NEW YORK, Nov 10: President Bush has settled on a war plan for Iraq that would begin with an air campaign shorter than the one for the first Gulf war, said the New York times quoting senior administration officials.
It would feature swift ground actions to seize footholds in the country and strikes to cut off the leadership in Baghdad.
The military plan calls for the quick capture of land within Iraq, which would be used as bases to funnel American forces deeper into the country. That approach is intended to relieve some of the diplomatic pressure created by massing troops and initiating attacks from neighbouring nations, including Saudi Arabia, the paper said.
In a detailed article the Times said that the plan, approved in recent weeks by Mr Bush well before the Security Council’s unanimous vote on Friday to disarm Iraq, calls for massing 200,000 to 250,000 troops for attack by air, land and sea. The offensive would probably begin with a “rolling start” of substantially fewer forces, Pentagon and military officials said.
Under the plan, the United States and coalition forces could operate out of such forward bases in northern, western and southern Iraq, building on lessons learnt in Afghanistan, where the military seized a similar outpost south of Kandahar, the Times says.
The paper says that as the Pentagon puts, the finishing touches on a plan of attack, the White House and State Department officials are discussing what one senior official called a “seamless transition” from attack to a military occupation of parts of the country. It would include efforts to deliver food to Iraqis and to engage them quickly in planning for economic development and eventual democracy in areas that President Saddam Hussein has terrorized.
Meanwhile, Iraqi scientists and local military officials would be encouraged to reveal the location of hidden stores of weapons of mass destruction, a process Mr Bush publicly encouraged from the Rose Garden on Friday when he told Iraqis that “by helping the process of disarmament, they would help their country.”
One senior official, drawing on comparisons with the American occupation of Japan in 1945, told the paper: “Our message will be that the faster we find the weapons and arrest Saddam’s guys, the faster they get some normalcy.”
Bush, after several war-planning meetings with Defence Secretary, Donald H. Rumsfeld and Gen Tommy R. Franks, the commander of American forces in the gulf, has decided that military action in Iraq would be carried out with the large troop levels that Gen Franks has consistently advocated. Even so, Mr Bush can still maintain the formal position that no decision has been reached because he has not yet ordered the nation to war, the paper said.
It noted that even as the United Nations weapons inspectors prepare to fly to Iraq, the American military is moving into a new phase of positioning logistical forces that military officials say are significant indicators of a movement towards war. The army is loading tugboats, forklifts and other cargo-handling equipment onto the Tern, a giant cargo ship in Hampton Roads, Virginia, that is bound for the Gulf to prepare ports for the arrival of tanks and other armoured equipment.
However, the paper said the orders to send those heavy ground forces have not been given. “We have a lot of things tied up to go if the big guys decide to send it,” a senior Defence Department official. told the paper “But no green lights yet.”Pentagon officials had been awaiting language from the Security Council because the timetable for the inspection process will shape the schedule of troop deployments and, ultimately, the start of any offensive that Mr. Bush may order.
“There were options within the plan, but there has only been one plan,” one military officer told the paper. “They have settled on the bulk of it.” But the officer said the war plan maintains flexibility over the final deployment of troops in order to cope with a range of Iraqi responses. The entire troop total may not necessarily be in the region when the offensive begins. The bulk of the force would probably stand ready in case of battlefield setbacks and be poised to occupy parts of Iraq as soon as resistance ends.
Under the plan, the air campaign would be less than the 43 days of the first Gulf war, and probably under a month, military officials were quoted as telling the paper. In the opening hours of the air campaign, navy and air force jets, including B-2 bombers carrying 16 one-ton satellite-guided bombs and B-1 bombers carrying 24 of the same weapons, would attack a range of targets from military headquarters to air defences.
Only 9 per cent of the weapons dropped in the Gulf war were precision-guided. This time, the figure would be well in excess of 60 per cent, officials say.
The campaign would quickly seek to cut off the country’s leadership in Baghdad and a few other important command centres in hopes of causing a rapid collapse of the government, officials told the paper.
As in Afghanistan, special operations forces would infiltrate Iraq early in the campaign to designate targets, to destroy sites holding weapons of mass destruction and to seize other objectives to prevent Saddam from slowing the US assault by flooding the marshes in southern Iraq or igniting the oil fields, officials said.
Because the United States wants to help transform Iraq quickly into a liberated nation, the air campaign would be carried out to avoid major destruction. The campaign would try to avoid destroying important city services and alienating the civilian population and would also encourage Iraqi troops to defect.
The targets of a bombing campaign would be the specific pillars of power holding up Iraq’s government, like leadership headquarters and Saddam’s sprawling presidential compounds. “While we would not want to kill many Iraqi soldiers, if they stupidly fight, we will,” a senior military official told the paper.
Pentagon officials say the war plan does not envision a clean break between the end of an air campaign and the opening of a ground offensive, as in the first Gulf war. Instead, ground operations would be more likely to be woven into the opening stages of the air war, with the aerial bombardment continuing “as long as we find targets,” one official told the paper.
The “inside-out” approach of attacking centres of power first aims to capitalize on the American military’s ability to strike at long distances and to manoeuvre forces rapidly to neutralize a large target. One important aim would be to disrupt Saddam’s ability to order the use of weapons of mass destruction. Another would be to wrest control of Baghdad from Iraqi forces without getting bogged down in block-by-block urban warfare, the Times said.
