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Bomb. Missile. Bomb. Bomb. Missile. Bomb.
By Steven Lee Meyers
Sunday Week in Review
February 21, 1999Not so long ago, Air Force pilots sent to Saudi Arabia and Kuwait to contain Iraq's Saddam Hussein complained that their mission had become routine: Flying monotonous loops in the "no flight" zone over southern Iraq, waiting for hostilities that never came. All that has changed. In the untidy aftermath of December's four-night battering of Iraq, American and British pilots enforcing the southern no-flight zone and the smaller zone in northern Iraq now find themselves dodging Iraq's newly aggressive air defenses and responding with punishing strikes of their own.
The Pentagon does not like to say it, but these skirmishes - coming, on average, every other day - have quickly turned into a low-level war. It is a war of attrition and appears to have no end in sight, since Clinton Administration officials say it will continue as long as Mr. Hussein's forces keep challenging the American and British patrols over Iraq.
Not since the Persian Gulf war in 1991 and, before that, Vietnam - have American forces engaged in such routine combat in such a sustained way over such a prolonged period. Perhaps the closest parallel today is Israel's continuing war against Islamic factions in southern Lebanon.
The recently concluded impeachment trial of President Clinton and other distractions may have deprived the fighting of much attention, but American and British jets have now struck some 70 military targets that the Pentagon said posed a threat. Operating under new rules of engagement, the pilots have broadened their attacks to include air defenses and other targets, not just those that directly confront them.
This new war embraces many of the hallmarks of American military strategy today, including a reliance on technological superiority to overwhelm the enemy and the avoidance of any risk to American lives. But it lacks the guiding principle once known as the Powell Doctrine, after Gen. Col Powell, the former Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff, who held that the United States should never commit American forces to a military campaign until it had a clear idea of the way out.
The Clinton Administration long ago stretched the meaning of the Powell trine to intervene in places like Bosnia, but now it seems to have given it up altogether. Last week, with the United States pledging to send 4,000 American soldiers and marines to the Serbian province of Kosovo if a peace agreement could be reached, Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright, did not even pretend to set a homecoming deadline.
"Welcome to the post-cold-war world," said Eliot A. Cohen, a professor at Johns Hopkins who directed the Air Force's definitive study of the Persian Gulf war in 1991. "This is the kind of imperial policing that the American military is increasingly going to be called upon to do."
The stated purpose of the intensive barrage against Iraq last December was to punish Mr. Hussein for his refusal to co-operate with United Nations weapons inspection and to knock down his ability to menace his neighbors. The goal now is to chip away at the fringes of his military might while stopping short of another all-out assault, though the Administration now openly calls for Mr. Hussein's removal.
Pentagon Officials have defended this new limited strategy. Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen said in an interview that the strikes were steadily eating away at Mr. Hussein's air defenses. Iraq's threats last week against Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Turkey for providing bases or the American British forces simply underscored Mr. Hussein's frustration, Mr. Cohen said. The key he added, is to keep pressure on Mr. Hussein long enough to let diplomatic efforts to undercut him play out. How long will take? He could not say.
"Patience is required," Mr. Cohen said. "This policy is working." Still, the conflict has raised concerns among some American military commanders and lawmakers. "I wish I knew where all of this played out," a senior uniformed official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Senator John McCain of Arizona, a Republican and former Navy pilot who spent seven years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, has repeatedly criticized the Administration's approach, saying it puts pilots at risk without truly punishing Mr. Hussein. "We continue to be in a reactive mode," He said. That's what makes this new war of attrition frustrating to critics. Even though the skirmishes have been overwhelmingly one-sided, with American and British jets able to strike virtually at will, the strategy is to hold the line, not to unleash enough force to defeat Iraq.
"It's something much less than more," said William Quandt, professor of government and foreign affairs at the University of Virginia. "It's a kind of symbolic show of force on our side to make a political statement, which is: There are some things Saddam cannot do without paying a price." Mr. Quandt called this an "on-the-cheap strategy." But it is not without costs.
Michael O'Hanlon, an analyst at the Brookings Institution in Washington, said enforcement of the no-flight zone eight years after the end of the Persian Gulf war was taking a toll on resources and morale. He noted that many Air Force pilots are not re-enlisting, at least in part because of the strain of repeated tours in the Persian Gulf. Then there is the risk of a nasty surprise. The one thing that could change everything is the downing of an American pilot. The prospect of an American or British prisoner of war being paraded through Baghdad to gain some kind of crude diplomatic leverage appears to be Mr. Hussein's only goal in opening his air defenses to repeated counterattacks.
"In a military sense, the attrition clearly favors the United States and Britain," said Anthony H. Cordesman, a military analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "The question is, Will Iraq get lucky? No matter how good the American military is, mistakes happen."
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