U.S. Forced to Defend Basic Targeting Goals : Policy: Bush set broad guidelines and left details to the generals. Their approach may be a problem.

With the U.S. bombing of Iraqi civilians huddled in a Baghdad structure, President Bush is beginning to confront the unhappy consequences of a strategy for conducting the Gulf War that was carefully designed to avoid the pitfalls of Vietnam--a strategy that, for the first month of the conflict, was judged highly successful.

Instead of imposing endless political constraints on the military, or directly involving himself in battlefield decisions as Lyndon B. Johnson and some other ill-starred predecessors did, Bush decided at the outset to lay down broad policy goals and then turn over fighting the war to the professionals.

“I don’t think you would ever see George Bush going over targeting charts. He’s not involved in that kind of micro-management,” White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater said in an interview last month, declaring that Bush is leaving “military tactics, logistics and analysis” to his generals.

“Never again will our armed forces be sent out to do a job with one hand tied behind their back,” Bush himself told an audience of military reserve officers less than a week after the war began.

But now, while results from the battlefield have generally been positive, the relentless aerial assault on Iraq--with its horrifying images of civilian casualties--is beginning to reveal that Bush’s approach may also bring with it increasingly difficult political and foreign policy problems.

“They’re now in a new and trickier phase of the air war,” said a Western analyst who is still based in the Persian Gulf region. “They’re taking out secondary and tertiary targets--all with military justification, but most of them packed in close to civilian areas.” And, U.S. officials acknowledge, some of those targets have had both civilian and military uses.

That point was driven home Wednesday as television screens across the country and around the world carried pictures of mangled civilian victims being removed from the ruins of the bunker outside Baghdad. U.S. officials insist that the bunker was a military command center and, as such, it was deliberately targeted by American warplanes. They said it also had apparently been used as a civilian bomb shelter.

Suddenly, the White House found, it is no longer enough to treat “collateral damage” as an unfortunate but unavoidable by-product of war. Instead, it had to defend its basic policy of giving the Pentagon so much discretion in choosing targets.

“The biggest risk of this, of course, is the political fallout,” one analyst said. “The (allied) coalition can’t afford too many more of these misses. And, with the United Nations meeting today on such topics as civilian casualties in Iraq, maybe one was too many.”

The problem is not that the Pentagon is deliberately targeting civilians. Rather, it is that many military and civilian facilities are so intertwined that unrestricted attacks on the one are almost certain to inflict heavy damage on the other. This is especially true in the present stage of the aerial bombardment, when attacks are being ordered on lower-priority targets that play more indirect roles in Iraq’s war-making capacity and are more likely to involve civilian casualties.

Indicative of the problem: One by one, the bridges of Baghdad fell this week, sliced by missiles and laser-guided bombs that blasted links used by military and civilian traffic alike as it moved between the Iraqi capital and its sprawling neighborhoods on either side of the Tigris River.

And hardly a single suburban postal and telegraph office has been spared in civilian areas in and around Baghdad.

Similarly, as the Pentagon views Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, the Ministry of Local Government is a “valid military target” because it controls police forces in the countryside. A convention center in downtown Baghdad is “associated with the military,” and is therefore eligible for inclusion on the allies’ “air tasking order.”

It is this rising emphasis on dual-use and quasi-civilian elements in Iraq’s infrastructure that is beginning to heighten concern about Bush’s hands-off approach to the day-to-day prosecution of the war, especially as it applies to aerial targeting policy.

Perfectly executed, the present approach could cripple Hussein’s war machine now and for the future at little cost in allied lives. Imperfectly executed, such bombing runs the risk of turning world opinion against the United States, damaging the allied coalition and ultimately souring domestic support for the war.

And it may be that the military officers making decisions fraught with enormous political and foreign policy implications are doing so with a relatively narrow professional focus.

The military view of the issue was reflected in the reaction of Lt. Gen. Thomas W. Kelly, director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to the incident Wednesday:

“There certainly is a possibility that there were civilians inside, and that’s a shame,” Kelly said simply, “but we acted in good faith and in a military regime.”

Indeed, one Pentagon official conceded that in its search for targets in Baghdad, the U.S. military has made little study of civilian sites, including possible dual-use facilities or such things as civilian air raid shelters that might be confused with military bunkers.

Asked whether he knew how many civilian air raid shelters there might be in the capital and what they look like, the deputy director of intelligence for the Joint Chiefs of Staff said Wednesday that he did not.

“We have focused almost completely on trying to find those locations in the city that supported his military infrastructure,” said the intelligence specialist, Navy Capt. David Herrington. “I just don’t know what kind of (civilian air raid) facilities are available.”

Herrington’s focus on the purely military aspects of the air war reflects the policy laid down by Bush and other top civilian leaders from the beginning of the war.

Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, summarizing Bush’s guidance to the Pentagon, said in December that U.S. military commanders would be given unhindered “freedom and flexibility” to plan and carry out military operations.

