Ground War Launched : Bush Acts After Iraq Scorns Deadline : Gulf conflict: In a nationwide address, the President accuses Baghdad of redoubling its efforts to destroy Kuwait.

One of the most violent battles in the history of modern warfare began on the wind-swept deserts beside the Persian Gulf today as the United States and its allies launched their long-threatened ground assault against Iraqi forces to drive them out of Kuwait.

“The liberation of Kuwait has now entered a final phase,” President Bush announced at 10 p.m. EST Saturday at the White House.

Bush said he ordered the land assault because Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had ignored his deadline, Saturday at noon EST, to withdraw his troops from Kuwait and because Hussein had redoubled his efforts to destroy Kuwait and its people. Military officials said Iraqis had now torched 300 Kuwaiti oil wells and were raping, mutilating and executing thousands of Kuwaiti citizens.

“I have therefore directed Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf (commander of U.S. forces in the Gulf), in conjunction with coalition forces, to use all forces available, including ground forces, to eject the Iraqi army from Kuwait,” the President said in a nationally televised statement. “Once again this was a decision made only after extensive consultation with our coalition partners. . . .

“I have complete confidence in the ability of coalition forces to swiftly and decisively accomplish their mission.”

Bush made his announcement on a podium in the White House press room. He read his statement from notes. At one point, his left arm shook slightly in his gray suit jacket as he said to the American people:

“Tonight, as this coalition seeks to do that which is right and just, I ask only that all of you stop what you are doing and say a prayer for all the coalition forces, and especially for our men and women in uniform, who at this very moment are risking their lives for their country and all of us.

“May God bless and protect each and every one of them,” Bush said, “and may God bless the United States of America.”

At the United Nations, Iraq’s deputy ambassador, Sabah Talat Kadrat, vowed: “The war will be long.”

Defense Secretary Dick Cheney declared a blackout on information about the assault. He told reporters at the Pentagon that all military briefings in Washington and at allied headquarters in Saudi Arabia would be suspended until further notice. Cheney cited the safety of allied troops and the security of military operations.

The date and hour to begin the assault had been decided “for some period of time,” Cheney said. He declined to say at what time the attack began, but a Pentagon source reportedly put it about 4 a.m. in the Gulf (5 p.m. PST). Cheney said the date and timing had been “subject to change up until the last minute,” depending on weather conditions and whether Hussein met the President’s deadline.

Asked whether there had been any communication whatsoever from Hussein, Cheney replied: “None that I’m aware of.”

The defense secretary said the ground assault was carefully planned to bring “a minimum number of casualties to allied forces.” But he added: “I would not say that there is a minimal risk. This is a major military operation against a well-equipped, well-fortified opponent.

“I would not want to underestimate the difficulties of the task at all.”

The President had returned to the White House at 9:34 p.m. EST after spending the day at Camp David, his presidential retreat in the mountains of nearby Maryland.

His announcement came 10 hours after his noon deadline passed with no evidence that Iraq had begun to withdraw its troops from Kuwait, a White House spokesman said. At the time, Bush had pledged that the Persian Gulf War would proceed “according to plan.”

Baghdad Radio called him a “madman” and dismissed his deadline as “desperate” and “theatrical.”

At the last minute, the American President had turned aside a plea from Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev to delay any ground war for “a day or two.” At the end of the day, Gorbachev authorized his spokesman to say the Soviets would not condemn America for any assault against the Iraqis.

“We will not express our censure,” said Vitaly N. Ignatenko at the Kremlin, “but only regret over the fact that the world today turned out to be incapable of solving this problem by peaceful means. . . .

“Today,” he said, “Iraq has lost its chance.”

The U.N. Security Council, too, had launched a last-ditch effort to merge the Bush ultimatum and its conditions with Friday’s Soviet-Iraqi peace proposal. But U.S. Ambassador Thomas R. Pickering made it clear that Bush does not consider the Security Council an appropriate place for negotiating peace plans.

The council, Pickering said, is “a good forum for dealing with resolutions.”

Surveying the bleak diplomatic landscape and Hussein’s adamant stance, one Bush Administration official declared: “He’s always said he wanted the ‘mother of battles.’ Now he’s going to get it.”

