It still wasn’t clear just how difficult that job would be – whether the allies could defeat Saddam’s Army mainly from the air, at relatively little cost, or whether their ground forces would have to wage bloody trench warfare to dislodge the Iraqis from a maze of fortifications in and around Kuwait. So far, the land war amounted to only a few skirmishes, and the massive air campaign was producing mixed results. Iraq’s air defenses were badly damaged, its radars mostly silent and its warplanes in hiding below ground. Allied attackers roamed the sky virtually at will, with fewer losses than might have been expected from a training exercise. Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, the allied commander in the Persian Gulf, said he was surprised by the enemy’s “total lack of aggressiveness. Given his rhetoric before,” said the general, “we thought we’d be in more of a fight.”
Yet for all their success, the allies could not prevent Saddam from lashing out when he chose to, with barrages of Scud missiles and a threatening spill of oil into the gulf. In addition, the air campaign was behind schedule and sometimes off target. A progress report:
Originally planned to last nine days, the air war had slipped by at least a week because of bad weather and the diversion of planes to search for Scud launchers. “We lost momentum, and the Iraqis had time to get their breath back,” complained a senior U.S. official.
“The bomb-damage assessments have not been as encouraging as the public has been led to believe,” an allied intelligence source told “Newsweek.’ Iraq was repairing damaged airfields, roads and bridges much faster than the United States had anticipated. And after the first full 24 hours of pounding the Republican Guards, their combat potential was “degraded” by only 5 percent, according to another source.
Despite allied precautions, Iraqi civilian casualties were higher than either side had acknowledged so far, sources said, though no precise figures were available. U.S. satellite pictures showed heavy damage to a civilian area in the southern city of Basra, apparently caused when a bombing run on an air base overshot its target.
Air Force officers predicted privately that the loss rate for allied warplanes will increase this week and next as the focus shifts to low-level attacks on Army positions bristling with surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) and thousands of antiaircraft guns. “Any pilot will tell you,” Powell said, “that the real danger is guns.” British Tornado attack planes, which flew low-level missions from the start, had much higher casualty rates than the Americans.
Nonetheless, the overall picture was promising. Powell said the allies had “achieved air superiority” over the entire theater of war. Iraq’s nuclear-, biological- and chemical-warfare facilities were badly damaged. Its two nuclear reactors, Powell said, were “gone, they’re down; they’re finished.”
“Soon will come the moment of truth when the Americans must decide if they are ready to pay the price of ground fighting,” said Yehoshua Saguy, a former head of Israel military intelligence. But the delay in the air war had a side effect that was beneficial both militarily and politically. It gave the allies the option of postponing the start of the land war, in the hope that continued bombing might mean lighter casualties later on. Schwarzkopf could launch a surprise attack at any time. Most sources predicted, however, that the air war would go on for another couple of weeks, or even longer, before the land campaign begins in earnest. “We aren’t going to start a ground war until they’re damn near dead anyway,” said a senior White House official. “We’re going to roar B-52s down there until you can’t see the sky.”
Already the Iraqis were being forced to fight partly deaf, dumb and blind. “We have significantly degraded Saddam’s communications ability, to the point where he has to jury-rig another one,” Schwarzkopf said in an interview with “Newsweek’s’ Melinda Liu and other reporters. “We’ve completely destroyed his integrated air defense. Any time he has to fire surface-to-air missiles, he has to ground every one of his airplanes, because he has no radar control whatsoever over the SAMs. All he’s doing is shooting them up in the air, sort of like you shoot a shotgun at a bird, hoping that one of the pellets will hit.”
The weak point in Iraq’s early-warning net was discovered on its southern border, where there was a gap in radar coverage. As Stealth aircraft and cruise missiles made the first attacks, U.S. commandos were helicoptered into Iraq through the gap. They widened it by blowing up two early-warning radar stations. This created a radar-free corridor for attack planes, some of which fanned out to destroy the air-defense control center and radars in Iraq’s southern sector. The radars were all pointed south, and the warplanes swung around to the north to attack them.
The few Iraqi planes that came up to fight last week were quickly dealt with. A Saudi pilot, Capt. Ayedh al-Shamrani, became the first allied airman to shoot down to Iraqis. Flying an F-15, he pounced on a pair of French-made Mirage F-1s as they flew south loaded with bombs and air-to-surface Exocet missiles. The Saudi’s kill made compelling television. When his cockpit tape was replayed, viewers could see the cross hairs lock on and the Sidewinder missiles fire. They could hear the pilot announce excitedly: “First target, splash! Second target, splash!”
By refusing to come out to fight, the Iraqis preserved most of their Air Force: more than 750 warplanes, by Pentagon estimate, out of 809 that began the war. Some thought Saddam was not pleased with this display of helplessness. Interfax, an independent Soviet news agency, said the commanders of the Air Force and the antiaircraft defenses had been executed for failing to fight harder. The agency attributed its information to “well informed” sources in the Soviet Defense Ministry; the ministry and the Iraqis denied the report. American officials knew nothing about it, but they pointed out that the Soviets still have some military contacts with Iraq and might be in a position to know. Given Saddam’s record for ruthlessness, the story did not sound implausible. “He does have a very dynamic zero-defects program,” said Lt. Gen. Thomas Kelly, the Pentagon operations chief.
Iraq did not admit to the full extent of damage it suffered in civilian areas, presumably for fear of of demoralizing its own people. But it did begin to denounce the Americans for hitting individual civilian targets, such as a purported “baby-milk plant.” U.S. officials identified that facility as the country’s main biological-weapons factory. According to one source, the evidence included “human-source material.”
