As Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld noted, the battle plan that led to the Americans success was that of General Tommy Franks, an Army officer appointed to head the Central Command by the Clinton Adminstration. More important, the military forces that executed that plan so boldly and bravely were for the most part recruited, trained, and equipped by the Clinton administration.

The first Bush defense budet went into effect on 10/1/2002, and none of the funds in that budget have yet to have an impact on the quality of the men and women in the armed services, their readiness for combat, or the weapons they used to obliterate Iraqi forces.

Given the way that Bush and his surrogates disparaged Clinton's approach to the military in his campaign, this is ironic. The president and his advisers claimed that Clinton had diminshed the armed forces' fighting edge by turning them into social workers and sending them too often on "useless" nation-building exercises. These same people also claimed that Clinton had so underfunded the military that it was in a condition similar to that which existed on the eve of Pearl Harbor.

Throughout the summer and fall of 2000, Vice President Cheney summed up the Bush team's sentiment toward what Clintion had done to the military. He went around the country telling the military and the nation that help and additional support were on the way for our troops.

Anyone examining the facts would know that these claims were bogus. The Clinton administration actually spent more money on defense than the outgoing administration of President Bush. The smaller outlays during the first Bush administration were developed and approved by Dick Cheney and Sec'ty of State Colin Powell, who were then serving as secretary of defense and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff respectively.

Clintons' last secretary of defense, William Cohen, a former Republican Senator from Maine, turned over to Rumsfeld a defense budget that was higher in real terms than what James Schlesinger had bequeathed to Rumsfeld when he took over the Pentagon the first time in 1975 at the height of the Cold War.

Not only did Clinton spend a large amount of money on the military; most of it was spent wisely. In the first Persian Gulf War, less than 10 percent of the bombs and missiles that were dropped on Iraq were smart weapons. That number jumped to 70 percent during this war because the Clinton administration ordered large quantities of upgrade munitions that made these 'dumb' weapons smart. The Clinton administration also invested heavily in the technology that gave the on-scene commanders a much more vivid picture of the battlefield than a decade ago.

It was the Clinton adminstration that improved the accuracy of the Tomahawk cruise missile and upgraded the Patriot missiles, which was so much more effective this time than the original Patriot in the first Persian Gulf War. The Clinton adminstration also kept the quality of our military personnel high by closing the gap between the military, and private sector compensation, a gap that the first Bush admininstarion had allowed to grow, and improvng retirement and health benefits for military retirees.

So if this latest military effort warrants a victory parade for the troops, lets inist that Clinton and his secretaries of defense are invited. They deserve it. And if the Bush adminstration wants to learn how to rebuid the nation of Iraq, they might ask their precessors how to go about it.

Lawrence J. Korb. former asst secy of defense under P:resident Ronald Reagan.