Global Policy Forum

By Michael R. Gordon

Soon after the 1991 Persian Gulf war came to an end, senior aides to President George Bush predicted that Saddam Hussein would be overthrown within six months. A decade later, much of the old Bush national security team is back in power - and still trying to fashion a plan to contain the ambitions of the Iraqi leader.

The American and British air strikes carried out Friday against radar installations and anti-defense sites near Baghdad will reduce the growing risk to pilots who patrol the southern no-flight zone.

And they also send the message that the new Bush administration is determined to keep the pressure on Iraq - even as Washington ponders its options. Since Iraq fired more surface-to-air missiles in January at American and British patrols than in all of last year, officials here say a riposte was necessary.

But Friday's air strikes do not decisively change the military situation in the Persian Gulf or provide a guide for how the incoming Bush administration hopes finally to dispense with the man whose survival has haunted Washington for years.

The United States has been reasonably successful in containing Iraqi power. But it has yet to figure out how to oust Saddam Hussein, or compel him to allow unfettered United Nations weapons inspections. The latest high-tech air strikes are more of a signal than a strategy.

President George W. Bush and his aides are, of course, just at the beginning, still hammering out a new and, they say, more muscular Iraqi policy. There are no easy answers.

Economic sanctions are already in place and could no doubt be more strictly enforced. But it will take considerable lobbying by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell just to maintain them in the face of France, Russia, Middle Eastern and Asian states who see business in Baghdad.

The new Bush administration seems to pinning much of its hope on the Iraqi opposition, which will soon receive $29 million in aid. So far, the opposition has not amounted to much. No one in the American political or military establishment has the appetite for another war with Saddam Hussein that might settle things once and for all.

That leaves air strikes, already a well-tried option. In 1998, for example, the United States and Britain carried out a four-day raid, after United Nations weapons inspectors withdrew from Iraq in the face of Iraqi intransigence.

Standing alongside President Vicente Fox of Mexico on Friday, Mr. Bush called the air strike routine. In fact the attack, which involved two dozen strike aircraft firing missiles at targets close to Baghdad and approved at the highest levels of the American and British governments after careful planning, was anything but routine. But, with no quick fixes for its Iraq problem, the Bush administration is evidently wary of raising expectations at home or anxieties among nervous allies abroad.

"Operations such as the one last night would not be needed if Saddam stopped attacking us," Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain said today. "But as long as he does, I will continue to take the steps necessary to protect our forces and to prevent Saddam from once again wreaking havoc, suffering and death."

For now, Saddam Hussein may not even be America's most dangerous foe. Osama bin Laden, the Saudi-born extremist who is the FBI's most wanted terrorist suspect, has in recent years struck with more deadly effect at American interests, orchestrating the August 1998 bombing of two American embassies in East Africa, and is suspected of being behind last October's bombing of the destroyer Cole in Yemen.

Saddam Hussein, in contrast, is confined within his country, visibly defiant, seemingly determined to preserve some modicum of Iraq's programs for developing chemical, biological or nuclear weapons - and apparently interested in shooting down an American or British pilot.

That Mr. Hussein has held onto power for so long is a testimony to the ruthless way in which he runs Iraqi society. While the first Bush administration never explicitly set his ouster as an objective in the 1991 conflict, American military planners did what they could to loosen his grip on power. American warplanes and missiles struck his bunkers, intelligence services and political apparatus in the hope that his regime would be shattered. But he hung on without major internal challenges.

In one of history's perhaps more curious twists, the first Bush administration relaxed the military pressure against the Saddam Hussein regime at a time when it was in the best position to squeeze the Iraqi leader.

Concerned that the American military would be portrayed by the media as piling on in a one-sided rout, the Bush administration halted the 1991 ground war at 100 hours, a move that allowed much of the Republican Guard in Iraq, the most effective and loyal force in Saddam Hussein's military, to escape.

Nor did the Bush administration rush to impose a no-flight zone in southern Iraq when Shiite rebels were attacked by Iraqi helicopters in the wake of the Gulf war. The Bush administration did not declare a southern no-flight zone until August 1992, some 18 months after the end of the war.

Bush administration officials later explained that they were initially wary of establishing an air-exclusion zone in the south to parallel the one they set up in northern Iraq in 1991 to protect the Kurds. A second no-flight zone, officials initially worried, might entangle the United States in an Iraqi civil war or encourage the breakup of Iraq, which Bush strategists saw as a counterweight to Iran.

Having put the world on notice that it has the will to keep the pressure on Iraq, the new Bush team faces the task of explaining its broader strategy, particularly when General Powell visits the Middle East later this month.

President George W. Bush, however, is not the only one to make Iraq the target of his first major military action. President Clinton's first military strike was also against Iraq: a June 1993 attack in which 23 cruise missiles were fired at an intelligence headquarters in Baghdad.

Mr. Clinton ordered the strike in retaliation for an assassination attempt against George W. Bush's father, which Saddam Hussein was accused of sponsoring. General Powell is familiar with that attack as well. He was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time and delivered the Pentagon briefing on the raid.