NIGHTLINE ABC News - November 19, 2002 (11:35 PM ET)
Opening Moves
TED KOPPEL, ABC NEWS (Voice Over) They fired at allied aircraft.
DONALD RUMSFELD, US SECRETARY OF DEFENSE They have fired on coalition aircraft 67 times. That ought to tell reasonable people something.
TED KOPPEL (Voice Over) Allied aircraft bombed them.
FEMALE ONE, IRAQI TELEVISION REPORTER The US and the British war planes violated our skies yesterday.
DONALD RUMSFELD Each missile launched at our air crews, Iraq expresses its contempt for the UN resolutions.
FEMALE ONE Implementing 41 sorties backed by AWACs and air-to-sea aircraft.
TED KOPPEL (Voice Over) And there is no end in sight.
JOHN PIKE, GLOBALSECURITY.ORG Our aircraft will continue to respond accordingly when fired upon in the no-fly zone. So that when an American ground attack starts, the Iraqi air defense will have already have been disassembled.
TED KOPPEL (Voice Over) Tonight, "Opening Moves." Who says there's no war in Iraq?
ANNOUNCER From ABC News, this is "Nightline." Reporting from Washington, Ted Koppel.
TED KOPPEL (Off Camera) In just about three weeks, on December 8th, the Iraqi government will be in the awkward position of providing United Nations weapons inspectors with a complete list of all the nuclear, biological and chemical weapons that they don't have. If that sounds a little silly, it is. If they don't have such weapons, if they don't have the facilities to produce such weapons, which is what they've been insisting for years now, to suddenly produce a list, and a comprehensive one at that, could be seen as rather embarrassing. It would be proof-positive that Iraq has been lying. Still, providing some such list and then coughing up and even destroying tons of weapons they say they never had, sure beats the alternative, which would be a US-led military invasion. So, it should come as no surprise that today, the Iraqis said that a list will be forthcoming. The tough part, of course, will lie in determining just how incomplete or dishonest that list turns out to be. War, quite literally, hangs in the balance. President Bush has said that the United States will have zero tolerance for cheating. Remember that phrase, "zero tolerance." If the Iraqis are found to be in material breech of the latest Security Council resolution, they face serious consequences. Two more phrases we need to hang on to ' "material breech" and "serious consequences." Just how ambiguous even the clearest language can be at times has already been demonstrated at least 35 times. That's the number of times since the UN resolution was passed that the Iraqi military has fired on US and British planes patrolling the so-called no-fly zones of northern and southern Iraq. Each of those instances represents what the White House defines as a material breech. With a policy of zero tolerance, you'd think that the next step would be, serious consequences. Well, not quite. Not yet. Here's "Nightline" correspondent Dave Marash.
DAVE MARASH, ABC NEWS (Voice Over) About six weeks ago while visiting the American Air Force crews who fly "Operation Northern Watch" over Iraq, I asked an F-15 pilot how often he and his mates came under Iraqi fire.
MALE ONE, US AIR FORCE PILOT Every single day.
DAVE MARASH (Off Camera) All the time?
MALE ONE Every day.
DAVE MARASH (Voice Over) Recent reports indicate Iraqi air defense units have become even more aggressive, tracking American and British planes and often firing missiles at them. Coalition forces have recently stepped up their responses, hitting not just missile batteries but command and control centers. Some call this a change in tactics. Others, like analyst John Pike of globalsecurity.org, see a strategic shift.
JOHN PIKE The United States is slowly but surely taking apart the Iraqi integrated air defense system. Rather than just attacking individual missile launchers or artillery sites, they're going after the command post to take apart the brains of the system so that when an American ground attack starts, the Iraqi air defense will have already been disassembled.
DAVE MARASH (Voice Over) And on a recent trip inside Iraqi Kurdistan, "Nightline" correspondent Don Dahler heard lots of buzz about American special forces troops already in place and preparing for war. The American troops inside Iraq have their orders, says former Army special forces officer Michael Vickers.
MICHAEL VICKERS, FORMER US SPECIAL FORCES Special forces will actually have more missions in a prospective Gulf War than they did in Afghanistan. In addition to designating targets for precision air strikes or working with Iraqi opposition, they will also have the mission of trying to find the scud launchers and also, perhaps, going after weapons of mass destruction sites or key leadership targets.
