U.S. Bombs Iraq Missile Sites : Britain, France Join In; 1,100 Troops to Be Sent : Persian Gulf: More raids are threatened if Hussein continues to defy U.N. The mission involves 110 planes, and no allied casualties are reported. Tank battalion from Ft. Hood, Tex., will help patrol Kuwait border.

By MELISSA HEALY

Jan. 14, 1993 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITERS

WASHINGTON —

The United States and its allies launched limited air strikes Wednesday against half a dozen missile sites in Iraq to punish Iraqi President Saddam Hussein for his repeated violations of U.N. authority after the Persian Gulf War.

The raids were smaller in scope than had been expected. But President Bush and British Prime Minister John Major asserted that they served notice that the allies will not tolerate any further defiance. Britain and France joined the United States in carrying out the attacks, involving a force of 110 warplanes.

Presidential spokesman Marlin Fitzwater warned that the allies “will continue to scrutinize Iraqi activity” and “we stand ready to take additional forceful action,” if Iraq continues to defy the United Nations.

The White House said that Bush also will send a tank battalion of 1,100 troops from the 1st Cavalry Division at Ft. Hood, Tex., to join 300 U.S. special operations forces in Kuwait to help serve as a deterrent to further Iraqi incursions into Kuwait.

The Pentagon said the primary targets were four missile-and-radar complexes and two concentrations of mobile antiaircraft missile batteries that Iraq had set up in the “no-fly zone” imposed by the allies last August to protect Shiite Muslims in the south.

The missile batteries became a contentious issue last week after the United States threatened military action against Iraq if Baghdad did not deactivate them within 48 hours. After delaying right up to the deadline, Iraq finally deactivated them over the weekend.

But Iraq quickly posed new provocations, refusing to allow U.N. planes to land on its territory and crossing into a U.N.-patrolled territory along the Kuwaiti border.

Iraq breached the border zone four times this week to recover missiles and materiel confiscated by the allied coalition during the 1991 Persian Gulf War. On Sunday, the Iraqis took four Silkworm missiles, which the United Nations has demanded they return.

U.S. officials said there were no allied casualties in Wednesday’s raid. The Iraqis reported four fatalities--three civilians and one soldier--and seven wounded.

Although final reconnaissance reports were not yet in, initial evaluations late Wednesday suggested that the allied warplanes hit all six targets, which were far from any of Iraq’s civilian population.

In other developments Wednesday:

* President-elect Bill Clinton, telephoned by Bush as the attack was getting under way, said that he thought “it was the right decision, done in the right way.” He added that if Iraq remains defiant after he takes office, “You can’t rule out (further use of) force.”

* Members of Congress rushed to welcome Wednesday’s air strikes against Iraq, with Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) suggesting that the move should send a message to those fighting in Somalia and in former Yugoslav republics.

* Moments before the attacks got under way, four permanent members of the U.N. Security Council--the United States, Britain, France and Russia--flatly rejected a last-ditch Iraqi attempt to ward off the allied action by agreeing to comply with some U.N. demands.

* U.S. military authorities disclosed that besides previously reported activities against U.S. aircraft in the three weeks that preceded the raid, Iraq sought on Jan. 2 to intercept an American U-2 spy plane flying a reconnaissance mission for the United Nations.

The Attacks

Wednesday’s 30-minute attack was decidedly narrower and less-protracted than U.S. strategists had hinted beforehand. Earlier, officials had suggested that the sorties would also hit airfields, communications centers, military headquarters and possibly some infantry units.

Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, appearing on the MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour, conceded that the scope of the raid was smaller than had been touted--”a relatively restrained and modest kind of option, relative to the things we could have done.”

But officials indicated Wednesday that the Administration ultimately had decided to go after only a small portion of the potential targets, presumably to provide allied forces with a way to follow up quickly if Iraq continues to defy U.N. demands.

“This was a discrete entity that was completed,” a Pentagon official told reporters at a briefing after the attack. He said that U.S. forces were poised to return and hit other targets if Iraq does not comply.

Analysts also suggested that part of the decision may have reflected opposition by U.S. allies to a more sweeping attack. Although Britain and France participated in Wednesday’s sorties, they contributed only token forces. And many other U.S. allies that had sent troops or planes to the Persian Gulf War sat it out this time around.