“There won’t be any restrictions” on what commanders can and cannot target within broad guidelines to avoid civilian casualties to the greatest extent possible, Cheney said. “There will be no holds barred.”

What that translates into for the air war is illustrated by the targeting of Baghdad’s bridges.

In all, there are 10 main bridges across the half-mile-wide Tigris in and around Baghdad, all built of reinforced concrete and capable of supporting tanks, artillery and other heavy military traffic--as well as an endless stream of civilian traffic.

To the south, there is just one more major bridge connecting Iraq’s only two roadways between Baghdad and the strategic southern city of Basra, which is the supply and command center for the occupation troops in Kuwait. That bridge, located near the Iraqi town of Shanawa, 50 miles north of Basra, was destroyed nearly three weeks ago, according to Vietnamese road workers living nearby.

But the 10 bridges of Baghdad can also be used to connect those two key supply roads, which similarly lead to reserve divisions now in and around the northern Iraqi city of Mosul and other divisions near Iraq’s eastern border with Iran.

“If you cut all the bridges in Baghdad, which we all expect them to do before the ground war begins, you confine the Iraqis to one or the other roads to Basra,” one military analyst in the Gulf region said. “You limit their options, slow down their convoys and effectively cut half of their reserve divisions off from Kuwait because they can’t cross the river at any point.

“It (the targeting of the bridges) isn’t to divide the city of Baghdad itself. It’s to slow down and ultimately destroy Iraq’s resupply and reinforcement capability to Kuwait.”

“These military and logistical assets they’re going for now are very close to civilian assets and very spread out from one another,” said another military analyst who has lived in Baghdad.

Allied targeters face two problems in attacking such sites:

* Any error in identifying strictly military targets is likely to result in a deliberate assault on what may prove to be innocent civilians, as appears to have been the case Wednesday.

* Even the most surgical ordnance sometimes goes astray, resulting in civilian casualties that may have been unintended in a literal sense but were predictable nonetheless, once a decision was made to hit a target in the midst of a civilian area.

“Obviously, sometimes the bombs fall a little outside the basket. They have been all week, although, of course, the allied military doesn’t show us these things. They only show their big successes, and it’s only when something big happens like this that we hear about it,” one analyst said.

If these analysts view the difficulties faced by U.S. military planners with considerable sympathy, they also emphasize that the impact on Iraqi civilians seems to be increasing, not declining.

“I, for one, am certain that what the Americans call collateral damage is far more extensive this week than it has been any week since the war began, and that’s because these secondary targets are simply harder to hit,” said one expert.

Assessing the overall air war after four full weeks and nearly 70,000 sorties, one of the analysts concluded that “on the front-line forces, it really was effective--maybe 70% or 80% accuracy.”

But in the continuing air assault on Baghdad and environs, where the analysts said that at least a third of the “smart bomb” attacks apparently have missed their targets, the accuracy and effectiveness ratios are far lower.

The U.N. Security Council met Wednesday to consider whether the U.S. prosecution of the war was outstripping the limited aims that have been set out by the international body.

For some in the Bush Administration, it is not the first time that the military’s view of what is and is not “militarily significant” has either neglected or collided with political factors too important to be left to the generals.

In the opening days of the war, military leaders sniffed at Iraq’s barrage of Scud missile attacks on Israel and Saudi Arabia as “military insignificant.” Feeling political heat from leaders of Israel and Saudi Arabia over the threat to their civilian populations, however, the White House told the Pentagon to step up its hunt for Scud launchers, militarily insignificant or not.

Days later, the Pentagon waved away Iraq’s pumping of millions of barrels of oil into the Persian Gulf as an act of “environmental terrorism” that would have no bearing on military operations. It took a plea for help from Saudi Arabia--and an order to cooperate from the White House--for the Pentagon to mount a aerial attack aimed at stopping the flow of oil into the Gulf.

Last Tuesday, just hours before the U.S. attack on the shelter, the Pentagon again declared that political considerations had little place in its view of how to conduct the war.

As Soviet envoy Yevgeny M. Primakov met with President Hussein somewhere in Baghdad, Gen. Kelly was asked at the Pentagon what efforts the allies had made to avoid striking the site of those meetings.

“This is a tactical thing,” responded Kelly, seemingly taken aback by the suggestion that Primakov’s visit might be a factor in targeting decisions. “Most of these bombing raids are planned several days in advance. The Soviet envoy’s visit to Baghdad is his own business and we are not involved in it at all.”

A senior military official said that Bush had not given the military free rein to bomb anything and everything in Iraq that might have military value.

“We were given specific marching orders, but within that we were given great latitude. War is always politically restrained,” this official said.

Bush would not impose new restrictions on the conduct of the war as a result of the bombing of the Baghdad structure “unless the White House perceives that we have violated its guidance . . . ,” the official said.

“This is just one of the grotesque misfortunes of war.”

Healy reported from Washington and Fineman from Amman, Jordan. Times staff writer John M. Broder in Washington contributed to this report.