07 January 1999
U.S. LAUNCHES AIR MISSILE AGAINST THREATENING IRAQI RADAR SITE
(Bacon says U.S. stands ready to strike with speed, surprise) (790) By Jacquelyn S. Porth USIA Security Affairs Writer Washington -- A U.S. Air Force jet fired on a threatening Iraqi surface-to-air missile (SAM) radar site January 7 inside Iraq's northern no-fly zone in the fourth incident in only 10 days of increasingly frequent military air skirmishes that have followed "Operation Desert Fox." "We will continue to protect our forces and...the no-fly zone with whatever means are necessary," Defense Department spokesman Ken Bacon told reporters at the regular January 7 Pentagon briefing. In the latest incident since the U.S.-British four-day military operation in December 1998, a U.S. F-16C/J aircraft picked up a signal that it was being tracked by the radar for an Iraqi Roland missile system over the northern no-fly zone above the 36th parallel. Approximately 10 minutes later the same aircraft and a second U.S. EA-6B aircraft picked up the signal again and then launched a HARM (High-Speed Anti-Radiation Missile) against the site. Bacon said the radar "stopped beaming at precisely the time that the HARM was to impact," leading the pilots to believe that the Iraqi mobile radar site had been hit. Dense clouds have prevented independent confirmation of the results of the air strike. "We will still search aggressively to find out what the result was," he added. The incident occurred northwest of the Iraqi city of Mosul in what the spokesman described as the "Saddam dam area." A statement issued by the U.S. European Command, which has the primary responsibility for U.S. activities in the northern no-fly zone, said that the U.S. aircraft fired "to prevent any offensive fire" from the Iraqi anti-aircraft missile site. Asked how long the United States is prepared to respond to each and every military challenge posed by Iraq, the spokesman said, "I think you could turn the question around and ask: How long will Iraq be content to see its assets eliminated by our missiles?" Incidents in December and January have resulted in U.S. attacks on SAM sites as well as Iraqi combat aircraft. "We've shown...that we can strike with speed, force, and surprise at the time of our choosing," Bacon emphasized. Depending on the challenges that the Iraqis pose, he added, "we can respond in a variety of ways." Bacon said posturing by Iraqi jets in recent weeks has amounted to "cheat and retreat actions" whereby Iraqi MiG jets dart briefly into the no-fly zone and then zip back out again. Both Bacon and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Henry "Hugh" Shelton have described these "timid" patterns of Iraqi flights as "militarily insignificant because they tend to be darting across the line and going back for the most part." These flights, Bacon added, "certainly do not represent any control" by Iraq of its airspace, 60 percent of which falls into either the northern or southern no-fly zones (below the 33rd parallel) which are patrolled by coalition aircraft. Iraq has maintained SAM sites in the no-fly zone and added additional ones over time, sparking periodic attacks by coalition aircraft. "We will continue to do that," Bacon noted. "I think they (the Iraqis) know what our position is. We know what their position is, and we are taking military action against these SAM sites as appropriate." Bacon also answered a number of questions about the composition of the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) and its mission. First and foremost, he said, UNSCOM "is a disarmament agency and monitoring agency -- not an intelligence agency." Iraq's refusal to cooperate with UNSCOM's efforts to determine the extent of the Iraqi efforts to develop weapons of mass destruction, he explained, forced the commission to become "increasingly aggressive" in its inspections to locate evidence of Iraqi chemical, biological or nuclear weapons programs. UNSCOM is composed of resident experts who meet the commission's requirements in various fields from a variety of nations including China, France, Russia, and the United States, the spokesman said, adding "We provide experts for UNSCOM to choose (from) a variety of agencies where experts work." The United States helped UNSCOM gather information which the commission "used for its own purposes," Bacon emphasized. "We provided help that UNSCOM requested," he said. As an illustration, Bacon noted that U.S. U-2 reconnaissance flights flew over Iraq, after UNSCOM specified the air routes for the U-2s. Iraqi officials were notified in advance about the U.S. and French flights that were conducted in support of UNSCOM.
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