The Battlefront: A Long Siege Ahead

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

Remember all the chatter about a short war? Well, forget it. "We would prefer not to talk in terms of days or weeks but months," says White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater. About the earliest anybody in the Bush Administration expects victory over Iraq is mid-March; British estimates run to mid-April or so. Which of course would still be short by comparison with World War II, Korea or Vietnam, but hardly the lightning victory that the success of the first air strikes on Baghdad had led some commentators to anticipate.

Does that mean the allied strategy is being foiled? Just the opposite. As the fighting enters its third week, it is -- with few exceptions -- going closely according to plan. In fact, according to two plans: the one drawn by the U.S. and its allies and the one apparently being followed by Saddam Hussein. Driven by opposing political and military reasons, both have shaped scenarios for a war lasting months.

The allies want to hold off as long as possible on any bloody ground assault against the more than half a million Iraqi troops deeply dug into Kuwait. First the coalition will try to isolate those forces by incessant bombing of their supply lines, hoping that Saddam's soldiers, cut off from food, water and reinforcements, will pull out or surrender. If not, plans call for massive bombing of key points in the heavily fortified Iraqi front line before the tanks and infantry go into the breach. That probably means several additional weeks of aerial war before any serious ground fighting starts. And if a powerful ground assault does become inevitable, a senior American commander estimates that it will take four to eight weeks more to succeed.

All of which, strangely enough, dovetails with Saddam's thinking. The allies are attempting to minimize casualties; Saddam will try to make the war supremely bloody. To exactly that end, however, he will try to drag out the fighting as long as possible. Right now he is "hunkering down" -- in the words of General Colin Powell, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff -- putting up only minimal resistance to the air campaign and saving all possible resources to fight what the Iraqi leader keeps calling "the mother of all battles" on the ground.

"Probably Saddam is banking on absorbing our air offensive and our ground ; offensive, but inflicting maximum casualties on U.S. forces," says General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, commander of the allied forces in the gulf. "Having done that, if the situation is promising, he would launch a counteroffensive. If not, having inflicted these casualties, he would rely on American public opinion to bring this whole thing to an end. And all this time he tries to portray himself as a hero to what he perceives as a supportive Arab world."

That strategy does not preclude early unconventional attacks to keep the allies off balance. Last week Saddam turned to what the Bush Administration called environmental terrorism. Iraqi soldiers in occupied Kuwait deliberately pumped gigantic amounts of crude oil into the Persian Gulf, producing an oil slick that the Pentagon estimated was a dozen times the size of the one that the Exxon Valdez deposited on the shores of Alaska early in 1989. The slick might have been intended in part to foil allied attempts at an amphibious landing. More important, it threatened to drift along currents that would take it into the water-intake systems of the giant desalinization plant at Jubail, Saudi Arabia, cutting off drinking water and electricity for all of the kingdom's Eastern province, site of most of the oil wells.

THE HUNT FOR SCUDS

Iraq also continued its sporadic missile attacks. Last week it launched salvos of Scud missiles at Israel and Saudi Arabia. Patriot antimissiles blew up most of them in the air, but six got through to hit the Israeli cities of Tel Aviv and Haifa, and at least one struck Riyadh. Four Israelis and one Saudi died during the raids; at least 130 Israelis and 30 Saudis were injured, and more than 1,000 Israelis were made homeless. During the first 10 days of the war, Iraq fired only about 50 Scuds, suggesting that it is saving hundreds more for later use. None so far has carried a chemical warhead; allied experts are debating whether Iraq has mastered the technology of delivering poison gas effectively by missile. The trick is to get the warhead to explode at just the right height so that the gas neither dissipates harmlessly into the atmosphere nor collects in a dense but small puddle on the ground.

The raids are making Saddam a hero to many Arabs, whose glee at seeing Israelis suffer is horrifying. But so far the attacks have backfired in their political purpose. Though Jerusalem insists that it will eventually retaliate, officials have assured the U.S. that it will do so sooner rather than later only if future attacks release poison gas or kill large numbers of Israelis.