On the Desert

U.S. officials have said in recent days that an allied ground, air and sea force of about 800,000 troops, 2,000 tanks, 2,000 combat aircraft and more than 100 warships would attempt to encircle approximately 500,000 Iraqi troops in Kuwait and southern Iraq and either destroy them or force their surrender.

The officials have said it would be one of the fastest and most violent clashes of forces in recent history.

White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater said the ground assault had been set for early today, Persian Gulf time, when Cheney and Gen. Colin L. Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, returned to Washington from three days of briefings in Saudi Arabia.

Nothing in recent weeks had changed allied plans for the war, Fitzwater said.

The first allied success of the ground attack came quickly.

At the start of the assault, allied forces captured the small island of Faylakah, commanding the sea approaches to Kuwait city, the Kuwaiti News Agency reported. It said it had received the information from “an informed source from the joint (allied) forces.”

Between 500 and 1,000 Iraqi troops were stationed on Faylakah, the agency said, and most were captured.

The hours before the ground war were filled with massive air bombardments and intense border fights.

In addition, Iraq launched three Scud missile attacks. One was fired at Riyadh early today, and witnesses said it was shot down by a Patriot missile. Another was fired at Israel 10 minutes before Bush’s deadline arrived. It too was shot down by a Patriot missile, resulting in no damage or injuries.

A third Scud was fired earlier at eastern Saudi Arabia, but it broke up in flight and fell harmlessly onto the desert, allied officers said.

Before the announcement that the ground war had commenced, allied planes flew through thick antiaircraft fire to drop so much ordnance on targets just outside Baghdad that downtown buildings shook. The raids began before dawn Saturday and continued periodically up to the 8 p.m. (Iraq time) hour of Bush’s deadline.

Of the 2,900 total sorties flown, 100 missions were directed against Iraq’s armored Republican Guard units, a prime target of the air campaign. These crack Iraqi troops--many of them survivors of the eight-year Iran-Iraq War--were fortified inside southern Iraq.

They are charged with blocking an allied advance into Iraq and reinforcing Iraq’s less-experienced front-line soldiers.

Just hours before the allied ground invasion started, U.S. forces in northern Saudi Arabia unleashed some of the heaviest artillery bombardment yet on Iraqi positions in Kuwait.

Marines also conducted perhaps their most aggressive reconnaissance patrols to date, capturing more than 200 Iraqi soldiers in two separate skirmishes, according to Lt. Gen. Walter E. Boomer, commander of the more than 80,000 Marine ground troops now deployed in northern Saudi Arabia.

U.S. psychological operatives had also stepped up their attempts to lure defectors across the border--using not only pleas broadcast over loudspeakers but also heavy-metal music.

Perhaps as a result, another 360 or so Iraqi soldiers were reportedly seeking to surrender Saturday night to the Marines across an Iraqi-laid minefield.

“They’re coming through gaps in the minefields,” Boomer said. “We’re moving people up to help them come home.”

Boomer also received a report that an American helicopter had mistakenly fired on Marine forces that had penetrated enemy territory. But the initial accounts said there were no U.S. casualties.

U.S. forces also said they had discovered explosives attached to numerous wellheads in the Wafra oil fields in Kuwait, just north of the Saudi border.

Boomer said explosives-ordnance teams had been dispatched to dismantle the devices. But it was not clear how the commencement of the all-out ground attack would affect their work.

As the ground war began, the allied force’s long-standing fear of Iraqi use of poison gas deepened. Traces of a substance used in chemical weapons were detected near an Iraqi site that has been heavily bombarded by allied artillery and air strikes, a Marine spokesman said Saturday.

“Probably we hit a chemical storage site and traces were released in the air,” said Lt. Col. Jan Huly of the 2nd Marine Division.

He did not disclose the substance, which was detected by a Fox detection vehicle.

Huly added that the trace amounts did not pose a threat to the troops. “From our best knowledge, we were not the subject of a chemical attack,” he said.

Still, the detection was the first hard evidence that the Iraqis have chemical weapons along the Saudi-Iraqi border.

The ground war was launched as a fierce firefight wound down between Iraqi troops and U.S. Marine and Army units just inside Kuwait.

