Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 24, 1991 TAG: 9102240139
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A/8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ANDREW J. GLASS THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Long
"Saddam has been trying to surrender for a week," one White House official said. "It is no longer a question of whether [the Iraqis] give up and get out of Kuwait. It is only a question of when and how."
"The liberation of Kuwait has now entered a final phase," the president told the American people in a brief televised statement. He anticipated that mission would be accomplished "swiftly and decisively."
Presidential aides said Bush no longer believed he had to choose between a long ground campaign to dislodge the Iraqis, with the consequent risk of high U.S. casualties, or else continuing the pulverizing air strikes.
That is because he believes the ground assault under way will be relatively short-lived and that it will conclude with a decisive Iraqi military and political defeat, the officials said.
In their telephone conversation Saturday, officials said, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev pressed Bush, who at the time was still at his Camp David retreat, to split the difference between the Kremlin's lenient timetable for an Iraqi pullout and the stricter one set by the American-led coalition. That formula was spelled out in an ultimatum to the Iraqis that expired at noon on Saturday.
Gorbachev also urged Bush to delay the ground thrust for another day or two in hopes of achieving a diplomatic breakthrough.
But Bush said no. He declined, officials said, because he saw a pressing political need to leave Saddam exposed to the full wrath of his military for dragging Iraq into a hopeless conflict and for having fought the war, as the Iraqi commander-in-chief, in an incompetent fashion.
The result has cost at least tens of thousands of Iraqi lives and left one of the most advanced economies in the Middle East in near-total ruin.
What is at stake in the president's view is a desire to humiliate Saddam by exposing him as a crass tyrant utterly lacking in military prowess, an official said. This is the political blow that Bush has aimed at Saddam, in league with the coming final military blows.
It is believed, both in the White House and in the Kremlin, that Saddam and his Revolutionary Command Council are now willing to conclude their disastrous foray into Kuwait on practically any terms that leave Saddam, as he put it in a speech last Thursday, with his "principles, dignity and rights" intact.
But that is precisely what Bush and his advisers, with the strong support of Saudi Arabia's King Fahd, want to deny the Iraqi president. That is why Bush showed no interest in hints on Saturday from Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz - relayed to the U.N. Security Council - that Iraq could live with a White House plan that, only hours earlier, had been described as "shameful" by Baghdad Radio.
Even before the noon deadline had passed, officials said, Bush had authorized his top field commander, Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, to start the ground attack into both Iraq and Kuwait, with a view of bringing the war to a speedy end.
To Schwarzkopf, that means implementing a well-honed desert AirLand plan to strike at several points well in the enemy's rear and with overwhelming force. The idea is to mount a vicious enveloping attack that, as quickly as possible, succeeds in cutting off the 550,000 Iraqi troops dug in and around Kuwait.
Some of those troops have been badly mauled under nearly six weeks of intensive allied bombing and shelling, suffering major losses of military equipment. Should Saddam respond to Schwarzkopf's strike by ordering his troops to leave their defensive bunkers and engage the allies in open desert warfare, they would then become subject to ceaseless attacks from the air. The Iraqis also would come under a withering armored pincer move against their exposed southern flanks, officials here and in Riyadh, the theater headquarters, said.
Officials suggested that when and if Schwarzkopf's trap is finally closed, a cease-fire could be arranged fairly quickly. But in such circumstances, they noted, the Iraqi departure from Kuwait would occur through a tight allied ring of steel, one that had managed to sever all supply routes to the already beleaguered Kuwaiti garrison.
If such a retreat were to occur, it almost certainly would leave the Iraqis deprived of virtually all their armor, artillery, chemical shells and other key weapons in the region.
Before the diplomatic game played out, as U.S. officials saw it, the fine points of any withdrawal from Kuwait were ultimately of less interest than Bush's desire to leave a lasting and overwhelming impression, both within the Arab world and in Iraq itself, that Saddam's bid to grab the small Gulf nation had ended in abject failure.
As one official put it: "We want to be sure that the coming military defeat can in no way be seen, in Iraq or elsewhere, as a political or moral victory that was gained by Saddam having `stood up' to [the allied coalition] and by his having left under a carefully crafted compromise."
Reports of a possible reign of terror by Iraqis against the Kuwaitis could still alter the allied timetable. But one official said these were desperate eleventh-hour tactics designed to suck the allies into "fighting Saddam's war in Kuwait and that's something we are not about to do."
by CNB