Allied pilots pushed their attack Saturday on Saddam Hussein`s Republican Guard and hit other military targets in Baghdad and Kuwait. Two U.S. Air Force A-10 ”tank busters” were shot down.
Iraq said 130 civilians were killed Thursday when British Tornado bombers, in an attack on a bridge at Fallouja, a town west of Baghdad, missed the target and destroyed an apartment house and hit part of a marketplace.
If there were any doubts that the furious pace of the war would continue in the wake of a confusing peace offer from Baghdad on Friday, they were erased by the statistics issued by military commanders at Riyadh`s daily briefing Saturday.
Allied planes flew 2,600 sorties in the 24 hours after the broadcast of the Iraqi proposal to withdraw from Kuwait. More than 700 of those were in the Kuwait theater and at least 170 were aimed at the Republican Guard.
Allied commanders have been targeting Guard units and Iraqi soldiers on the front lines in Kuwait in preparation for a ground war, if one becomes necessary, to force the Iraqis out of their fortifications.
The jet fighters and bombers were joined in the attacks by Apache attack helicopters, which made nighttime raids on Iraqi positions, shooting at troops and destroying a variety of military vehicles, U.S. officials said.
Marine Brig. Gen. Richard Neal said the two A-10 attack planes shot down had been attacking Republican Guard positions in northwest Kuwait amid heavy anti-aircraft fire. Both pilots were listed as missing in action. An F-16C also was lost, and its pilot killed, in a landing accident.
The Iraqis fired more Scud missiles, this time at a Saudi refinery town and at Israel. The Scud aimed at Jubail before dawn Saturday broke into pieces and fell harmlessly into the Persian Gulf. Two Scuds landed in open areas of Israel. There were no reports of damages or injuries.
Although the peace proposal had drawn some initial consideration from the Soviet Union, a foreign ministry spokesman said Saturday that conditions attached to the proposal made it unacceptable-conditions President Bush firmly rejected, too.
At Bush`s vacation home in Kennebunkport, Me., where he was spending a long weekend, the president said the United Nations position on the Gulf war is ”solid, and there`s no giving on that at all.” In rejecting the plan Friday, Bush suggested that the Iraqis get rid of Hussein.
”There`s another way for the bloodshed to stop. And that is for the Iraqi military and the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands and force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside and then comply with the United Nations resolutions and rejoin the family of peace-loving nations,”
Bush said.
The U.S. military in Riyadh said it would continue attacking Iraq without pause and also attack any Iraqi troops that try to withdraw from Kuwait until Baghdad makes clear its readiness to abandon Kuwait without condition.
”Until that occurs, the coalition forces and the U.S. forces will continue to execute the campaign plan,” said Neal, deputy director of operations for the U.S. Central Command. His comments were echoed in Washington.
Perhaps underlining their determination, U.S. commanders have ordered the use of two devastating weapons-big ”daisy cutter” bombs and fuel-air explosives-to clear minefields and other obstacles that might obstruct a ground invasion.
U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Thomas Kelly, operations director for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was asked whether the allies would order a bombing pause to give Hussein`s troops a chance to leave their entrenchments and fortifications and head home to Iraq.
”I would recommend against a bombing pause because it would give them a chance to regenerate and could result in dead Americans in the future,” said Kelly during a news briefing in Washington.
”If he was trying to get a military advantage out of it, he failed utterly because he is not getting a military advantage out of it. My recommendations to my bosses, who talk to the president, would be: The campaign`s going good, there is no military reason that I know of to change anything we`re doing, so let`s continue to press.”
Friday`s offer by Iraq was the first time Hussein has accepted the concept of leaving Kuwait, which he annexed after his forces invaded the tiny oil emirate last August. His conditions were dismissed as unacceptable.
Among them:
– Withdrawal from Kuwait ”must be coupled” with the withdrawal of U.S. and other allied forces from the region.