The fighting began around noon Thursday when about 500 Marines from the 2nd Marine Division in light armored vehicles were conducting a reconnaissance patrol. They came under heavy mortar, artillery and machine gun fire, followed quickly by Iraqi T-55 tanks.

Taken by surprise, the Marines initially retreated back to Saudi territory, but they quickly returned to engage the Iraqis.

By noon Friday, about 100 Iraqi soldiers had surrendered, including 81 taken Thursday night during a single firefight after land-launched Marine TOW missiles destroyed at least 18 tanks and 15 other vehicles, including at least one armored personnel carrier.

And by Saturday morning, the Marines had launched 60 artillery and eight multiple-launch rocket raids, combined with numerous air strikes, according to Huly.

“It’s been a pretty brisk fight. But they have been coming out waving white flags and one of them said: ‘We’re happy to give up, but we had to make a token fight first,’ ” said Col. John Sylvester.

According to pool reports cleared by military censors in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, three Marines were wounded, but two others escaped virtually unscratched even though the Humvee in which they were riding was hit by an Iraqi mortar. They were both knocked clear out of the demolished vehicle.

U.S. military officials quoted an Iraqi prisoner of war as saying that more than 100 Iraqi soldiers have died in the firefights.

Huly added: “Our troops have seen bodies lying around, but we’re not counting.”

Reports from the battlefield also suggested that current desert conditions could be favorable for tanks.

“It has been raining heavily up here, the roads are still muddy tracks, the nights so cold that the breath forms a fog in the air, while winds have been strong enough to rip tents out of the ground,” the pool report said. “Conditions in fact are ideal for armor because the sand is packed densely and the vehicles do not throw up the choking sand and dust which normally restricts vision when large numbers of armored vehicles are on the move.”

Allied commanders turned loose a wave of their heaviest bombers, the eight-engine B-52s, against a lone Scud launch site Saturday, destroying it and igniting secondary explosions, indicating that additional weaponry had been hit.

There were no allied air losses resulting from combat Saturday, but two Navy helicopters suffered engine failure and were lost at sea. Six crewmen were rescued; one was listed as missing.

In updated figures on Iraqi equipment losses before the ground war began, U.S. military spokesmen said 1,685 of Iraq’s 4,200 tanks had been destroyed, as had 1,485 of its 3,100 artillery pieces and 925 of its 2,800 armored personnel carriers. Hundreds more have been damaged, and Marine Brig. Gen. Richard I. Neal, U.S. military spokesman in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, said he believed that Iraq no longer had the capability to maintain or repair its armor.

“I think Iraq just didn’t understand what forces they were going up against,” said one senior U.S. officer early Saturday. “I don’t think they are professionally or emotionally prepared for what they are experiencing. They are out of their league.”

But at the regular Pentagon briefing Saturday afternoon, before the ground assault got under way, Lt. Gen. Thomas W. Kelly said that although the Iraqi army had suffered “severe losses” during the air war, it was not on the verge of collapse.

Some units may have been 90% crippled, Kelly said, while others remain very effective.

“There are units in the theater of operations that have the capability to resist,” said Kelly, director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “I do not think that they have the capability to prevail--as a matter of fact, I am certain they don’t. But they do have the capability to persist, and to say that a force of that many men with that many tanks left . . . is on the verge of collapse would be very dangerous.”

In Washington

Bush was at Camp David, walking along a rustic path between his office in Laurel Lodge and his residence in Aspen Lodge, when the noon deadline passed.

“We regret that Saddam Hussein took no action before the noon deadline to comply with the United Nations resolutions,” the President said in a written statement issued at the White House one hour later. “We remain determined to fulfill the U.N. resolutions. Military action continues on schedule and according to plan.”

Spokesman Fitzwater, meanwhile, said that Iraq’s approval of Friday’s Soviet peace proposal “is without effect” because “it did not constitute an unequivocal commitment to an immediate and unconditional withdrawal.”

The Soviet plan would have committed Iraq to withdrawing its troops over 21 days, starting one day after a cease-fire. It also called for an agreement to lift all U.N. resolutions against Iraq when the pullout was complete.

Bush had called for a seven-day withdrawal, to begin at noon EST (9 a.m. PST) on Saturday, and made no mention of the resolutions, which demand--among other things--the payment of Iraqi reparations to Kuwait. Bush also called for Iraqi withdrawal of its troops from Kuwait city and the release of all prisoners of war within 48 hours.

