NEWS ANALYSIS : Victory Is Military--and Political : Tactics: U.S. achieves a remarkable strategic and tactical surprise. But apparent sparing of Israel is a master stroke.

The warplanes of the United States, Britain, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait apparently achieved a remarkable strategic and tactical surprise in their pre-dawn attack today on the military might of Iraq.

The surprise appears to have almost complete. Although Iraq had a modern air force and a sophisticated air defense system, preliminary reports are that all allied planes returned safely to base.

That good news has a significance far beyond its purely military aspects. At the strategic level in warfare, surprise is almost always gained by an unexpected exercise of will.

That was true in the Vietnam War with the Christmas bombing of 1972, when everybody believed that President Richard M. Nixon lacked the will to escalate the war.

The North Vietnamese made a fatal error then. They underestimated their enemy. And it appears that Saddam Hussein has made a similar mistake.

Even though the Persian Gulf has been on a war footing for more than five months, and even though the United Nations’ Jan. 15 deadline for the use of military force had come and gone, Hussein was evidently still convinced that President Bush was just bluffing.

Israeli actions within the last few days were illustrative. When Hussein threatened to strike Israel at the outbreak of a gulf war, Israeli pilots were put on “strip alert” and were sitting in their cockpits ready to go at a moment’s notice. They took the threat seriously.

In contrast, Hussein did not.

It appears that Bush avoided what could have been an equally devastating political miscalculation--that is, repeating one of the major U.S. mistakes of the Vietnam War, and using military action as a signaling device rather than a war-fighting device. The notion that the bombing campaign would end with a pause, giving Saddam Hussein time to reflect and perhaps surrender, was wisely not taken up.

Instead the war is likely to continue unabated and the momentum will not be lost, as it was so many times in Southeast Asia. Bush was evidently serious when he said the mistakes of Vietnam would not be repeated.

Initial reports were that the surprise enabled the allies to destroy Hussein’s air force on the ground.

Yet, important though that was, perhaps the most important air strike of the first few hours was not against the Iraqi air force.

The apparently successful raids on the Scud medium-range ground-to-ground missiles that threatened Israel were of enormous significance. For they removed the United States from the horns of a dilemma. On the one hand, it had to acknowledge Israel’s right of self-defense, which could have torn the delicate gulf coalition of Arab and Western nations apart. That was Hussein’s expressed intent.

On the other hand, the United States had to maintain the Arab coalition against Hussein if its strategy was to succeed.

The best news to come out of the initial reports was that these Iraqi missile sites had been destroyed and Israel was no longer threatened. Although it was still early, the evidence for this assessment is that Israel was not at war by morning and that business-as-usual prevailed in Jerusalem.

We must never lose sight of the fact that war is a political act, and that military action is only a part of it. The initial victories at the political level are even more encouraging than the military successes on the battlefield.