The Egyptian, Syrian and Saudi Arabian governments have promised that their forces will continue to fight alongside the U.S. against Iraq even if Israel does strike back. And some reports have it that Syrian President Hafez Assad has quietly let Israel know it can fly bombers through his air-space on a retaliatory raid, so long as they return by a different route. Assad could then claim that the Israeli planes had whizzed over Syria too rapidly to intercept. Some danger remains that Israeli jets might get into dogfights over Jordan, possibly setting off the Arab-Israeli warfare that Saddam is trying so hard to ignite. But for the moment Israel seems likely to come out of the war strengthened militarily and economically by new U.S. aid and basking in praise for its restraint from the U.S. and other nations that only months ago were damning it for stubbornness.

Searching for mobile Scud launchers last week did divert allied warplanes from bombing targets of greater military importance. That and heavy clouds over Iraq and Kuwait early in the week briefly slowed the tempo of the air assault. Many allied planes carry infrared devices and guidance systems that enable them to hit targets they cannot see. But assessment of bomb damage can only be done visually, which is impossible through clouds. That in turn makes it difficult to decide which planes should be sent to hit targets a second time and which can pound new ones.

But as skies cleared late in the week, the bombing resumed with greater intensity than ever. On Thursday allied planes mounted a record 3,000 sorties (one plane on one flight); in the first 10 days, sorties totaled 20,000, of which more than half were combat missions. In the early days of the war, American briefers gave a misleading impression by lumping all sorties -- including refueling flights and AWACS flights -- together, without disclosing that many were not devoted to "dropping iron," as Air Force lingo puts it. Even so, for sustained intensity the air campaign far outranks any other in history.

The big change last week was a switch in targets. In the first days of the war, bombers concentrated on blasting Iraqi nuclear facilities, chemical- and biological-weapons plants (including one factory in Baghdad that the Iraqis said manufactured baby formula but that the White House insisted was devoted to preparations for germ warfare), command-and-control centers and, in particular, the Iraqi air force. At a midweek briefing, Powell and Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney counted a bit more than 40 Iraqi planes shot down or destroyed on the ground. That compares with 22 allied planes, half of them American, lost in combat, nearly all to ground fire -- a startlingly low figure given the number of sorties. As many as 750 Iraqi planes may have survived intact, however, either in underground bunkers or by fleeing to bases or highways and secret shelters in the north that are difficult for allied warplanes, most of which fly out of Saudi Arabia, to reach. But they can be, and have been, bombed from Turkish bases that the Ankara government, after some hesitation and at considerable internal political cost, has agreed to let the U.S. use for offensive purposes. In a curious twist, two dozen Iraqi fighters and transport planes landed at airfields in Iran last week. The pilots may have defected or been seeking safe refuge from allied planes; it is also possible that Iraq has struck a secret deal with Iran to keep the planes there until the war is over.

Whatever Saddam is saving his planes for, they are not a factor in the battle now. Many may be unable to take off because runways they might use have been bombed full of craters. Powell displayed a map showing only five of 66 airfields at which the U.S. spotted any activity last week. When the Iraqi planes do fly, their performance in dogfighting is miserable. Last Friday two Iraqi jets tried to stage an attack with Exocet missiles on British ships in the Persian Gulf; a Saudi pilot shot down both. In any case, the U.S. and Britain claim to have achieved practical air superiority.

The allies are using that superiority to shift into a new phase of the air war. They will continue to revisit old targets, such as runways that often can be repaired within 48 hours and must be bombed repeatedly to keep them out of action. But beginning last week they concentrated increasingly on targets such as transport lines, fuel dumps and tank and artillery parks. Again and again they hit the southern city of Basra, which according to legend is near the site of the Garden of Eden and once was home port to Sinbad the Sailor. Today it is the main supply gateway and communications center for the Iraqi troops in Kuwait.

A particular target was and will remain the Republican Guards, Iraq's choicest troops, mostly stationed just north of the Iraq-Kuwait border. They are the key to an eventual land battle; they form a mobile reserve that is supposed to reinforce weak points, counterattack against any U.S. breakthrough and stop any unauthorized retreat by frontline troops, shooting them if necessary. "The Republican Guards have a very good engineering capability," says Colonel Manfred Rietsch, pilot of an F/A-18 Hornet and commander of Marine Air Group 11. "They are very well camouflaged and dug in." Nonetheless, he says, "we are bombing tanks, APCs ((armored personnel carriers)), bunkers and berms." That kind of bombing will continue, and probably intensify, to the end of the war. Says General Powell: "Our strategy to go after this army ((in Kuwait)) is very, very simple. First we're going to cut it off, and then we're going to kill it."