Overall, the Pentagon continued to estimate that its air-war missions were 80 percent successful. But what did that mean? By late last week, the allies had flown 20,000 sorties. Of those, only 11,000 or so were combat sorties; the others were flights by tankers, transports, radar planes and other nonfighting aircraft. And most of the 11,000 combat sorties did not attack ground targets. Only about one plane in four carried “strike munitions.” The others were responsible for missions like air cover, electronic jamming and reconnaisance. For the approximately 2,700 sorties that were meant to deliver bombs or missiles, success meant “that the aircraft got to its target, delivered its ordnance and returned,” Powell said–the definition that produced the 80 percent figure. But how many of those 2,000 sorties actually “damaged’ the target? One source said that while there was “room for a lot of interpretation,” the satellite pictures suggested an effectiveness rate of “somewhere between 66 and 75 percent.”
Saddam’s efforts to retaliate were militarily insignificant. The release of oil into the gulf might interfere slightly with Marine landings on the Kuwaiti coast when the land war begins. It could reduce the allies’ water supply by knocking out desalination plants. But those are logistical problems; Americans are adept at solving them. The allies also charged Iraq with setting fire to Kuwait oil installations, sending up columns of thick, greasy smoke. The allied command said the smoke screen would not interfere with air operations. Smoke-screening was a game two could play. Sources told “Newsweek” that at least one of the fires–in oil-filled trenches along the Kuwaiti border–was set by the allies. The reason: Schwarzkopf wanted to mask his preparations for a ground offensive, just in case the Iraqis were still receiving intelligence from Soviet satellites.
The Scud attacks were a more serious distraction. Although they posed no significant danger to allied forces, the threat to Israeli and Saudi Arabian civilians compelled Schwarzkopf to divert important resources to the search for the launchers and the 500 or so extended-range Scuds remaining in the Iraqi arsenal. “I’d frankly be more afraid of standing out in a lightning storm in souther Georgia than I would be in the streets of Riyadh when the Scuds come down,” groused the general.
Civilians at ground zero were less nonchalant. “I don’t understand why the fixed launchers were not knocked out,” said Aharon Levran, a general in the reserves. “I don’t want to blame the Americans, but it’s not mission impossible.” Patriot anti-missile missiles managed to shoot down or deflect most of the Scuds, though lives were lost in the process. Israel continued its policy of not retaliating for the attacks, sparing America’s Arab allies any discomfort. A poll showed that 80 percent of the Israeli public supported the decision not to strike back at Iraq. Forbearance had its price. Last week Israel asked Washington for $3 billion, the amount it said it had lost from the war, and $10 billion more to pay for resettling Soviet Jews.
A U.S. diplomat called that “nothing less than blackmail.” But Israel’s courageous restraint under Iraqi attack had a strong impact on U.S. public opinion. In the latest “Newsweek’ Poll, 64 percent of the Americans surveyed said their sympathies were more with Israel than with the Arabs, compared with 42 percent last October. The poll also suggested that Americans may not object too strenuously if Israel resists any effort to settle the Palestinian issue once the war is over. In the latest sample, American sentiment for pressuring Israel into a compromise dropped from 60 percent in October to 45 percent.
The postwar era is not yet at hand. The conflict may well get uglier and more desperate before Saddam is beaten. U.S. officials fear he is husbanding his resources–the Air Force, surviving stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons–for what a Bush aide calls “one great move…to try to change the character of the war.” Says Oxford historian Robert O’Neill: “I think his strategy now is to accept defeat but make it a Pyrrhic victory for the allies.” The allies could deny Saddam that satisfaction by delaying the land war indefinitely. “We can refuse to give him the great clash of arms,” says O’Neill. “We can besiege him in his southern positions…until his troops run out of food, supplies and water.”
The trouble with a long, uncertain siege is that it might enable Saddam to survive the war with some or most of his offensive military capability intact. Destroying that power has been a high-priority (if unstated) goal for Bush all along. If Saddam had withdrawn from Kuwait by Jan. 15, Bush would have had no choice but to leave the Iraqi Army and arsenal untouched. Now that war has begun, the president intends to dismantle what one of his top advisers calls “the Saddam machine.” Whether Saddam himself survives the war is not the main point. The objective is to eliminate Iraq’s ability to overwhelm its neighbors ever again. That will be a delicate operation; completely destroying the armed forces, especially the Republican Guard, might lead to the dissolution of Iraq and then to another round of perilous instability in the Persian Gulf region. But destroying Saddam’s ability to disturb the peace is the goal that George Bush intends to pursue, on the land as in the air.
At what point do you think the United States should stop military action against Iraq?
10% After Iraqi military capability is destroyed 25% After Iraqi forces actually leave Kuwait 47% Only after Saddam Hussein’s government is removed from power in IraqA BAG OF TRICKS
As he showed last week by fouling the Persian Gulf with oil, Saddam Hussein is capable of surprises outside the conventional conduct of war. Other possibilities:
Kuwaitis could be the next “human shields.” Iraq holds up to 8,000 prisoners near Basra, the southern military hub and a prime allied target.
Iraq could try to foil an amphibious landing by throwing high-voltage power lines in the surf–a tactic used against Iran.
Low-grade troops in Kuwait could mount a suicide assault against fixed Marine positions, backed by long-range artillery armed with poison gas.
