The Washington Post
WASHINGTON — U.S. and British warplanes struck three air defense sites in southern Iraq on Friday in what Pentagon officials described as an effort to cut back on recent improvements in the Iraqi anti-aircraft system.
The airstrikes, the largest since a much bigger raid in February that hit five sites closer to the Iraqi capital of Baghdad, were carried out by 10 Navy F-14s and F/A-18s from the USS Enterprise, four Air Force F-16s, and four Royal Air Force Tornadoes. They dropped laser-guided bombs on a long-range mobile radar system and a surface-to-air missile battery located 170 miles southeast of Baghdad, as well as on a fiber-optic communications station 70 miles southeast of the capital, officials said.
The fiber-optic site was one the targets hit in the February raid. "We think it played an important role in the Iraqi ability to integrate air-defense information in that part of the country," a Defense Department official said.
But the fact that the United States felt the site had to be struck again underscored that since last winter’s strikes, Iraq has largely rebuilt its air defense system. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld raised that concern last week, saying the Iraqi military had been "quantitatively and qualitatively" bettering its abilities to threaten allied aircraft. He singled out the reconstruction of fiber-optic communications as a worry.
The official Iraqi News Agency said Friday’s strikes killed one person and wounded 11. Iraq’s ambassador to the United Nations, Mohammed al-Douri, called the attack "a crime of mass extermination against the people of Iraq."
Yet the most significant aspect of Friday’s bombing may be its relatively limited scope. The Bush administration came into office determined to break out of the routine bombing of Iraq that had been the pattern for several years. For several months, senior administration officials have been debating how to develop a more muscular policy for confronting Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, including more effective airstrikes and increased support for Iraqi opposition groups in exile.
But Friday’s strikes appeared to continue the Clinton-area pattern of hitting Iraqi air defenses every six months or so to reduce the threat to pilots patrolling the "no-fly zones" in northern and southern Iraq.
"We do many of these, every so often, and then we do a Desert Fox," one aviator with several tours of duty in the no-fly zones said, referring to four days of wide-ranging strikes in 1998. In that set of raids, more than 400 cruise missiles were fired against about 100 sites, including presidential palaces, suspected missile factories, intelligence facilities and economic targets.
In addition, military officials said the scope of Friday’s bombing was limited to avoid antagonizing Arab allies already upset with the turmoil in Israel. That may be one reason most of the planes involved in Friday’s bombing flew from an aircraft carrier, rather than from bases in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere in the Gulf region where U.S. aircraft are located.
There’s been some frustration within the U.S. military over the Bush administration’s lengthy efforts to develop a new Iraq policy. Some worry that the longer the United States has aircraft patrolling the no-fly zones, the more likely it becomes that Iraqi gunners eventually will get lucky and knock one down.
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