DAVE MARASH (Off Camera) Has the Pentagon already written the opening chapters of the book of Gulf War II? The Iraqi government and its official television mouthpiece seem to think so.
FEMALE ONE The US and the British warplanes violated our skies yesterday, implementing 41 Sorties backed by AWACs and air-to-sea aircraft.
DAVE MARASH (Voice Over) This may be a case of new complaints about some very old issues, says ABC newsman David Wright in Baghdad.
DAVID WRIGHT, ABC NEWS (Off Camera) The conflicts in the no-fly zone happen all the time. But what's new here is the rhetoric that's being applied to them. On the one hand, you've got US officials crying, "material breech." And that leads the Iraqis to say, "ah ha, the US is using this just as a pretext for military action, it's a fait accompli."
DAVE MARASH (Voice Over) Iraq is asking UN Secretary General Kofi Annan to end the no-fly zone overflights, something he is very unlikely to do. Although Hans Blix, the chief of the UN weapons inspection mission in Iraq, said today in Baghdad, the overflights could present him some problems.
HANS BLIX, CHIEF UN WEAPONS INSPECTOR The no-fly zones enter a complication in our work, in the sense that we will have air operations. The Iraqi side has said to us that they will take all steps that are within their complicit power to ensure our safety. And we are in touch with those who are administering the no-fly zones to make sure that they also will respect and will ensure the safety.
DAVE MARASH (Voice Over) If the Iraqis and the inspectors feel surrounded, there is good reason. The Pentagon estimates there are now some 60,000 American troops in the Persian Gulf Central Asia region. Some 14,000 American forces are based on ships, in the Persian Gulf or nearby. While America has troops at or building bases in Djibouti, Yemen, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Pakistan. And ABC News national security correspondent John McWethy says, the troops are the last element of pre-war preparations.
JOHN MCWETHY, ABC NEWS (Off Camera) The US Has been engaged in a massive buildup over many months and it continues to this day. But the buildup is things like tanks, ammunition, and food. And the final ingredient of people, that has not yet been added. The United States will not add the large number of ground troops until war is almost a hand.
DAVE MARASH (Voice Over) When might that be? Michael Vickers bases his guesstimate on December 8th, the day Saddam Hussein must officially declare all of his systems and materials for the manufacture of weapons of mass destruction.
MICHAEL VICKERS The military is generally thought to be ready within 30 days of a go notice from the President. So, if, for example, the President declared the Iraqis in material breech on December 8th, went to the Security Council and said, there's a material breech and then the order was given for operations sometime within a week or two of that, then operations could theoretically begin sometime in mid to late- January.
DAVE MARASH (Voice Over) Even while it grows its offensive forces, the Bush Administration today won a major victory for its vision of the defensive front of the war on terrorism. The Senate defeated the Democratic package of amendments and then passed the White House bill for a Department of Homeland Security.
DAVE MARASH (CONTINUED) (Off Camera) And on a second defensive front, Tom Ridge, the Director of Homeland Security says the US and its allies have detained and are holding more than 2,000 suspected al-Qaeda operatives, many of whom, Ridge says, have given up important information about terrorist plans, assets and capabilities. I'm Dave Marash for "Nightline" in New York.
TED KOPPEL (Off Camera) Have we been watching the opening shots of the next war without even realizing it?
GENERAL RICHARD HAWLEY, RETIRED US AIR FORCE You know, another way to say it is that the war never stopped. There hasn't been much of a pause in this operation since "Desert Storm" in 1991.
TED KOPPEL (Off Camera) That conversation when we come back.
commercial break
TED KOPPEL (Off Camera) My guests tonight are both retired generals with extensive experience in Iraq. General Terry Scott was one of the Army's key commanders in "Operation Desert Storm" and led the special operations command in the mid-1990s. He joins us tonight from our affiliate KTXS in Abilene, Texas. General Richard Hawley retired in 1999 as the commander of the US Air Combat Command, where he was responsible for thousands of sorties patrolling the no-fly zones in Iraq. He joins us from Newport News, Virginia. And General Hawley, let me begin with you and those 35 violations that I referred to. Each one would, and I presume, should be considered a material breech, don't you think?
