WHY THE SILENCE?
The New York Times
March 7, 1999
Weeks of Bombing Leave Iraq's Power Structure
Unshaken
By STEVEN LEE MYERS and TIM WEINER
ASHINGTON -- This week, an American diplomat named Frank
Ricciardone
will take on a new job. His mission is as simple as it is
difficult: unify the
fractured Iraqi opposition, topple Saddam Hussein and build a
democratic nation
from the ruins.
The Clinton administration has been pursuing the same goal on three
tracks:
bombing Iraq in a slow-motion war, succoring the opposition with
words and ideas,
plotting to subvert the pyramid of soldiers and spies that supports
the Iraqi leader.
Toward that end, the United States has been striking Iraq from the
air for 10 weeks
now, and last week American planes loosed the biggest barrage of
bombs since
December. At last count, American and British jets have bombed Iraq
on 30 separate
days -- roughly every other day -- since Dec. 28.
The jets have struck at least 104 targets, 4 more than they hit
during the major
American and British barrage over four days last year, damaging or
destroying
surface-to-air missile sites, anti-aircraft artillery, radar towers
and communications
centers. In a report to Congress on Wednesday, President Clinton
said Iraq's air
defenses had been "degraded substantially."
"What we are working to do is to help create the political and
military conditions that
will permit a successful change of the regime," said Walter B.
Slocombe, under
secretary of defense for policy.
But Pentagon officials are among the first to acknowledge that
bombs alone cannot
topple Saddam.
The American military commander in the Persian Gulf region has said
repeatedly
that the task of creating a legitimate alternative to Saddam
appears hopeless for now,
given the disunity of the opposition.
For now, the hope for a coup rests on the impact of the tons of
bombs falling on Iraqi
military sites. But allies of the United States in the region,
especially Saudi Arabia
and Turkey, are increasingly impatient with the American program of
bombs and
bombast.
There has been no clear evidence so far that the bombings have
eroded Saddam's
power structure, best envisioned as a pyramid of perhaps 100
trusted men, sitting
atop half a million soldiers, spies and political operatives.
Despite this, Ricciardone, the State Department official named to
the newly created
position of policy coordinator, has said he envisions a sudden
demise for the regime
in Iraq, a country he does know.
In the mid-1980s, during the Iran-Iraq war, he helped try to
normalize relations
between the United States and Iraq. He was second-in-command of the
shuttered
American Embassy after the 1991 Persian Gulf war, working out of
Amman, Jordan
and London.
He is one among many in the administration who sees political
thunderclouds
gathering over Saddam, though no one will predict when a storm
might occur.
"Most likely, there will be a military coup," he said last week in
an interview with a
newspaper in Ankara, Turkey, where he is ending a stint as deputy
chief of the
American Embassy. "It will be very sudden and without warning."
The State Department, which confirmed the content of his remarks,
said Ricciardone
could not be reached for comment.
The president's national security adviser, Samuel R. Berger, said
that Saddam's
repeated efforts to shoot down American or British jets over Iraq
showed his
weakness, not his strength. "His ineffectiveness in stopping us has
undercut him to
some degree," Berger said in an interview. The challenges are meant
"to demonstrate
his power," he added. "Instead he looks ineffectual."
One senior administration official said that Saddam is "nervous and
off-balance."
Another official, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity,
said: "We think we
see Saddam flailing. We are working toward a slow whittling-down of
his power, his
authority and his nerves. There are reports of military guys
perhaps not following
orders."
The Clinton administration has not spent a penny of a $97 million
fund created by
Congress to finance Iraqi opposition, one indication of its
thinking about the
likelihood of its success.
There is understandably some revulsion in the Arab world about
superpowers
plotting insurrections in the region. Few in the administration
have any idea who or
what could succeed Saddam, except perhaps chaos.
In part because of these sensitivities, the administration has
tried to draw as little
attention as possible to the air strikes. On Feb. 26, in a major
foreign policy speech
nearly 7,000 words long, Clinton devoted one sentence to Iraq and
said nothing about
the bombing.
The Pentagon, too, is giving out less and less information about
the bombing,
withholding the familiar grainy videos of attacks and refusing to
discuss the damage
in detail. Military officials say their silence is an effort to
minimize sympathy that
might be generated in the Arab world.
One U.S. military official said the bombing of Iraqi communications
sites and
command centers appears to have reduced the central government's
ability to
communicate effectively with military units.
A senior administration official said, "The morale of Iraqi air
defenses is pretty low."
It is not so low, however, that Iraqi radar operators have
refrained from tracking
American planes and giving pilots the justification they need to
attack.
Despite the pounding, there are signs Iraq is able to recover. In
his report to Congress
last week, Clinton said Iraq had repaired an oil refinery that had
been damaged in
December's raids. The refinery has resumed generating illegal
profits for Saddam's
government. A senior administration official said Iraq had also
"made an effort to
reconstitute" military facilities destroyed in the raids as well.
The Pentagon says it is trying to balance risks against rewards.
The delicacy of that
balance was clear last week when American jets attacked two radio
towers that the
Pentagon said relayed messages to Iraqi air defenses but that also,
it turned out,
controlled the flow of oil through Iraq's pipeline to Turkey.
On Friday, Secretary of Defense William Cohen, who arrived for a
week-long visit to
the Persian Gulf region, indicated publicly that the strikes on the
towers were a
mistake. "We're very sensitive to that and we want to make sure we
don't disrupt the
flow of oil going into Turkey," he said.
By disrupting the U.N. program that allows Iraq to sell oil for
food and medicine, the
United States had handed Iraq a public relations victory, officials
and diplomats said,
creating some sympathy for the suffering of ordinary Iraqis and
building some
momentum for an end to the attacks. "It's really one of those traps
Saddam's trying to
draw us into," one official said.
The biggest trap would be losing an American pilot. The Pentagon
has increased the
number of helicopter-borne emergency rescue teams dispatched to the
region,
standing by to dart into Iraq on a rescue mission should a plane go
down.
Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company
