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U.S. sets preemptive strikes on wider range of Iraqi targets

SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM
Tuesday, September 17, 2002

U.S. officials said the Bush administration has decided to take preemptive action to halt Iraqi anti-aircraft fire against British and U.S. warplanes over northern and southern Iraq.

They said the new regulations allow U.S. fighter-jets to destroy both mobile and stationary Iraqi air defense facilities.

Until the summer, allied air attacks focused on mobile command and control facilities and anti-aircraft batteries. Officials said the United States is now targeting Iraqi airfields, buildings that house command and control centers as well as communications headquarters, Middle East Newsline reported.

The change, officials said, includes the widening of Iraqi targets in the no-fly zones. The areas comprise zones where Iraq cannot fly fixed-wing aircraft.

"We decided after a great deal of talk that it really didn't make an awful lot of sense to be flying patterns that we were getting shot at, if in response we were not doing any real damage that would make it worth putting our pilots at risk," U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said. "As you attack moveable targets and get them, the question is can you get them faster than they can replace them through the relative porous borders they have with at least three countries on their periphery."

Rumsfeld told a Pentagon briefing on Monday that allied bomb strikes are focusing on what he termed higher-value Iraqi targets. He said the new policy was launched several months ago amid a determination that allied air attacks were having little affect on Iraq's air defense capability as the Saddam regime has demonstrated the capability to rapidly repair and replace components through such neighbors as Iran, Jordan and Syria.

"I directed it, because it seemed right," Rumsfeld said. "I don't like the idea of our planes being shot at. We're there implementing UN resolutions, and the idea that our planes go out and get shot at with impunity bothers me."

Rumsfeld said the latest allied strikes have degraded Iraq's air defense system, which have been improved with fiber-optic cables and queuing capabilities, or the dissemination of information on aircraft throughout Iraq's air defense network. But he could not say whether Iraq has lost its overall air defense capability.

"Whether it is degrading it faster than it was being improved, no one can say," he said.

The new policy was disclosed more than a week after U.S. and British warplanes destroyed Iraqi stationary air defense facilities in western Iraq.

It was the first time since 1998 that the allied jets bombed targets in the H-3 area, used to launch medium-range missile attacks against Israel during the 1991 Gulf war.

"Radars can easily be moved between the time a missile is fired and we counterstrike," Gen. Peter Pace, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said. "We're picking on targets that are part of that continuum of air defense, but cannot be moved."

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