National Correspondent
ABCNEWS.com
W A S H I N G T O N, Dec. 18 — Baghdad’s attempts to hide chemical and biological weapons may be the reason why Iraq is being being bombarded now, but the targets suggest that the Gulf War of 1991 never really ended.
Many potential targets left untouched during that conflict now find themselves in the cross hairs. American and British forces have focused their sights largely on military, intelligence and communications facilities.
Some of the biggest strikes have been on headquarters and buildings housing Iraq’s Republican Guards, intelligence operations and special security forces. Anti-aircraft facilities, airfields and military command-and-control centers were also turned to rubble.
Last Remaining Options
A number of international security analysts agree that such targets may be among the last viable options available for halting Iraq’s unrelenting pursuit of biological and chemical weapons.
That’s because locating the necessary chemical and biological precursors for Iraq’s deadly ambitions has become nearly impossible. There’s little reason to believe that smart bombs can track down what U.N. weapons inspectors have failed to find during the past seven years.
Even the 1991 Gulf War, which ousted Iraq from Kuwait with the use of 500,000 troops and thousands of sorties, could not accomplish that.
“Anything of any size has been found already,” says John Pike, an international security analyst with the American Federation of Scientists. “The problem is that Iraqi security forces are moving the material around all the time. At night, they even take some of the stuff home with them.”
No Easy Choices
The invisibility of Iraq’s program might mean looking for bigger targets — the infrastructure supporting Iraq’s weapons program. That includes “dual-use” civilian industrial sites capable of producing weapons, according to Amy Smithson with the Henry L. Stimson Center, a Washington think tank devoted to security issues.
“There are no easy choices, but you have to consider the infrastructure,” says Smithson.
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Henry Shelton said today some targets chosen had both military and civilian uses, including facilities that can make both drugs and biological weapons.
Defense Secretary William Cohen maintains that “we have been careful in our targeting to try to limit it to military types of targets that would minimize the potential for harm to innocent civilians.”
A Possible Benefit
The heaviest U.S.-British military strikes since the Gulf War may have an advantage this time around. Iraq was never able to rebuild its military after the war.
“We destroyed a great deal of Iraq’s air defense and armed forces last time around,” says retired U.S. Army Maj. Gen. William Nash, an armored brigade commander in Desert Storm who is now with Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.
“In the coming hours, there will be a complete near-destruction of their defense capabilities [that will] render them militarily insignificant.”
