Global Policy Forum

By Vernon Loeb

U.S. 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 U.N. weapons inspections proceed and diplomats look for ways to head off a full-scale war.

The airstrikes have increased not only in number but in sophistication, with pilots using precision-guided bombs to strike what defense officials describe as mobile surface-to-air missiles, air defense radars, command centers, communications facilities and fiber-optic cable repeater stations.

On Monday, the heaviest day of bombing in at least a year, U.S. and British jets for the first time struck five targets, hitting an air defense command site at Tallil, 170 miles southeast of Baghdad, and four repeater stations in southeastern 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 airstrikes, which they said included civilian targets in the southern city of Basra.

U.S. military officials said the attacks are initiated only in response to Iraqi fire. They said the increase mirrors an increase by Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's forces in anti-aircraft and surface-to-air missile attacks on U.S. and British jets. But they acknowledged that military planners are taking full advantage of the opportunity to target Iraq's integrated air defense network for destruction in a systemic fashion that will ease the way for U.S. air and ground forces if President Bush decides war is the only option for disarming Iraq.

The aggressive tactics were ordered by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who disclosed in September that he had urged commanders to focus their retaliatory strikes not just on Iraqi radar and missile systems but also on air defense communications centers in an attempt to degrade Iraq's air defense network.

Last month, U.S. military officials acknowledged that 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," said Jim Wilkinson, a spokesman for the U.S. Central Command in Tampa. "Every coalition action is in direct response to Iraqi hostile acts against our pilots, or the regime's attempts to materially improve is military infrastructure south of the 33rd parallel."

Anthony H. Cordesman, a former defense official at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the increased U.S. air attacks are about far more than retaliation. "You enforce containment when you carry out these strikes, and you deter Iraq from any kind of military adventure," 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."

Degrading air defenses in southern Iraq, said Loren B. Thompson, a defense analyst at the Lexington Institute with ties to defense contractors and the Pentagon, will enable the U.S. military "to send in almost anything its wants -- bombers, fighters and helicopters with Special Operations Forces." Freedom of movement across the border for U.S. aircraft would be especially important in a war against Iraq, Thompson said, since the Pentagon envisions flying thousands of troops into airfields inside Iraq aboard slow-moving C-17 transports.

Retired Air Force Col. John Warden, a key figure in planning the U.S. air campaign against Iraq in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, said every radar system and missile destroyed by U.S. aircraft will help war planners. "Anything that would need to be knocked out that is knocked out now saves some sorties once the war starts," 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 U.S. military established the no-fly zone over southern Iraq in 1991 and over northern Iraq in 1992 to enforce U.N. resolutions to protect Shiites and Kurds from attack by the Iraqi military and to keep Baghdad from moving its forces toward Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Over much of the past decade, U.S. and British warplanes have patrolled the zones and engaged in periodic airstrikes 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 U.S. and British aircraft to patrol the northern no-fly zone from Turkish bases and exercises some control over the operation.

The United Nations does not recognize the no-fly zones or the U.S. assertion that it is enforcing U.N. resolutions. Last fall, Russia's foreign ministry said escalating attacks by U.S. and British warplanes against Iraqi air defenses have made it more difficult for U.N. efforts to resume weapons inspections in Iraq.

Iraq says it fires at the aircraft because they are violating Iraqi airspace. "Not many people realize that a war has been going on for the last several years in the no-fly zone," Gen. Amir Saadi, a top Hussein adviser, said in a December interview. "The very people that Britain and the United States claim to be protecting, they're killing them, maiming them, depriving them of their normal livelihood and also destroying the infrastructure which is there to serve them."

U.S. military officials say they go to great lengths to avoid civilian casualties. They would not comment on how much the attacks have degraded Iraq's air defenses. But they said Iraq continues to maintain "integrated" air defenses using new technology acquired in spite of weapons sanctions and tactics to avoid detection and attack.

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