THE ALLIED BLUEPRINT

The overall allied strategy is more complicated and is driven as much by political as by military considerations. While Powell says his directives are only to force the Iraqis out of Kuwait, President Bush and his aides are talking, sometimes out loud, of war aims that go much further. Some seem contradictory. The U.S. intends to smash Iraq's offensive military power so that it is no longer a menace to neighbors. Yet Washington wishes to leave enough of the Iraqi army intact to keep the nation (under a regime succeeding a presumably ousted or assassinated Saddam) from being carved up by such neighbors as Iran, Syria and Turkey.

Whether the allied forces can calibrate the level of destruction so finely is, to put it mildly, uncertain. Nevertheless, the U.S. is already thinking of what kind of postwar Middle East a post-Saddam Iraq will inhabit. Among other things, Washington plans a hard push for Israeli-Arab peace. That helps explain why it has been willing to expend so much effort hunting for the militarily insignificant Scuds. Even if enough of those missiles survived and hit Israel to goad the Jewish state into a retaliatory strike, that probably would no longer change the course of the war, given the Arab states' pledges to stay loyal to the coalition. But a counterstrike in which Israelis killed large numbers of Arabs would poison the atmosphere for a postwar Middle East peace conference.

These political goals have heavily influenced battlefield strategy, beginning with the initial choice of bombing targets. Strange as it seems now, some tacticians before the war were worried that the allies would win too quickly; an overwhelming assault just might induce Saddam to pull out of Kuwait and sue for peace in a few days, with his personal power and most of his military machine intact. So they hit Iraq's nuclear reactors and chemical- weapons plants right off the bat to make sure that some of the dictator's terror arsenal was eliminated no matter what happened. Most of it was in fact destroyed, though Iraq could still launch a horrendous chemical attack with bombs and artillery shells that were manufactured and stockpiled before the war.

The composition of the attacking air force in the first few days was also partly political. Besides the U.S. and Britain, the participants included Saudi Arabia, which had to be seen as a full partner from the very beginning to counter any impression among the American public that rich Saudi sheiks were getting the U.S. to fight their battles; Kuwait, for much the same reason; and France and Italy, to cement those somewhat reluctant nations into the anti-Iraq coalition.

While no one worries anymore that Saddam will give up too soon, U.S. strategists still insist they could end the war much faster than they now plan if they were to launch an all-out, shoot-everything-at-once land-sea-air campaign. They will not do so, they say, because it would cause ghastly casualties, Iraqi as well as American and allied. Their proclaimed choice, reiterated by Cheney and Powell last week, is to fight a much more measured campaign, accepting a longer war as the price of avoiding a bloodbath.

Politics is also on the mind of the dwindling number of American strategists who favor a ground attack sooner rather than later. A prolonged air war, in their opinion, conveys the very impression the opposing school hopes to avoid: American pilots killing helpless Arabs. A ground assault, on the other hand, would at least visibly engage Iraqis against other Arabs: the Saudi, Egyptian and Syrian troops who are expected to be in the forefront of the attack.

For the time being at least, this school has lost to those who insist on trying to avoid or at least delay heavy ground fighting. The hope of the dominant strategists is that steady bombing will at a minimum soften up the Iraqi defenses enough to hold down casualties among the attacking infantry- and tankmen as well as the Iraqis behind the barbed wire.

SADDAM'S STRATEGY

The dictator made an address on Baghdad radio apparently intended to reassure Iraqis alarmed by their country's weak resistance to the initial allied attacks. Iraq, he said, "will not allow the army of atheism, treachery and hypocrisy to realize their stupid hope that the war would only last a few days or weeks." The country, he said, had so far refrained from ground combat and used only part of its air force, but "when the war is fought in a comprehensive manner, using all resources and weapons, the scale of death and the number of dead will, God willing, rise among the ranks of atheism, injustice and tyranny."

