But Critics Cite Rise in Violence : U.S. Trims Gulf Armada; ‘Unbounded Success’ Seen

In a low-key announcement that belied the event’s significance, the Defense Department announced Tuesday that the Navy frigate Rodney M. Davis has begun steaming out of the Persian Gulf, thus trimming the size of the U.S. armada to 26 ships from the 27 that had been protecting tanker traffic in the gulf.

U.S. officials believe that the departure of the Davis will usher in the final stage of what has been a costly and violent American military commitment that many critics had complained would be dangerously open-ended. Pentagon officials foresee the gradual reduction of the U.S. naval forces to their pre-1987 level of roughly four ships.

By the standards set by the Reagan Administration, the Persian Gulf initiative was a strategic success. It contributed to Iran’s decision to end its eight-year war with Iraq, according to the Administration. It thwarted a Kuwaiti bid to gain protection from Soviet ships and limited Moscow’s Persian Gulf armada to a few minesweepers.

And in the eyes of the United States’ gulf allies, it has boosted confidence in American will to use military power on their behalf.

“It’s been an unbounded success which accomplished everything we set out to do,” said former Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger, who launched the initiative. “The fact that we’re able to wind it down now is the clearest indication of that.”

But critics charge that the U.S. Navy’s gulf operations raised the levels of violence in and along the troubled waterway--attacks on neutral shipping in the gulf actually rose--and that it exposed dangerous inadequacies in the training and intelligence of the very forces most likely to be dispatched to future Third World hot spots.

Some also question the Administration’s claim that the U.S. naval presence in the gulf was a key factor in Iran’s decision to call a halt to its war with Iraq.

‘Premier Success’

A senior Arab diplomat, who called the initiative “one of the premier successes of the Reagan Administration,” nevertheless said that the “commotion” caused by the U.S. naval force had spawned as much terrorism and sparked as much hostility in the Middle East as it was meant to avert.

“You have to be more low-profile, less spectacular,” cautioned this official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The origins of the escort operation date back to March, 1987, when Kuwait, citing increased Iranian attacks on neutral shipping in the Persian Gulf, turned to the United States and the Soviet Union for naval protection of its commercial tankers.

Washington won a Kuwaiti promise to limit the Soviet role, and the United States in July launched Operation Earnest Will. American warships began escorting 11 Kuwaiti tankers, newly reflagged under the Stars and Stripes, through the perilous Strait of Hormuz to Kuwait’s oil complexes in the northern gulf.

Stark’s Fatalities

In May, 1987, even before the reflagging initiative formally began, 37 sailors aboard the frigate Stark were killed when an Iraqi warplane mistakenly fired an Exocet missile at it.

And the formal escorts immediately proved dangerous. The reflagged Kuwaiti tanker Bridgeton, one of two ships under escort in the first naval convoy of Operation Earnest Will, hit a mine while under U.S. escort on July 24, 1987, and was temporarily put out of service.

U.S. and Iranian forces clashed no fewer than 10 times. Eleven U.S. service personnel were killed, including two crew members who went down with a Marine helicopter during April’s U.S. attack on Iranian oil platforms. The other nine deaths were not in combat; three sailors and one airman, for example, died when their helicopter crashed into one of the patrol ships.

$17 Million a Month

The Persian Gulf escorts strained taut Navy budgets with their monthly bill of at least $17 million beyond normal operating costs. And the Navy frigate Samuel B. Roberts sustained roughly $58 million in damage when it struck a mine on April 14 of this year.

That episode added to the appearance that sophisticated American forces were vulnerable to older weapons such as World War I-era mines, unguided missiles and speedboats.

“It changed the whole idea of gunboat diplomacy,” said Adm. Eugene La Rocque, director of the Center for Defense Information, a Washington-based research center that has been critical of the Administration’s defense priorities.

“You could no longer with impunity run up there with your guns blazing and make these Third World nations roll over and play dead,” La Rocque said. “We showed how vulnerable we could be. And we told the world as well.”

Passenger Jet Downed

And when the U.S. cruiser Vincennes, mistaking a civilian jetliner for a warplane, downed Iran Air Flight 655 last July 3, it killed 290 civilians and raised the possibility that an $860-million ship and its highly trained crew could make tragic mistakes because of nervousness and errors.

Further, the U.S. armada did not appear to accomplish one of its principal goals: to stop or reduce attacks on commercial shipping and enforce the international right to freedom of navigation.

According to the Center for Defense Information, attacks on shipping in the gulf reached an all-time high during 1987 and the first half of 1988, while the U.S. Navy was strongest in and around the gulf.

The Persian Gulf initiative also highlighted the limits of cooperation between the United States and its allies where military commitments outside Europe are concerned.

Allied Cooperation

Publicly, American officials have loudly praised the British, French, Dutch, Belgian and Italian navies, which have sent warships to the gulf and coordinated them loosely with U.S. forces. But U.S. officials privately have joined many independent experts in expressing irritation over the North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies’ stout resistance to any more formal arrangement.

“It certainly made it clear that NATO is not the institution to engage in out-of-area operations,” said Geoffrey Kemp, a former National Security Council aide currently at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Mideast experts in and out of the government believe that the operation initially invited the Iranians to probe for ways to challenge the escorts without provoking a U.S. response.

Iran continued to attack neutral vessels not flying under the U.S. flag, and those vessels in turn clamored for U.S. protection. In October, 1987, in a move apparently designed to test the limits of U.S. protection, Iran lobbed a Silkworm missile at a U.S.-flagged Kuwaiti tanker inside Kuwaiti territorial waters. The United States retaliated with an 85-minute bombardment of an Iranian offshore oil platform used as a command and control station.

‘Chain of Vulnerabilities’

“We defined too specific a commitment in reflagging Kuwaiti tankers and found we created vulnerabilities,” said Georgetown University’s Anthony Cordesman. “It set up such a specific set of targets, created such a specific chain of vulnerabilities, it was tempting (for the Iranians) to try those targets. We should have anticipated that better.”

In response, the United States last April expanded the operation, ordering U.S. ships to come to the aid of neutral ships that were attacked.

In the end, however, officials believe that the orderly reduction of American forces in the gulf is the best indication that the United States has not been drawn into the open-ended commitment that critics had predicted.

“This moderates the Vietnam syndrome by making it clear that one can get into and out of a war that appears murky,” said a senior Navy official.

Marine Gen. George B. Crist, who retires as commander of the Middle East force on Nov. 23, goes even further. “This may be the first successful military application of a political objective that we’ve pulled off, perhaps, since Korea,” Crist told the Associated Press on his command ship, the LaSalle.

Other experts say that the operation proved the utility of offshore forces.

“Neither George Bush nor Michael Dukakis nor any foreseeable President is going to want to be put in the position where he’ll have to commit U.S. ground forces,” said Kemp, of the Carnegie Endowment. “What the Reagan Administration has shown is that you can use direct and indirect force, covert operations and arms sales to back up U.S. diplomacy. I think we’re going to see more operations of this sort.”