A senior State Department official said that “as far as I know” Bush’s proposal remains on the table even though the ground assault had begun. But the official added that such a decision is up to the President.

Fitzwater said the U.S. Central Command in Riyadh had seen no indication of Iraqi military activity suggesting a withdrawal. There had been “no communication between Iraq and the United Nations that would suggest a willingness to withdraw under the conditions of the coalition plan,” he said.

“Iraq continues its scorched earth policy in Kuwait, setting fire to oil facilities,” he said, referring to about 200 oil-field fires in Kuwait, which the United States says have been set by Iraq.

“It is a continuing outrage,” he added, “that Saddam Hussein is still intent upon destroying Kuwait and its people, still intent upon destroying the environment of the Gulf and still intent upon inflicting the most brutal kind of rule on his own population--yet appears to have no intention of complying with the U.N. resolutions.”

Indeed, Fitzwater said, Hussein’s only response to the noon deadline “was to launch another Scud missile attack on Israel.” A single missile was fired at Israel only minutes before the deadline arrived; it caused no injuries.

Earlier on this sunny winter day at his mountaintop hideaway, Bush reportedly had gone for a lengthy walk with his longtime friend,Secretary of State James A. Baker III. He spoke by telephone with National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, working in the White House, 60 miles to the south, and with Dick Cheney.

In Laurel Lodge, the presidential office, the President was given his daily national security briefing, and he spoke by telephone with Japanese Prime Minister Toshiki Kaifu and Turkish President Turgut Ozal.

At 11:15 a.m., Gorbachev called.

According to Fitzwater, the Soviet president told Bush that he had asked for a U.N. review of the Soviet-Iraqi peace proposal and had spoken to British Prime Minister John Major and French President Francois Mitterrand about his plan.

“Both of the allied leaders,” Fitzwater reported, “indicated full support for the coalition withdrawal plan” put forward by Bush.

The presidential spokesman said Bush “thanked President Gorbachev for his extensive efforts and reflected our general disappointment that Saddam Hussein has chosen not to respond positively.”

Some Administration officials had expressed irritation with Gorbachev’s peace efforts, or at least skepticism about his motives. They feared that he was undercutting Bush’s goal to rid Kuwait of its occupying forces while delivering a punishing blow to Hussein.

Even so, Secretary of State Baker was said by a senior aide to view Gorbachev’s work as a sincere effort. The secretary’s view, the aide said, is that the Soviets were able to get Hussein “to move some; it’s too bad they didn’t get him to move enough.”

In Iraq

In Baghdad, President Hussein publicly ignored Bush’s noon ultimatum and exhorted his troops to turn the battlefield into “a hellfire.”

Defiant orders broadcast on Baghdad Radio before and after Bush’s deadline had passed signaled what analysts described as a strategy to bleed the U.S.-led forces in battle and to seek a victory of arms that Hussein could not achieve at the bargaining table.

“Any land offensive launched by the aggressors will only meet with failure,” the broadcasts said. “ . . . Can such (allied) forces hold out against the Iraqi army, with its advantages of fighting on its own soil under a monolithic leadership . . . not to mention its long experience in the land war?”

The broadcasts were much more than exercises in morale-building on the eve of a ferocious infantry, tank and artillery battle. One Western military analyst, based in Baghdad until late last year, said they telegraphed the Iraqi strongman’s strategy for the ground war--an attempt to claim victory for his soldiers by punishing a better armed and fresh adversary, win or lose.

“He (Hussein) wants to see American blood,” the analyst declared. “He needs to inflict severe casualties on the allies as soon as possible.

“The best chance for Saddam is if he can inflict big casualties on the allies and then withdraw. He has to keep it going in order to pretend he has got some sort of victory, but he can’t let it go on too long.”

If he does, the analyst said, he faces the destruction of his army. “I would say there is a peak for Saddam’s survival of about one week or so.”

Two hours before the noon deadline, which came at 8 p.m. in Baghdad, the broadcasts announced that Hussein had chaired a meeting of his ruling Revolutionary Command Council. The radio gave no details of the meeting.

