The US has not held general surrender talks with President Saddam Hussein's government, and efforts to persuade parts of his military to give up did not yield results good enough to avert a major assault, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said this evening.
"We have been issuing, through a variety of methods, communications urging the Iraqi military to surrender, and apparently what we have done thus far has not been sufficiently persuasive that they would have done that," Mr Rumsfeld told a Pentagon briefing.
"It may very well be that, with the initiation of the ground war last evening and the initiation of the air war this afternoon, that we may find people responding and surrendering."
Mr Rumsfeld spoke shortly after the United States launched a massive aerial bombardment of Baghdad and other locations in Iraq zeroing in on several hundred military targets.
Mr Rumsfeld said thus far a few hundred Iraqi troops had surrendered to invading US and British forces.