U.S. Warns Iraq, Sends Warship to Persian Gulf

One day after U.S. warplanes shot down an Iraqi fighter, the United States announced Monday that the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk is being dispatched to the Persian Gulf and warned Baghdad that it would “respond as necessary to further harassments of U.N. operations.”

The Pentagon said the warship, which normally carries 85 combat aircraft and a crew exceeding 5,000, is being redeployed from waters off the Horn of Africa, where it was aiding American military operations in Somalia. The Kitty Hawk is expected to arrive in the Gulf in the next day or two.

Pentagon officials said that 18 of the Kitty Hawk’s warplanes had flown ahead Monday to a Saudi military base in Dhahran, where they joined American patrols over southern Iraq’s “no-fly zone.” The U.S. patrols are intended to protect Shiite Muslims from Iraqi air attacks.

The added American firepower to enforce the no-fly zone came as tension mounted between Baghdad and Washington.

Pentagon officials reported a continuing pattern of cat-and-mouse activity Monday by Iraqi warplanes flying near--but not across--the 32nd Parallel, which marks the northern boundary of the no-fly zone. And they noted substantial activity by Iraqi jets north of the no-fly zone.

Iraq also made new threats against the Bush Administration through its state-controlled media. “If the criminal Bush imagines that this crime will go unpunished, then he is deluding himself,” the Iraqi army paper Al Qadassiyah said Monday.

The government daily Jumhouriyah declared: “Our great people . . . know very well how to turn their violent wrath over Bush’s new aggression into a revolution against this dirty criminal and his vicious attempts to encroach on Iraq’s sovereignty.”

Although U.S. officials do not expect a serious military challenge, they are concerned about possible terrorism. “We take such threats seriously, and our overseas posts are taking the appropriate precautions,” a State Department official said. Such precautions usually include an alert to American diplomatic facilities throughout the Middle East.

In turn, American officials on Monday released a list of 57 incidents of Iraqi harassment of U.N. humanitarian and other programs over the last six months. The incidents ranged from truck bombings and rocket or grenade attacks on food and refugee relief agencies to stealing U.N. weapons inspectors’ personal goods to telephoned death threats.

“Iraq has continued to engage in a pattern of harassment against various U.N. operations in Iraq,” State Department spokesman Joe Snyder said Monday. “These actions appear aimed at testing the resolve of U.N. officials, as well as the U.S. and coalition allies, in enforcing U.N. Security Council resolutions on Iraq.”

In a statement handed to reporters in Baghdad, Deputy Prime Minister Tarik Aziz countered that Iraq is not compelled by U.N. resolutions to recognize the flight ban imposed Aug. 27 because it was imposed by the United States, France and Britain without a formal resolution. The position of the U.S.-led coalition last August was that it was empowered to act according to existing resolutions.

The heightened tension comes as Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein attempts to tighten his hold on the Shiite Muslim-dominated south and to starve northern Kurdistan, according to Administration officials.

In the south, Hussein earlier this month inaugurated the “Saddam River” project, which Iraq has boasted will provide irrigation along a 350-mile area between the capital and the southern port city of Basra.

In fact, the project is believed to be a civilian cover for a longstanding military effort to drain the southern marshes where three different groups of dissidents--the marsh Arabs, army deserters from the Persian Gulf War and Shiite opponents to Hussein’s rule--are based. The project, basically, will make the swampy region, where tens of thousands now live, accessible to Iraqi tanks and artillery--and help compensate for Baghdad’s inability to use the skies to control the south because of the no-fly zone.

The deployment of up to 100,000 Iraqi troops throughout the south, the half-rations of basic goods there and the lack of reconstruction of basic infrastructure or social services almost two years after the Gulf War’s end--in stark contrast to conditions in Baghdad--means that “the south is somewhere between occupied and under siege,” another American source said.

Over the last six months, Baghdad also has intimidated and harassed various non-government foreign relief agencies into leaving the south, American officials said. Iraq refused to renew the visas of many aid workers.

As a result, southern dissidents now have virtually no outside aid.