The supertanker Bridgeton finally was moored Saturday in Kuwait`s terroritial waters with the American flag flapping in the hot desert winds. But the Stars and Stripes might as well have been flying at half mast.
Weeks of American bravado about its ability to protect commercial shipping in the troubled waters of the Persian Gulf were dealt a severe blow when the U.S. Navy`s ”high tech armada” failed to detect a relatively simple underwater mine that ruptured the side of the Bridgeton and sent it limping into the port of this oil-rich Arab nation late Friday.
American and Kuwaiti officials who followed the Bridgeton`s trek into port after it hit the mine, which officials believe was planted by Iran, sought to put the best face on the situation.
No one, after all, was killed by the explosion that occurred when the Bridgeton hit a mine about 120 miles out of Kuwait, they pointed out.
And the U.S. Ambassador to Kuwait, Anthony Quainton, said: ”I don`t think it hurts our credibility any more than the Marshal Chuykov, (a Soviet tanker that hit a similar mine last May) hurt Soviet credibility. I have no doubt we`ll go on with our effort.”
He and other U.S. officials said they doubted there would be any U.S. retaliation, which would further heighten tensions in the gulf.
But privately, a senior Western diplomat commented glumly on the devastating image of a huge tanker wounded while under the protection of U.S. warships because of mines that probably were sown by Iranians in a speedboat. Looking off into the distance, he said, ”We look awful,” and then he walked away.
In the final analysis, the Navy`s ”high-tech armada” lacked adequate mine-detection capability. It actually followed the Bridgeton through the mine field because the huge supertanker was better able to absorb a hit.
Thus, the protected ended up being the protector.
That the massive Bridgeton, the first of 11 Kuwaiti tankers selected to fly the American flag, hit the mine was especially grating for the U.S. Kuwait last year asked the Reagan administration to extend naval protection to its tankers, which had been under persistent attack from Iran in the gulf, a major battleground in the Iran-Iraq war.
The Bridgeton is symbolic of America`s status as a major power in the gulf. Even though it is owned by Kuwait`s state-owned oil tanker company, the reflagging scheme gave the vessel American identity.
The Bridgeton also plays a crucial role in the reflagging scheme. It is as long as four football fields and can carry 3 million barrels of oil or three days` worth of Kuwait`s entire oil production. Under Operation Earnest Will, as the escort plan is known, the vessel was to act as a massive shuttle ferrying oil through the perilous waters of the gulf to several smaller tankers waiting outside the mouth of the gulf.
Now U.S. officials are unsure of the ship`s future. The Bridgeton is so large that there are few drydocks on the gulf big enough to handle it if major repairs are needed, Quainton said.
He said officials of the Kuwaiti Oil Tanker Co. will assess the damage done to the tanker and determine its fate. If the damage is serious, the Bridgeton will have to be moved, or towed, to another repair yard, probably in Dubai near the mouth of the gulf.
In private, Western diplomats in Kuwait said the mine collision probably will hobble the naval escort operation by changing its pace.
”I think there will probably have to be some more minesweeping (or)
mine-hunting efforts in the area where the Bridgeton was hit. How long that will take I don`t know,” said a Western diplomat who spoke on the condition that his name not be used.
The explosion of the mine also was a blow to U.S. prestige in the gulf, a body of water that Washington considers crucial to the strategic interests of America and to Kuwait itself.
Initially, the reflagging was a low-key operation that was accepted reluctantly by the Reagan administration to keep the Soviets from assuming the role of naval protector in the gulf.
The Iraqi jet attack on the USS Stark in May that killed 37 American sailors, however, raised the profile of the escort plan in the U.S. and the Arab world.
In the weeks before the operation actually began, for example, Kuwaiti newspapers carried headlines quoting Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger as saying that the U.S. had the capabilities to respond to any attack on the convoy that might be launched by Iran, which was attacking Kuwait`s ships because of that country`s support for Iraq in the nearly 7-year-old gulf war. In recent weeks, Kuwaiti leaders interviewed agreed that the U.S. should be prepared to respond to an Iranian attack unless it wanted to be viewed as a ”paper tiger” by the Arab states surrounding the crucial waterway.
But the U.S. is unable to prove that Iran laid the mine that the Bridgeton hit. As a result, America now is in a no-win position: If it strikes at Iran, it will be viewed as provocative. If it doesn`t, it will raise the specter of Lebanon, where American forces were pulled out when things got tough.
American troops were withdrawn from Lebanon after 241 U.S. servicemen were killed in October, 1983, by a terrorist who drove a truck bomb into Marine headquarters barracks outside Beirut.
One Western diplomat said he didn`t think the U.S. would retaliate against Iran unless U.S. lives were lost, or at least severely threatened.
The shock waves from the mine blast also were felt in Kuwait. Kuwaiti leaders ostensibly requested the escorts to protect their tankers carrying oil, the major source of income for the monarchy.
But one senior executive at the state-owned tanker company recently admitted that the Iranian attacks on the tankers really didn`t hurt Kuwait`s flow of oil.
He said the company had fed data into its computers on more than 300 attacks on tankers since 1980 and had ”pretty well” determined how to avoid most of them.
”We`ve met our schedules all along,” he said, adding that the uncertainty spawned by the tanker reflagging scheme actually helped Kuwait by raising the price of Middle East oil.
The true goal of the Kuwaiti reflagging scheme was to
”internationalize” the Iran-Iraq war, political analystss say, and help end the conflict, which is causing severe domestic political problems in Kuwait. Officials clearly were not expecting a setback such as the collision of the Bridgeton with a mine.
But the party that may suffer the most is the U.S. Navy. It had assembled a powerful high-tech armada of ships to escort the Kuwaiti tankers from the Gulf of Oman to Kuwait and back.
The Navy has guided-missile cruisers in the gulf and destroyers, frigates and an aircraft carrier with 50 warplanes nearby. It has radars that can detect missile sites and radars that can target Iranian F-4 fighters.
But it didn`t have any of the mindsweeping ships or mine-hunting helicopters assigned to the Middle Eastern Task Force protecting the ships in the gulf.
When asked about the lack of minesweepers more than a week ago, before the escort operation got underway last Wednesday, a Navy spokesman said,
”There are others over there taking care of that.”
The Navy clearly didn`t expect the mine that the Bridgeton hit about 120 miles out of Kuwait, or about three-fourths of the way up the gulf. In fact, just before the Bridgeton hit the mine, Rear Adm. Harold Bernsen told reporters that he didn`t expect attacks from Iran because their armed forces were spent from fighting the gulf war.
One Western military analyst said the Navy`s military posture in the gulf represented the tendency of the U.S. Department of Defense to concentrate on the ”high end” of the military threat spectrum–the threat represented by missiles and other sophisticated weapons.