The Iraqi News Agency, however, said it had learned from sources close to the leadership that “the concerned officials are seriously studying the setting up of democratic rule in Kuwait in cooperation with religious and national tendencies hostile to imperialism and foreign dominance.”

The news agency gave no explanation, but it appeared Iraq was laying the groundwork to try to claim that Kuwait was being administered by an independent government that could challenge the expected return of Kuwait’s ruling Sabah family.

Amid all this, Baghdad reserved its most strident commentary for President Bush. It reviled him in a series of personal assaults.

“George Bush is a stupid, contrary boy,” one radio broadcast said. “It would have been possible to overlook this except for the fact that this madman, who suffers from megalomania and the insanity of war, destruction and aggression is the President of the United States.”

The American President, the radio said, “is making threats, promising retribution, determining and speaking on behalf of the whole world, the U.N. Security Council and the U.N. General Assembly itself . . .

“This ultimatum will not do Bush any good. Iraq will remain strong and steadfast in its political and military position.”

In Moscow

At the Kremlin, spokesman Ignatenko said early in the day that Gorbachev had telephoned Bush.

The Soviet president, Ignatenko said, made a final plea that he wait with a ground assault for “a day or two” and submit his noon ultimatum and its detailed conditions along with the latest Soviet-Iraqi proposal to the U.N. Security Council to see if its members could work out a compromise that would satisfy everyone.

The Soviet president, Ignatenko said, proposed the possibility “of integrating the two plans.”

Ignatenko said that Aziz had indicated that he did not consider Bush’s ultimatum and the Soviet-Iraqi proposal to be severely different.

Then, at 11:30 p.m., Moscow time, half an hour after the noon EST deadline passed, Ignatenko summoned reporters and said Gorbachev had been on the phone some more.

In addition to Bush, Ignatenko said, the Soviet president had talked to German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani and Japanese Prime Minister Kaifu to discuss the next stage in the conflict.

The Soviet Union, Ignatenko said, supports international efforts led by the United States and does not resent the international community for failing to respond to Soviet-Iraqi proposals for peace.

During a ground war, he said, “the attitude of the Soviet Union toward the United States will not change. Our relations have a firm base and they create an important strategic background, and we must not destroy this background.

Iraq, Ignatenko stressed, and not the United States, will bear the guilt for bloodshed. He said he hopes “Iraq will have the courage to withdraw.”

At the United Nations

The effort at the U.N. Security Council to meld Bush’s ultimatum and its conditions with the latest Soviet-Iraqi proposal was met by skepticism from Britain and the United States.

The Soviet Union’s representative to the world body, Ambassador Yuli M. Vorontsov, spearheaded the effort after telling council members that Iraq’s Aziz had reacted positively to some elements of President’s Bush’s ultimatum.

After the council’s formal meeting and consultations, British Ambassador David Hannay quickly cast aspersions on the process of knitting together peace proposals.

“We are standing by the statement that was made in our name by President Bush yesterday. No more and no less,” Hannay said.

Vorontsov’s statement that Aziz looked favorably on elements of President Bush’s statement set off a flurry of television and wire service reports that Iraq was close to capitulation. Even though some of the reports were hedged, they caused a major stir in capitals around the world.

Gerstenzang reported from Washington, and Williams reported from Amman, Jordan. Contributing to this story were Times staff writers Mark Fineman in Amman; David Lamb in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; Edwin Chen in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia; Elizabeth Shogren in Moscow, and John J. Goldman and Stanley Meisler at the United Nations.

OIL FIELDS AFIRE

U.S. military briefers, accusing Iraq of “systematic destruction” of Kuwait’s oil wells and facilities, said Saturday that heavy black smoke hung over much of the region, above.

* Revised estimated number of oil wells in Kuwait: 1,200

* 100 oil wells have been sabotaged but are not now burning

* 200 are burning

* One-quarter of the country’s wells are damaged or on fire.

Tenets of “AirLand Battle”:

Initiative: Make the enemy react to U.S. forces

Depth: Includes concepts of time, distance and resources

Agility: Ability to act and react faster than the enemy

Synchronization: Coordination with all higher and lower echelons, other services and allies

Source: U.S. Department of Defense; Modern Land Combat by David Miller and Christopher F. Foss