GENERAL RICHARD HAWLEY Well, that's clearly up to the President to decide what's going to be a material breech. But, they're certainly not new. We've been flying these sorties for the better part of a decade. We've encountered a lot of firings like this over those years. Fortunately we haven't lost a single pilot or aircraft to enemy fire. But it would be a stretch, maybe, to say that something that's been going on that long is a reason to now implement the sterner measures that the UN resolution calls for.
TED KOPPEL (Off Camera) All right, so, what's going to have to happen, General Scott, is that presumably we're going to have to have some evidence that whatever list it is the Iraqis hand over to those weapons inspectors is, in some fashion or another, lacking, failing, missing something. How do we do that?
GENERAL TERRY SCOTT, RETIRED US ARMY SPECIAL OPERATIONS It is, as you said Ted, going to be tricky to get past the Iraqis' prior denials of any sort of breeches at all. But I think what we're going to see is that the Iraqis will come up with some, data, some information, some materials and the inspectors will start doing some looking around. Now, where it goes from there, it's pretty hard to say. I agree with General Hawley that it's very difficult to say what's occurred up to this point in the no-fly zones is truly a material breech. But certainly the no-fly zones are a very sensitive spot and something could happen there in those no-fly zones that does constitute a material breech.
TED KOPPEL (Off Camera) Maybe we just need to remind people, General Hawley, what the purpose of the no-fly zones were in the first place. Why were they instituted?
GENERAL RICHARD HAWLEY Well, the whole purpose of the no-fly zones was to keep Saddam Hussein and his military forces from, beating up on the, opposition in the south and the north of Iraq. There are two sects, of course, in Iraq and Saddam's sect is primarily in the Baghdad area, his home is around, and the folks down around Basra and the areas in the south, who are actually a majority in Iraq, are a different sect and have been abused by the Iraqi regime for many, many years. In the north, of course, you have the Kurds. The Kurds are another minority in Iraq and have equally been abused. And those no-fly zones were set up by the United Nations in order to protect those people from the abuse that had been heaped upon them for many years by the Iraqi government.
TED KOPPEL (Off Camera) Let me suggest to you, and since you're out of the service now, I'm assuming you don't have direct knowledge of it anyways, so we can just talk as a couple of people who don't know what's going on. I know even less than you do, but I'm going to suggest to you that maybe in one fashion or another, the war has begun and that part of what's going on with those British and American flights over the no- fly zones is, we're starting to soften things up in the eventuality that a real war gets going. What do you think of that theory?
GENERAL RICHARD HAWLEY Well, I think that's pretty good. You know, another way to say it is that the war never stopped. There hasn't been much of a pause in this operation since "Desert Storm" in 1991. And of course, if you believe the reporting recently, certainly there has been some focus on the Iraqi command and control facilities and their air defense system, which would indicate that we are softening them up a little bit. The first thing you have to do in any modern conflict is gain control of the air because the side that has control of the air is able to be dominant in so many other ways.
TED KOPPEL (Off Camera) Is there in fact, any Iraqi air force left? Do their anti- aircraft facilities represent any sort of a threat? You said before, they haven't hit a single plane over the last ten years, knock on wood.
GENERAL RICHARD HAWLEY Yeah, I wish I had some around here to knock on, Ted. The fact is that we've got very good tactics, good intelligence, and we have demonstrated to the Iraqi air defense system that when they threaten our aircraft, they usually pay a pretty high price. So they haven't been very effective. They often shoot without their radars on. But keep in mind that we've only operated in those no-fly zones, which are south and north of Baghdad, leaving the central part of the country able to defend itself pretty well. And they've concentrated their defenses in that area. So, when the flights expand and move into the area where we haven't been flying for the past ten years, I would expect there's gonna be some pretty stiff opposition. There's not a great air force there, but it exists. If they choose to fight, it'll take a little bit of work in order to beat them down and gain control of the air.
TED KOPPEL (Off Camera) General Scott, I want to ask you when we come back, you were in charge of special operations and I'm gonna, put the same preamble that I just did a moment ago to General Hawley. You're out of office now, so you don't know for sure what's going on at the moment. But I want to tap into your expertise in terms of what Special Op units might be doing in so far as intelligence gathering is concerned at a time like this. We're going to take a break, that question to General Scott when we come back.
commercial break
TED KOPPEL (Off Camera) And we're back again with retired Generals Richard Hawley and Terry Scott. General Scott, as we mentioned at the beginning of this broadcast, the problem is gonna be when the Iraqis hand us that list or hand to the weapons inspectors a list in which they say, here's what we got, we don't have anything else, honest, cross my heart, hope to die. We have to measure that list against whatever intelligence we've been able to get from the air, from satellites. But presumably, also from Special Ops units on the ground. Give us a sense of what's that about.
