IRAQ: Air raids on Iraqi installations, apparently to enforce UN no-fly zones, suggest America and Britain are softening up the enemy, reports Vernon Loeb from Washington
US and British warplanes have bombed more than 80 targets in Iraq's southern no-fly zone over the past five months, conducting an escalating air war even as UN weapons inspections proceed and diplomats look for ways to head off a full-scale war.
The air strikes have increased not only in number but in sophistication, with pilots using precision-guided bombs to strike what defence officials say are mobile surface-to-air missiles, air defence radar, command centres, communications facilities and fibre-optic cable repeater stations.
On Monday, the heaviest day of bombing in at least a year, US and British jets for the first time struck five targets in a single day, hitting an air defence command site at Tallil, 170 miles south-east of Baghdad, and four repeater stations in south-eastern Iraq.
Iraq says many of the attacks have been on non-military targets and have resulted in civilian deaths. The Iraqis said six people were injured in Monday's air strikes, which, they claimed, included civilian targets in the southern city of Basra.
US military officials said the attacks are only initiated in response to Iraqi fire, and that the increase mirrors an increase by President Saddam Hussein's forces in anti-aircraft and surface-to-air missile attacks on US and British jets.
But they acknowledged that military planners are taking advantage of the opportunity Mr Saddam is handing them, targeting Iraq's integrated air defence network for destruction to ease the way for US air and ground forces if President Bush decides war is the only option for disarming Iraq.
The aggressive tactics were ordered by the US Defence Secretary, Mr Donald Rumsfeld, who disclosed in September that he had urged commanders to focus their retaliatory strikes not just on Iraqi radar and missile systems, but on air defence communications centres in an attempt to degrade Iraq's overall air defence network.
Last month, US military officials admitted they used an incident of Iraqi fire on jets patrolling the northern no-fly zone to justify a retaliatory strike in the south. The tactic represented another escalation of enforcement activity by the Bush administration.
"The Iraqi regime has increased its attacks on the coalition, so the coalition has increased its efforts to protect its pilots," Mr Jim Wilkinson, a spokesman for the US Central Command in Tampa, said. "Every coalition action is in direct response to Iraqi hostile acts against our pilots, or the regime's attempts to materially improve its military infrastructure south of the 33rd parallel."
Mr Anthony Cordesman, a former defence official now at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, said the increased US air attacks are about far more than retaliation, however.
"You enforce containment when you carry out these strikes and you deter Iraq from any kind of military adventure," Mr Cordesman said. "And when you conduct these strikes, you are preparing part of the battleground for a war. But it doesn't mean that you've gone to war, and it doesn't mean war is inevitable."
Mr Loren Thompson, a defence analyst at the Lexington Institute with ties to defence contractors and the Pentagon, said degrading air defences in southern Iraq will enable the US military "to send in almost anything it wants - bombers, fighters and helicopters with Special Operations Forces" should Mr Bush go to war.
Freedom of movement across the border for US aircraft would be especially important in a war against Iraq, Mr Thompson said, since the Pentagon envisions flying thousands of troops directly into airfields inside Iraq aboard slow-moving C-17 transports.
Retired Air Force Col John Warden, a key figure in planning the US air campaign against Iraq in the 1991 Gulf War, said every radar system and missile destroyed by US aircraft in advance of a conflict will help war planners.
"Anything that would need to be knocked out that is knocked out now saves some sorties once the war starts," Col Warden said. "I suspect some of the attacks are really just an intensification of the tit for tat that has gone on for a long time - but with some obvious value in the event of a war."
The US military established the no-fly zone over southern Iraq in 1991 and over northern Iraq in 1992 to enforce UN resolutions to protect Shia Muslims and Kurds from attack by the Iraqi military, and to keep Baghdad from moving its forces towards Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.
Over the past decade, US and British warplanes have patrolled the zones and engaged in periodic air strikes against Iraqi targets, but nothing on the scale of the past five months. Virtually all of the attacks occur in the southern no-fly zone out of deference to Turkey, which allows US and British aircraft to patrol the northern no-fly zone from Turkish bases.