Air Campaign

WASHINGTON -- Rejecting Iraq's conditional withdrawal proposal yesterday, allied forces kept up a bombing campaign designed to prepare the battlefield of occupied Kuwait and southern Iraq for a ground assault.Baghdad's surprise pullout offer produced a brief rush of euphoria among allied troops in the Persian Gulf, and officials back in Washington, that an end to the conflict was at hand. But after studying the Iraqi statement, U.S. military spokesmen said there would be no letup in the round-the-clock air campaign unless Iraq were to withdraw unconditionally from Kuwait.

Mayor Sheila Dixon launched the first television advertisement of her campaign yesterday - an ad that focuses on her last six months in office - and campaign officials said it will stay on the air until the Sept. 11 primary election. Though short on specifics, Dixon's 30-second spot began airing yesterday on all four local network affiliates. It portrays the mayor as "a tough-minded chief executive who gets things done" and "a problem solver." The ad starts about a week after her leading opponent in the race began his own series of ads. Both ads represent an early start to the campaign's television wars - at least when compared with the 1999 mayoral elections - and demonstrate just how much money has been raised.

WASHINGTON -- The United States and its allies are preparing for a ground war against Iraqi forces that will rival the air campaign in use of high-tech weapons and exceed it in intensity, military authorities say.But unlike the air war, the land campaign is expected to suffer high casualties at the outset as allied armor and infantry clear Iraqi minefields, breach fortifications and penetrate enemy lines, probably on multiple fronts.The ground thrust would be closely coordinated with aerial bombing and missile strikes, using advanced Army helicopter-borne weapons as well as those employed since the start by air forces.

A proposal aimed at reducing the influence of special interests in legislative campaigns by having Maryland taxpayers pay for them was debated in a state Senate committee yesterday. The bill's primary Senate sponsor, Prince George's County Democrat Paul G. Pinsky, said the bill would reduce the appearance of favoritism among legislators and enable candidates to focus on issues, not fundraisers. To be eligible for "public financing," candidates would have to raise seed money in sums of $5 or more from about 350 registered voters in their districts in addition to $6,750 in other contributions.

WASHINGTON -- The United States and Russia failed to agree yesterday on how to end the war over Kosovo, and President Clinton signaled a prolonged and costly air campaign by preparing to dispatch more than 300 additional warplanes and to call up Air Force and Army reservists.As NATO's bombing attacks entered their fourth week, Clinton met for a second day with members of Congress to try to shore up support for the military campaign.The White House told Congress the war would cost $3 billion to $4 billion through September.

WASHINGTON -- Military staffs at the Pentagon are preparing an extensive air campaign against Serbian artillery and troop units in Bosnia in the expectation that President Clinton may soon order action under his promised tougher Balkans policy.A full panoply of sophisticated intelligence apparatus and advanced weapons would be brought into play to locate targets and bring them under swift air attack, if the president chooses that course.By late yesterday afternoon, military planners and operators had settled in for what they said would be a long weekend of getting ready for presidential orders.

Washington. -- In the four months that have elapsed since the end of Operation Desert Storm, some Air Force planners have become persuaded that air power defeated Iraq almost single-handedly -- Indeed, that General H. Norman Schwarzkopf's ground invasion of Kuwait would have been unnecessary had the air campaign been permitted to continue for another week or two.They also believe Desert Storm proved that the kind of carefully phased air campaign conducted against...

WASHINGTON -- The commander of allied air forces in the Persian Gulf war, Lt. Gen. Charles A. Horner, said yesterday the destruction of Iraq's nuclear works would be a major undertaking -- no one-shot operation -- if President Bush ordered it done."

The Los Angeles Times said in an editorial yesterday:FOR MORE than two months the no-fly zones over northern and southern Iraq have been arenas for almost daily attacks on Saddam Hussein's air defense system by U.S. and British planes.The bombing campaign shows no signs of diminishing. So long as Iraq chooses to challenge the allied patrols with its planes or surface-to-air missiles, retaliation is a certainty. The need to maintain these patrols can hardly be argued.The no-fly zones were created to protect the largely anti-government Kurdish population in the north and the Shiite Muslims in the south from the kind of brutal air attacks Mr. Hussein carried out against them in the wake of the Gulf War. The allies are not likely to abandon that humanitarian purpose, nor should they.

WASHINGTON -- Only about 60 percent of the U.S. laser-guided bombs dropped in Operation Desert Storm have hit their targets, and the other 40 percent have missed by as much as thousands of feet, according to past and present government officials who are familiar with U.S. intelligence reports.The low scores may help explain why the air campaign against Iraq is proceeding more slowly than many officers had anticipated, those officials say.Before the war began, Pentagon officials estimated it would take about 10 days to complete the air campaign, according to members of Congress who were briefed.