Bombast aside, the speech gave a strong clue to his plans, which struck some American politicians as a military adaptation of Muhammad Ali's "rope-a- dope" ring strategy: bob, weave, dance and duck until the opponent tires himself out chasing an elusive target; then hit hard. Saddam, in fact, has supposedly used very nearly those words. Says an Arab diplomat in Amman: "Before the war, he was telling everyone, 'We know that the first strike will be for the benefit of the U.S. But we are prepared for them to hit us for two or three weeks. After that, it is our turn.' Saddam's effort will be on the land; he wants to have physical contact with the Americans where he can inflict big losses. His forces also will suffer big losses, but he feels he can absorb them and that Bush cannot."

Though that seems clear enough, some mysteries remain. One is what Saddam intends to do with the air force he has taken such care to keep intact by keeping his planes hidden in bunkers. Some American analysts suspect he will never use his jets in combat but will save them to wield as a postwar political weapon. In this view, the dictator knows he is going to be driven out of Kuwait but expects to survive still holding power in Iraq. If he throws the planes into the battle for Kuwait, they will only be shot down. If he keeps them out of the fight, they might enable a postwar Iraq once again to bully its neighbors.

Part of this theory fits with the Iraqi action last week of setting fire to oil wells in Kuwait. The fires could put up what amounts to a thick smoke screen hampering air attacks on Iraqi troops. But they could also signal the start of a scorched-earth policy, ensuring that if Saddam is forced out of Kuwait, he will leave the victors only a burning, devastated wreck.

Other analysts think, however, that Saddam is saving his air force, and virtually every other weapon he has, for climactic battles later on. The planes could be used for terror attacks on Israeli and Saudi cities, where they might cause more death and destruction than the Scuds have to date. Given the strength of the allied air armada, those sorties would amount to suicide missions for some Iraqi pilots, but Saddam might be able to find willing martyrs. There is some speculation that he is already forming an Iraqi kamikaze corps.

The planes could try to attack U.S. troops and tanks launching the final ground assault, quite possibly spreading poison gas. During the long war against Iran, Iraqi pilots and gunners proved adept at using chemical bombs and shells, and Saddam has immense reserves of artillery.

With or without gas, U.S. authorities expect frequent and sometimes effective counterattacks once the decisive land battle is joined. General Schwarzkopf points out that Saddam's greatest victories during the Iran-Iraq war came after absorbing Iranian offensives, "even at the cost of great casualties and even a loss of territory," and then launching counteroffensives when the Iranian attacks stalled.

Saddam's strategy is obviously enormously risky. Allied air power could in fact cut off his troops in Kuwait or destroy so many of their defensive fortifications that the rest would be pierced relatively easily. The firepower the allies can employ even in a high-tech ground assault might overwhelm Saddam's forces, with fewer allied casualties than he now thinks likely. Like all dictators, Saddam may be hearing only what he wants to hear. Western intelligence people think he may actually believe the absurdly high estimates of allied planes knocked down that Baghdad has been reporting publicly. As ever, no one dares tell him any bad news. Serving Saddam is hazardous enough in any case; last week there were reports, believed by some allied intelligence sources, that the dictator had ordered the chief of the Iraqi air force and two of his deputies summarily shot.

But there are risks for the U.S. too. One is that the public will grow impatient to see some measurable progress in a war that is yielding precious little, at least as long as the Pentagon jealously guards bomb-damage reports and pictures. Those that it has released may actually intensify the problem, since people may wonder why, if the missiles are doing their job so well, is the war taking so long? White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater took care to warn last week that "there are going to be enemy victories; there are going to be enemy surprises; there are going to be days when we'll see allied losses." And public opinion had best be prepared for the all but inevitable setbacks.

Still, those psychological problems are better than the military ones Saddam faces. There is no way the Iraqi dictator can win in the long run. But he thoroughly, and misguidedly, doubts that. The question is whether he can get the American public to share his disbelief.

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT: From a telephone poll of 1,000 American adults taken for TIME/CNN on Jan. 24 by Yankelovich Clancy Shulman. Sampling error is plus or minus 3%. "Not sures" omitted.

CAPTION: Which if any of these should be major goals in the war against Iraq?

How much longer do you think the war against Iraq will last?

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT: NO CREDIT

CAPTION: THE PRICE OF WAR

With reporting by Dean Fischer/Riyadh, Dan Goodgame and Christopher Ogden/Washington