GENERAL TERRY SCOTT Well, I do know that the Special Operation forces will play a major role in the forth-coming campaign. It may not be the centerpiece, as it was in Afghanistan. But certainly, we expect the Kurds in the north and the Shiah(PH) in the south to participate in this, campaign. And they will need special forces training, advice, and weapons placement. And they're probably gonna get it.
TED KOPPEL (Off Camera) You're putting, you're putting everything, General Scott, in the future tense. Let me suggest to you, I'd be astonished if that wasn't going on right now.
GENERAL TERRY SCOTT Well, it is, a matter of record that the intelligence forces and the Special Operations forces have worked closely with the Kurds in the north. And I'm sure that's continuing today and that a significant amount of intelligence about Iraq and the Iraqis, their military, has come through those channels. I seriously doubt that there's much on- the-ground work in the south just yet. But there are other ways of getting information. And I think you'll see that stepped up during the, transition, if there is one, from the inspections to war. And that will be a tricky, transition because with inspectors in place, no, forces there and some allies that have got to be brought along, it's going to be a major challenge.
TED KOPPEL (Off Camera) What are we talking about, General Hawley, in terms of how long it would take from the moment that the President makes the decision and says, we are gonna go to war here? Presumably a great deal of the preparation is being done right now. As we've already heard, there has been a significant amount of pre-positioning of men and material and equipment. But how long is it gonna take them?
GENERAL RICHARD HAWLEY Well, it depends wholly on the campaign plan that the commander in charge of this operation has in mind. But we have a great advantage over 1991,1990, during the Gulf War because we've got a lot of pre- positioned forces. We've been flying these no-fly zones, as you talked about Ted, for ten years or more. We've got forces in Turkey. We've got forces in Saudi Arabia. We've got forces in the Gulf states. We've got naval carriers present in the Gulf and near the Gulf. So, we've got a lot of forces already in the region. In addition, after the Gulf War, we pre-positioned a lot of material in that area. And so, a lot of the deployment is already accomplished. I would expect this could happen very quickly. An awful lot of the force that we have to put on the ground there is nothing more than bringing the people over to fall in on their equipment. That's gonna make it a lot quicker operation than that six-month buildup that we saw in 1990 leading up to "Desert Storm." This could kick off within a matter of days, certainly no more than a week or two after the President decides that that's what we have to do.
TED KOPPEL (Off Camera) General Hawley let me follow up with you on another question, in a number of post-battle assessments, it certainly happened after the, bombing raids over Kosovo, similar things happened after Vietnam, the discovery is that our air power wasn't quite as effective as we thought it was. We dropped a hell of a lot of armament, but we didn't necessarily, in Kosovo, I know that for a fact 'cause I was on the ground there, at the time, when the Serbs started pulling out with all these tanks and APCs and a lot of the equipment that we thought we had destroyed. We didn't. So, what is the point of these heavy bombardments at the beginning of a campaign?
GENERAL RICHARD HAWLEY Well, I wouldn't expect to see a lot of heavy bombardment. This is gonna be virtually an entire precision operation. There will be few non-precision weapons used. And the precision, of course, of the weapons is only as good as the precision of the intelligence that you use to target them. And of course, that's where we've gotten in trouble in the past, in other conflicts, is our intelligence wasn't nearly as good as we hoped. But I think it's gonna be a lot better this time. The focus, initially, will be on destroying the Iraqi command and control system, their ability to control their air defenses in order to gain that control of the air that we talked about earlier. I think you'll simultaneously see attacks directed against the weapons of mass destruction, to the extent that we know where they are and their means of delivery, again, to extent we know where they are and can find them. We'll do our level best to deny Saddam the opportunity to use those weapons.
TED KOPPEL (Off Camera) General Scott, General Hawley, we're out of time, but I thank you both very much. I suspect we'll be talking again in the weeks and months ahead. Thanks so much.
Copyright 2002 American Broadcasting Companies, Inc.
