Iraq Defeat Certain, U.S. Says : Hussein’s Army to Be Cut Off, Killed, Powell Asserts : Gulf War: General and Cheney assess the conflict and cite foe’s resilience. Bush says the attacks have put Baghdad out of the ‘nuclear bomb-building business.’

Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and his military forces are “hunkering down” in an effort to ride out the massive allied air assault, but sooner or later they will be crushed by Operation Desert Storm, U.S. officials declared Wednesday.

“There can be no doubt: Operation Desert Storm is working,” President Bush said in his first speech since the earliest days of the allied offensive. “There can be no pause now that Saddam has forced the world into war. We will stay the course--and we will succeed.”

Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin L. Powell, assessing the first week of the Persian Gulf War, acknowledged that Iraq’s Scud missiles have been more elusive than expected and the elite Republican Guard has remained a credible fighting force.

But the two officials warned bluntly that despite its resilience under fire, Hussein’s military machine faces certain defeat at the hands of the more than 700,000 American and allied troops deployed in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the region.

“He is a man who will use any means at his disposal to break up the coalition and avoid defeat,” Cheney said. But, he added, Hussein “cannot change the basic course of the conflict. He will be defeated.”

The Iraqi army is “waiting to be attacked, and attacked it will be,” said Gen. Powell. “Our strategy for dealing with this army is very simple: First we’re going to cut it off, then we’re going to kill it.”

The President, speaking to a group of retired military officers, said the intensive allied bombardment of military and industrial targets in Iraq and Kuwait is “right on schedule” and praised its success in meeting key strategic objectives.

“We have dealt a severe setback to Saddam’s nuclear ambitions,” said Bush. “Our pinpoint attacks have put Saddam out of the nuclear bomb-building business for a long time to come. Allied aircraft enjoy air superiority, and we are using that superiority to systematically deprive Saddam of his ability to wage war effectively.”

Despite the setbacks caused by heavy cloud cover over Iraq and Kuwait and the necessity of diverting aircraft to search for Scud missiles and launchers, Cheney and Powell insisted that allied forces have the upper hand and ultimately will prevail over Hussein’s army.

“Time is clearly on our side,” Cheney insisted. “Each day, each week that goes by, he gets weaker and we get stronger.”

“There’s no question that (Hussein’s) force will become progressively weaker,” Powell added. “It’s absolutely mathematical.”

Cheney and Powell said allied military officials are fully prepared to expand the allied campaign to the ground to drive Hussein’s forces from occupied Kuwait. Even so, they suggested that a brutal ground offensive is not necessarily a foregone conclusion.

By subjecting Iraqi army units to intensive bombardment and disrupting the supply lines that are their only source of provisions in the desert, the possibility exists that the conflict could end without a protracted ground engagement, they said.

“If we do have to go to using our ground forces to push him out of Kuwait, it will be after we have done enormous damage to his ground forces, after they’ve been significantly weakened,” Cheney said.

“And I think our people have the same capability on the ground to display the kind of mastery over Iraqi forces that they’ve displayed in the air today.”

Powell said that the U.S.-led coalition has pursued a carefully scripted strategy of disrupting Iraq’s command and control network, attacking key nuclear and chemical weapons facilities and pounding Republican Guard units with a massive aerial bombardment.

Only when those objectives have been met, he said, will allied commanders consider calling their ground forces into play to finish the job.

“We have a tool box that is full of lots of tools, and we brought them all to the party,” said Powell. He said Hussein’s forces appear to be “hunkering down” in an effort to see if the allied effort can be sustained.

While most of Hussein’s 800-plane air force remains intact, Powell said allied forces have attained air superiority by knocking out most of Iraq’s air defense network, severely damaging runways and forcing most of Iraq’s planes into hiding.

During the first week of the campaign, he said, allied forces shot down 19 Iraqi planes in air-to-air combat, while only one U.S. plane was lost in an aerial dogfight. Including planes destroyed by other means, Iraq has lost 41 planes and allied forces have lost 16, Powell said. Considering that the United States and its allies have flown more than 10,000 sorties, he said the allied plane loss is considered unusually low.