SECRET AND STRICTLY PERSONAL - UK EYES ONLY DAVID MANNING From: Matthew Rycroft Date: 23 July 2002 S 195 /02 cc: Defence Secretary, Foreign Secretary, Attorney-General, Sir Richard Wilson, John Scarlett, Francis Richards, CDS, C, Jonathan Powell, Sally Morgan, Alastair Campbell IRAQ: PRIME MINISTER'S MEETING, 23 JULY Copy addressees and you met the Prime Minister on 23 July to discuss Iraq. This record is extremely sensitive. No further copies should be made. It should be shown only to those with a genuine need to know its contents.

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration initially expected that Iraq's political and military leadership might quickly collapse when, with some fanfare, the Pentagon unveiled the strategy of "shock and awe" to expedite the rapid disintegration of Saddam Hussein's regime. In his briefings to President Bush's war Cabinet, Gen. Tommy Franks, commander of coalition forces in the war, said shock and awe would combine to offset the numerical superiority of Iraqi forces and stun their leadership into submission.

WASHINGTON - President Bush has settled on a war plan for Iraq that would begin with an air campaign shorter than the one for the Persian Gulf war, senior administration officials say. It would feature swift ground actions to seize footholds in the country and strikes to cut off the leadership in Baghdad. The plan, approved in recent weeks by Bush well before the United Nations Security Council's unanimous vote Friday to disarm Iraq, calls for massing 200,000 to 250,000 troops for attack by air, land and sea. The offensive would probably begin with a "rolling start" of substantially fewer forces, Pentagon and military officials say. Bush, speaking at a news conference Thursday, did not discuss the secret process for planning a possible war, but he said that if military action was required to compel Iraq to disarm, the United States and its allies would "move swiftly with force to do the job."

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration, in developing a potential approach for toppling President Saddam Hussein of Iraq, is concentrating its attention on a major air campaign and ground invasion, with initial estimates contemplating the use of 70,000 to 250,000 troops. The administration is turning to that approach after concluding that a coup in Iraq would be unlikely to succeed and that a proxy battle using local forces there would be insufficient to bring a change in power. But senior officials acknowledge that any offensive would probably be delayed until early next year, allowing time to create the right military, economic and diplomatic conditions.

WASHINGTON - Vice President Dick Cheney yesterday left the Middle East quieter than he found it. But the task of cementing a truce and finally halting 18 months of bloodshed depends in large part on the combined skills of two very different envoys who will stay behind. Anthony C. Zinni, President Bush's Middle East troubleshooter, is a short, powerfully muscled Marine from a mill town outside Philadelphia who climbed the ranks from serving as a junior officer in the Vietnam War to command all U.S. forces from Kenya to Kazakhstan.

BELGRADE, Yugoslavia -- Once, Knez Milosa street was Yugoslavia's governing heart, where sweeping administrative buildings shared pride of place with embassies from powers great and small, including the United States.Now, a six-block walk along the tree-lined boulevard is like a journey through NATO's target list.The Yugoslav army headquarters is a twin pile of scorched junk. Across the street, the Foreign Ministry, which did not take a direct hit, is empty, its windows blown out, the facade and grand columns pockmarked by shrapnel.

WASHINGTON -- The Pentagon substantially overestimated Iraqi troop strength during the Gulf War, insisting that the Iraqis had more than 500,000 troops in the theater while the true count may have been as low as 183,000 when the ground war began, according to a new congressional report on the war.The House Armed Services Committee "lessons learned" study asserts that allied intelligence failed to discern that the 42 Iraqi divisions deployed in Kuwait and...

WASHINGTON -- On the eve of high-level military talks today in the Persian Gulf, the president of France and the leader of British forces both said that an allied ground assault against Iraq is now "inevitable."Heightening speculation that a potentially bloody land war is imminent, President Francois Mitterrand also said that the ground battle would start "in coming days . . . in any case sometime this month."Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, before leaving Washington for discussions in the gulf with senior military leaders, told Congress he hoped the war could be ended "as soon as possible, to minimize the loss of life on all sides."

WASHINGTON -- NATO allies concluded their 50th anniversary summit yesterday with a new pledge of military protection and economic aid to Yugoslavia's fragile neighbors, but they reached no clear agreement on how to ratchet up the pressure on Serbia beyond an intensified bombing campaign.The 19-member NATO alliance "reaffirmed our determination repeatedly to intensify our actions, military and economic, until we achieve our objectives in Kosovo," President Clinton said yesterday evening. "On this, the alliance leaves Washington more united even than it was when we came here."

WASHINGTON -- Allied leaders will begin this weekend to lay the groundwork for alliance troops to wipe out pockets of Serb military resistance in Kosovo after NATO bombers "soften up" the Yugoslav army, much as the air war did against Iraqi forces occupying Kuwait, a NATO source said.While NATO officially is committed only to an air campaign to drive President Slobodan Milosevic's forces out of Kosovo, alliance officials are reluctantly concluding that limited ground action might be needed to complete the military mission after weeks of punishing airstrikes.