has perfected a laugh line to disarm his critics.

“My predictions on the Gulf War didn’t quite come true,” he says. “I’m reminded, once again, of something that I have observed early on in my life in politics--that is, that there is something worse than being quoted incorrectly in the paper and feeling bad about it, and that is being quoted correctly in the paper and feeling bad about it.”

But although politicians are the most public practitioners of the winner-loser game, they are not the only, or even the best, players.

In fact, the military already is displaying almost as much skill in the Washington war as they did in the Gulf.

Leading the way is the Air Force.

Just as U.S. airmen dropped leaflets on Iraqi soldiers, urging them to surrender, Air Force lobbyists have bombarded members of Congress, reporters and others with charts designed to show that expensive stealth bombers are, in fact, far cheaper than older, less sophisticated airplanes because the stealth planes require far fewer escorts.

And Air Force officials have been happy to grant interviews to reporters in which they suggest that the Navy, with its old-style “dumb” bombs, was far less effective against Iraq than the Air Force with its high-tech laser-guided “smart” bombs. The Navy’s carrier-based airplanes are the Air Force’s most direct competition for Pentagon funds.

So successful has the assault been that a senior Navy official recently was reduced to complaining that the Air Force’s superior television technology had enabled Air Force footage of exploding bombs to squeeze lower-quality Navy footage off CNN.

While the Air Force and Navy dispute control of the skies, Army officials are reopening their long-running ground war against the Marines. And at least some Marine officials remain disgruntled that their much-heralded amphibious assault against Iraqi positions in Kuwait turned out to be a feint, leaving many of the few and the proud sitting on their ships all dressed up with no place to go.

Arguments over what the war showed about the capability of the military, however, at least have the advantage of being directly relevant to what happened in the Gulf. That is not often a requirement for devotees of Washington spin.

Indeed, for the true spin professional, the more implausible the case, the better. That helps explain why in many cases, both sides in an issue can seize on an event like the Gulf War and use it in an effort to score political points.

Take civil rights, for example.

Last year, Bush and congressional Democrats staged a nasty battle over whether to amend the nation’s civil rights laws to reverse several Supreme Court rulings that make it harder for workers to win discrimination lawsuits. Bush claimed that the bill, backed by Democrats, would lead to quotas. Democrats claimed Bush was opposing civil rights in an effort to attract votes from conservative white Southerners.

This year, the two sides have been cautiously circling each other, waiting for the right time to open the issue once again. And both have seized on the war.

What’s the connection?

Democrats argue, in the words of Massachusetts Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, that the troops who fought for freedom overseas should come back to an America free from discrimination.

Republicans counter, in the words of Vice President Dan Quayle, that “the superb performance of black Americans in our armed forces demonstrates that they don’t need quotas and preferences to obtain the very highest ranks of excellence.”

Both sides expect to fire off a lot more Gulf-related rhetoric before the civil rights battle is over.

Indeed, both parties expect to use the war for almost everything, at least so long as voters will stand it. As strategists on both sides know, the game can b played only so long before players have to switch to another topic.

“In politics, as in everything else, what people may perceive in a favorable light they may perceive in a very different light a week from now, or two weeks from now, or three weeks from now,” Senate Republican Leader Bob Dole said in a speech he gave last week on the day Bush left Washington for a meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney.

“I’m not a great believer in polls,” added Dole, who ran against Bush for the GOP nomination in 1988. “If my pollster had been right, I’d be going to Canada, where Bush is going; he’d be here talking to you about Dole’s role in the Gulf crisis.”