Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, January 15, 1993 TAG: 9301150154
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The Washington Post
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
AIR STRIKES CALLED SUCCESS
The Bush administration Thursday declared its air strike on Iraq a political and military success, while acknowledging that at least a third of the targets were missed and a stray 2,000-pound bomb did heavy damage to an apartment building near Basra.Iraqi reaction ranged from caustic defiance in a Baghdad military communique to partial compliance at the United Nations with demands that Washington had cited in justifying Wednesday's military reprisal.
Giving ground on some U.N. demands but ignoring others, Iraq confirmed it would allow U.N. planes transporting weapons inspectors to land in Baghdad and would stop crossing over newly drawn boundaries with Kuwait.
But Iraq did not agree to return four Silkworm missiles seized in an earlier raid. Iraq also did not retreat from its declared right to station anti-aircraft missiles anywhere it chooses inside the "no-fly zones" in northern and southern Iraq being patrolled by U.S. and allied aircraft. After Wednesday's attack, which targeted four southern missile batteries and disabled only one, Iraq took the other three apart and moved them, U.S. officials said.
Pentagon officials claimed greater success against four command and control sites. Each of the locations was targeted in multiple places, and officials said none of the sites went unscathed.
One official with access to intelligence reports said damage was heavy at Tallil, the largest and most important site, and at a subordinate "integrated operations center" at Amarah. Damage at Najaf was said to be moderate, and at Samawah, light.
President Bush, declaring the mission "a big success" in an Oval Office exchange with reporters, added, "Let's just hope that Saddam Hussein got the message."
Pentagon officials provided no explanation and no casualty estimate for the bombing of the apartment building on the edge of Basra. Given the hour of the attack - around 9:15 local time - the building was presumed to have been occupied.
Air Force sources said a bomb from an F-15E struck the building inadvertently during an attempt to hit an SA-3 anti-aircraft missile battery more than a mile away. The initial hypothesis was that a so-called smart bomb "went stupid" when its laser guidance mechanism failed, leaving the weapon to drop where gravity happened to take it.
The Defense Department also retreated from Wednesday's attempts to portray the air strike as a substantial military operation involving more than 100 U.S. and allied planes. Thursday, by contrast, Pentagon spokesman Pete Williams emphasized that "this was a very small mission." Mocking Saddam's famous promise of "the mother of all battles," Williams volunteered, "This wasn't even the second cousin of all battles."
At Fort Hood, Texas, meanwhile, the first of more than 1,000 soldiers from the 1st Cavalry Division boarded jumbo jets for Kuwait. The White House announced Wednesday that they were being sent immediately as a further signal of American resolve in the gulf.
In Iraq, Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz reaffirmed concessions announced Wednesday, saying Iraq would let U.N. planes use its airspace on a "case-by-case" basis and would suspend "for the time being" efforts to retrieve equipment left in the former Iraqi naval base of Umm Qasr. The United Nations says the base is in Kuwait's territory.