Agence France Presse March 20, 2003
After risky raid, US vows unprecedented war
The United States started its war against Iraq with small-scale strikes some experts considered risky, but followed up by vowing an unprecedented "shock and awe" campaign.
The start of Operation Iraq Freedom just before dawn Thursday was made up of just two bombing raids on Baghdad, mainly aimed at killing or incapacitating Saddam and his senior leaders.
But this was followed up late Thursday with new raids in the centre of Baghdad and US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said: "What will follow will not be a repeat of any other conflict.
"It will be of a force and scope and scale that has been beyond what has been seen before."
Many experts were surprised by the way the United States started the war.
Relying on intelligence information that Saddam and his two sons and close aides could be at a specific location, US bombers hit several "leadership targets" around Baghdad.
"Information led us to believe that there were elements of the leadership at some of these locations, and if we struck them we would have some success," said one US official.
Norman Schwarzkopf, the US general who led Operation Desert Storm to force Iraqi forces out of Kuwait in 1991, said: "My first reaction was complete shock because we all believed that it would begin with a giant attack on downtown Baghdad and instead it's a very, very small operation."
Patrick Garrett, a military specialist with the Globalsecurity.org consultancy, said that by not embarking on "comprehensive strikes" from the start there was a risk that the Iraqis could try to seize the initiative.
The Iraqi army fired missiles at US-led forces in Kuwait and, according to US officials, has set three or four oil wells ablaze in southern Iraq.
"So the Iraqis haven't kept their head down," said Garrett.
"You want to keep the Iraqis head down and do as much as preparation of the battlefield before the ground war begins," Garrett said.
US military strategists had led experts to expect major bombing raids to start the war to disarm and oust the Iraqi leader in line with the modern "Shock and Awe" theory of using crushing force from the start of any conflict, developed by military tacticians Harlan Ullman and James Wade in their 1996 book of the same name. The aim is to stun the enemy before it can act.
The US military had hinted that this war would start with 48 hours of intense bombing to cripple anti-aircraft defences, command centres and Iraqi military infrastructure.
"Everybody assumes that we are somehow supposed to conduct the war in a certain way. The best thing you can do is not conduct the war the way your ennemy thinks you might do it," said Jay Farrar, vice-president of the Center for International and Strategic Studies.
"In this case, they believed that they had good intelligence information. They chose to go after Saddam Hussein and his inner circle very quickly and thought they could have a hit.
"We are still going to have a broader war effort. We'll see that taking place within hours or days."
And that was just what Rumsfeld promised at his press conference in Washington and US warplanes threatened with their latest bombing raid on Baghdad as US ground forces massed at the Kuwait frontier with southern Iraq.
Michele Flournoy, a military analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, also said the opening of the war "did not go as anyone had planned".
But Flournoy predicted that the United States would now go back to its original plan. "The challenge now is to regain a measure of tactical surprise."
Copyright © 2003, Agence France Presse
