Egyptians Feel Iraqis Plan Chemical Attacks : Tactics: Analysts conclude Baghdad is waiting for an allied ground assault before unleashing its air force.

Egyptian military planners believe that Iraq, timing its counter-strike for maximum political as well as military effect, is waiting for the allies to launch a ground offensive before it commits its air force and its stocks of chemical weapons to the battle for Kuwait.

“The only reason we can see for Iraq holding its planes back is that it plans to arm them with chemicals and use them when the ground attack starts because that is when they calculate such weapons will be most useful to them. We are convinced of this,” a senior military source said.

Allied military commanders have expressed surprise at the relatively light Iraqi resistance thus far and at the almost total absence of the Iraqi air force in the first week of the war. In the first air strikes against Baghdad, American pilots reported seeing Iraqi planes fleeing northward, to the safety of airstrips and hardened shelters in the upper quadrant of the country. This, in turn, has prompted some military analysts to speculate that the Iraqis had been thrown into initial disarray by the magnitude of the allied air campaign.

However, Egyptian sources with access to intelligence reports believe that such assessments underestimate what, one week into the war, is emerging as the outlines of a more carefully planned, longer-range Iraqi battle plan. The Iraqi strategy, these sources contend, relies as much on political calculations as it does on military ones and reflects what appears to be Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s belief that his country can afford to sustain many more casualties than can the United States and its allies.

“Saddam believes he can beat Bush--not in the desert in Kuwait but at home in the United States,” one senior military source said. “He thinks that if he can hold out and make it a long war, with many American casualties, he can win because the American people won’t accept a long and costly war with Iraq.

“He is basing his judgments on Vietnam and Beirut,” the source added, referring to the withdrawal of U.S. peacekeeping forces from Lebanon after 241 American servicemen were killed by a suicide truck bomber Oct. 23, 1983.

If the U.S. experiences in Vietnam and Beirut have shaped Hussein’s view of the resolve of the alliance confronting him, Iraq’s own long and bloody war with Iran--the 1980-88 conflict in which more than 1 million lives were lost---may also help to explain why Iraq has not yet offered much overt resistance to the allied air strikes, Egyptian analysts say.

“The Iran-Iraq War was essentially a war of attrition, and there is every reason to believe that Saddam thinks he can fight this conflict in a similar manner,” one military source said, noting that the Iraqi president himself has described Iraq’s strategy during the war with Iran as “defending ourselves until the other side gives up.”

If the Egyptian assessments, which are based in part on insights gained from a long and close history of military cooperation between Egypt and Iraq, are correct, it suggests that Hussein is saving his resources for the ground phase of the war.

“We think he has not used chemical weapons yet because he is waiting for the ground war, when he thinks they can inflict more casualties. He wants to show that he can take a pounding but still come back and inflict great damage,” an Egyptian intelligence source said.

Conserving the Iraqi air force will be essential to this strategy if, as the Egyptians believe, the Iraqis do not have the capability to mount chemical warheads on missiles. “We never thought he had that capability and we think the fact that all of the missile attacks against Saudi Arabia and Israel so far have been with conventional warheads confirms this,” the Egyptian source said.

Other Egyptian analysts also see political calculations as playing an important part in Iraq’s war strategy.

“From the beginning, Saddam has been trying to transform this conflict into an Arab-Israeli war. He has been playing to the Arab masses, trying to polarize their opinion and use it to divide the Arab members of the anti-Iraq coalition,” a Foreign Ministry official said.