– Withdrawal ”should be linked” to an Israeli withdrawal from occupied territories.
– Kuwait`s future political arrangements must be based on ”authentic democracy,” and must not include the returning of the al-Sabah family`s autocratic rule.
– Iraq`s debts to ”aggressor gulf and foreign countries” should be forgiven and the United States and other allied countries should pay for the rebuilding of Iraq.
Within a few hours, the Iraqi proposal was rejected by foreign ministers representing eight of the nine Arab nations with troops in the multinational forces in Saudi Arabia.
”It is not a serious offer,” said Egyptian Foreign Minister Esmat Abdel-Meguid, announcing that the group unanimously rejected the proposal after it found that the conditions were unacceptable and contrary to UN resolutions.
Ministers from Oman, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Syria attended the session. Morocco`s King Hassan, under growing domestic pressure to pull his troops out of Saudi Arabia, sent no representative.
In Israel, Eliahu Ben-Elissar, chairman of the Knesset`s security and foreign affairs committee, said, ”It`s a gimmick. Only those who are willing to leave power in the hands of the Iraqi regime support linkage. From our point of view, nothing has changed.”
Defense Minister Moshe Arens said the announcement indicates ”Saddam Hussein has begun to understand that his condition is difficult.”
In the busy war room of Desert Storm commander Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, there was a moment of anticipation ”that, hey, maybe this thing is over and we can all go home,” recalled one U.S. officer who was there. But it didn`t take long for the optimism to melt away.
”I don`t think he`s going to pull out,” said Spec. 4 James Hayden of Chicago, with the 2d Armored Division. ”He`s buying some time because we`re bombing him. He can`t move anything because we`ll bomb it.”
Even as a bid to buy time, Hussein`s offer was a political challenge to President Bush in the face of growing anger at the U.S. in formerly moderate Arab nations such as Jordan. There the mood has turned more passionate in the aftermath of the U.S. bombing of a bunker in which many women and children had taken shelter. Police turned away about 3,000 demonstrators trying to protest Friday at the U.S. Embassy in Amman.
The offer from Iraq`s Ruling Revolutionary Council, headed by Hussein, came just days before Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz was to leave for a meeting with Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, suggesting that Hussein harbors hopes of a deal, with the Kremlin as his guarantor.
Aziz is scheduled to fly to Moscow on Sunday and meet Gorbachev on Monday.
Gorbachev has voiced concerns recently about the extent of coalition bombing of Baghdad but has stood by the UN Security Council`s no-conditions policy for Iraq`s withdrawal. While the Soviet leader tries his hand at peacemaking, the U.S. and its allies are unlikely to proceed with a land offensive to drive Iraq out of Kuwait.
Allied air attacks over the last four weeks have destroyed at least a third of Iraq`s tanks and artillery as well as damaging others, according to the military command. Hussein`s Air Force hasn`t been active in weeks, except for frantic dashes into Iran.
The round-the-clock air strikes also are taking a toll on the Republican Guard and picking off the bunkers and tanks dug in along the Kuwait border. There have been reports that some Republican Guard members have abandoned their fortifications and headed home.
”I think we`re inside his decision-making cycle,” said Neal. ”I think down on the ground they are confused, they are disorganized, and I think that is a direct result of a very tough, effective air campaign.”
At the daily military briefing in Riyadh, Neal said the way for the fighting to stop is for Hussein to accept the UN Security Council resolutions and withdraw without condition or for Iraqi troops to come across the border to surrender ”in droves.”
The U.S. has established prisoner-of-war camps in Eastern Saudi Arabia capable of holding more than 100,000 Iraqi soldiers.
If they sense that military discipline is breaking down, the U.S. might try to destroy the minefields that Iraq has placed along the Saudi-Kuwaiti border, creating pathways for disaffected Iraqi troops.
American and Saudi officials have said that those minefields are in place as much to keep Iraqi troops from defecting as to blunt an allied ground offensive.
