THE OTHER WINNERS ARE... : Victors: Bechtl, Fluor and CNN. Vanquished: Kurds, Shiites and the Democrats

We need to know the score. Heck, we’re so desperate to know it that we’ll pay 95 cents for the first minute to call a 24-hour 900 number just so we don’t have to wait half an hour for KFWB.

So it’s time to start figuring out the score on this little war deal we had. Remember the war? It was that thing that inspired all those star-studded TV salutes to the troops. Here, then, is an early reckoning of the winners and losers in the Persian Gulf War.

WINNERS

Fluor Corp. and Bechtel Corp. Two of the biggest construction firms in the country--and two of the best-connected politically--they stand to gain a hefty share of the contracts to rebuild Kuwait. For one thing, they’ve built most of the modern Middle East. And the grateful Kuwaitis have announced that they will tilt toward American bidders. The only thing that could hurt Fluor and Bechtel is if they turned out to have Jews on the payroll. The Kuwaiti government, enthroned in its temporary palace only after our Army Corps of Engineers installed the gold bathroom fixtures, has reaffirmed its refusal to deal with any companies so contaminated. Knowing Fluor and Bechtel, I wouldn’t be worried.

The creators of the musical themes and logos for TV’s war coverage. Given the recession battering the advertising business--I keep reading about it, even though there doesn’t seem to be any less advertising--these music and graphics houses had their first quarter rescued from a hot tub full of red ink by the war. Maybe they planned ahead, but I bet they generated all that stuff at the last minute. Think of the overtime. Big winners.

CNN. Besides the temporary ratings increase and the permanent Peabody Award, this network’s big win is synopsized in its retirement of the vaguely embarrassing slogan “The World’s Most Important Network.” Just as the smartest people don’t flaunt their Phi Beta Kappa keys, CNN’s growing importance rescues the network from the need to proclaim it. Bernard Shaw’s fame no longer derives solely from making Michael Dukakis think too hard about his wife being attacked (we’ve since learned why the governor might have had so much trouble with that question). And the most respected woman in the Arab world--a limited competition--is no longer Jordan’s Queen Noor but CNN’s Bobbi Battista.

LOSERS

The Iraqi Kurds and Shiites. A medical center full of spin doctors is hard at work on why this isn’t like 1956, when Radio Free Europe encouraged the Hungarians to think their revolt would receive Western aid. But you have to pardon the Kurds and Shiites for not understanding that, when President Bush expressed the hope that the Iraqi people would overthrow Saddam Hussein, the people he had in mind were moderate Sunni generals.

Yassir Arafat. Hey, in a two-horse race, you have a 50-50 chance of picking the loser.

The Democratic Party. Having spent eight years perfecting a phobia of Ronald Reagan’s shadow (where’s the rest of him?), the Democrats are reading George Bush’s poll figures and wondering, “What’s the use?” For 50 years, the Republicans excoriated them as the war party; now the Democrats are paralyzed by the charge that they’re not eager enough for war. Heck, they even opposed Grenada.

The news departments of ABC, CBS and NBC. They got to show off their craft on a truly major international news story; what they won for their efforts were orders to slash spending. The war cost so much to cover that NBC had to close its San Francisco bureau, CBS laid off its Beijing correspondent, and ABC postponed getting Sam Donaldson a new rug. There’s a special piquancy here for Steve Friedman, impresario of “NBC Nightly News,” who said last July that “all this geopolitical stuff we used to cover is over,” so the newscast could easily carry more show-biz items. In the wake of the war, NBC also laid off an L.A. reporter.

Given the fact that none of the networks reported during the war that the Iraqis did not disconnect the Kuwaiti incubators, that our POWs’ visible injuries were caused by their ejections and landings, and that the U.S. bombed Iraq into a “pre-industrial, near-apocalyptic state” (all items we’ve learned later through other sources), they might just save themselves the trouble, lay everybody off and send the paychecks directly to Pete Williams.

That’s the early line on winners and losers. My 900 number, 95 cents for the first minute, provides hourly updates.