Despite the initial successes, Cheney cautioned that the Gulf War is unlikely to end quickly. Even so, he dismissed suggestions that Hussein stands to gain by dragging out the conflict on the assumption that allied forces lack the stomach for a protracted battle.

“There’s no question the United States and its allies have the staying power,” the defense secretary said. “He will quit long before we will.”

Acknowledging that Pentagon officials have been unable to provide detailed bomb damage assessments and other precise indicators of allied progress, Powell appealed for tolerance on the part of the public and press corps.

“It’s a war. I don’t think we’ve done badly for seven days,” he said. “What we can’t do is keep up with the hourly news cycle.”

The briefing by Cheney and Powell came as officials throughout the Bush Administration appealed for patience.

“We’d better get patient, and we’d better get ready for a lot longer conflict than just a few days,” said White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater. “This is not going to be wrapped up in a week. We’re not going to have this done in time for the weekend talk shows and the evening news. It’s going to go on, and it’s going to be day after day, just like this.”

At the Pentagon briefing, Powell was most confident in claiming damage to the facilities that produce Iraq’s unconventional weapons--nuclear, chemical and biological.

Iraq’s two operating nuclear reactors at Tawaitha, east of Baghdad, which were thought to be capable of producing enriched uranium for nuclear weapons “are both gone, they’re down, they’re finished,” Powell said.

Powell said a number of plants suspected of making chemical weapons have suffered “considerable damage.” He acknowledged, however, that “they still have a chemical weapons capability. Their artillery can fire chemical weapons; their multiple-launch rocket systems, their (missile) systems and their air force does have that capability.” And large stockpiles of chemical weapons are believed to survive in protected depots scattered over the country.

“We only have estimates of how many of these weapons they have, but we have made it a high priority to locate these weapons and to go after them, and a significant part of our capability is directed toward Scud facilities--those Scud facilities and mobile Scuds,” Cheney said.

He noted that the launchers are small and easily hidden in the vast Arabian desert. “It’s one of those problems that may be with us for some period of time,” the secretary said.

But while the Scuds may be the Pentagon’s biggest immediate headache, the real problem facing the U.S. military is Iraq’s half-million troops in the theater. The allied air campaign is just now turning to the task of trying to destroy them, after starting with the elite Republican Guard deployed in northern Kuwait and around Basra in southern Iraq.

“We believe the Republican Guard is at the heart of his military capability and his political power,” Cheney said. “That’s the unit that he used to take Kuwait. Those are the units that he used in his war with Iran for offensive purposes. They are the heart of the regime. And we’re not really trying to fine-tune it. We’ll hit the Republican Guard just as hard as we have to until we’ve achieved our objective.”

That bombardment has begun with uncertain results, Powell said. He said the Pentagon has “anecdotal” evidence of low morale and some desertions, “but it is not a trend yet.”

He said that satellite reconnaissance photos show that some units within the Republican Guard have suffered substantial damage, while others appear to be intact. When it comes to “bomb damage assessment” of enemy fighting units, Powell said, satellite photos and other technology may not provide the final answer.

“You really don’t know how you’re doing against an army until that army tries to perform its function,” Powell said.

Powell and Cheney did not address the question of whether the destruction of the two Iraqi reactors would result in a release of radioactivity. But because of the relatively small amounts of fuel and heat energy in research reactors, there is “a lot lower potential for a severe radiological consequence,” according to Gregory N. Cook, spokesman for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission in Walnut Creek.

It was unclear Wednesday whether the nuclear fuel from the two reactors had been removed before the bombing raids. If the fuel had been removed, the spread of radioactive materials would be limited to the reactor structure that may have been contaminated.

If fuel was present, the release of radioactive materials would not begin to compare to the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident in the Soviet Union, which killed 31 people and exposed more than 500,000 Soviet residents to radiation.

Nonetheless, there could be serious radiation nearby, according to Najm Meshkati, an assistant professor at USC’s Institute of Safety and Systems Management, who has written about the Chernobyl accident.

“If there was any release of radioactive material, then we are dealing with a potential catastrophe at least for the immediate vicinity, and very long-term contamination,” Meshkati said.

Times staff writer John M. Broder contributed to this report.