Press Secretary Fitzwater said that Bush decided Monday to attack Iraq and that he would have launched the air strikes Tuesday if weather in southern Iraq had permitted. The aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk launched some planes Tuesday, but they had to turn back.

Bush Administration officials had said Tuesday that the President might still call off the raid if Iraq agreed to comply fully with the spate of cease-fire terms that the United Nations had imposed. But in the end Baghdad continued its defiance.

A few hours before the attacks began, Iraq sent a fourth group of workers into the U.N.-controlled zone to reclaim U.N.-held property that had been confiscated during the Persian Gulf War, defying Security Council orders issued last Monday to stop such incursions.

At the same time, an official Iraqi government newspaper renewed Baghdad’s prewar declaration that Kuwait belongs to Iraq and that Iraqi forces would reclaim it. It was Iraq’s initial attack into Kuwaiti territory in 1990 that prompted the allies to conduct the 1991 war.

It was not immediately clear how Iraq would react to Wednesday’s attack. A few hours after the sorties, Hussein called on his air force to hit back against Western aircraft, saying that any U.S. or Western plane in Iraqi airspace would be a target.

But U.S. authorities said there was no sign of Iraqi military activity Wednesday, and officials said the allies are prepared to launch further sorties if Hussein either tries to retaliate or does not agree quickly to comply fully with the U.N. demands.

Defense Department officials said that the first planes took off from the Kitty Hawk and from American, French and British air force installations in Saudi Arabia about 6:45 p.m. Iraqi time, or about 7:45 a.m. PST.

The Pentagon said that 110 allied warplanes participated in the mission--A-6 Intruders and F/A-18 Hornets from the aircraft carrier and dozens of F-15 Eagles, F-16 Falcons, F-117A Stealth fighter-bombers, six French Mirage 2000s and four British Tornadoes from allied air force installations.

The bulk of the aircraft were Air Force warplanes launched from a U.S. installation at Dhahran, Saudi Arabia.

U.S. officials said that the allied aircraft encountered only token opposition. The Iraqis fired some light antiaircraft weapons but did not launch any of their own warplanes or surface-to-air missiles.

The targets were permanent antiaircraft-missile and radar sites at Tallil, Najaf, Samawah and Amarah in southern Iraq, and two mobile missile sites near the cities of Basra and Nasiriyah.

The bulk of the precision bombing was carried out with 2,000-pound laser-guided bombs, designed to hit precisely at specific targets. U.S. aircraft also used missiles designed to home in on radar installations. “It was well-crafted, a pinpoint strike,” the source said. “It was designed to send a crystal-clear message.”

Extra Troops

The battalion that Bush ordered to Kuwait on Wednesday will include two companies of troops equipped with M-1 Abrams tanks, one company with Bradley Fighting Vehicles and one artillery battery, along with combat support units.

Pentagon officials said the deployment will begin within 24 to 72 hours and that soldiers would be flown from their home base in Ft. Hood to Kuwait and then transferred to the area around the Iraqi border.

The troops presumably will give Iraqi units pause before repeating their incursions into the Iraq-Kuwait demilitarized zone, which is currently guarded by lightly armed U.N. peacekeeping forces.

Officials said the U.S. units also would be backed up by American aircraft from the Kitty Hawk and from Air Force bases in Saudi Arabia.

Reaction Favorable

The President, speaking with reporters just after the attack, said he hopes Wednesday’s mission sent “a very important message” to Hussein. “I would think that soon (he) would learn we mean what we say,” he said.

Britain’s Major echoed the Administration’s sentiments, conceding that the attack was “proportional and measured” but warning that the allies would renew their attacks if Iraq does not comply with U.N. demands.

Almost immediately after Fitzwater made his announcement, George Stephanopoulos, Clinton’s spokesman, said that the former Arkansas governor “fully supports the actions President Bush has taken” and is pleased that they apparently have gone well.

Stephanopoulos confirmed Fitzwater’s assertion that Clinton had been “fully informed” by the Bush Administration. Bush called Clinton personally at noon, just before the operation began, and aides for the two men had consulted daily for the past two weeks.

U.N. Maneuvers

Iraq’s bid to satisfy the Security Council came too little and too late to persuade the allies to postpone their attack.

Early in the day, Iraqi U.N. ambassador Nizar Hamdoun telephoned Yoshio Hatano, the Japanese envoy acting as this month’s Security Council president, to tell him that Baghdad would agree to two U.N. demands--that it stop raiding bunkers in the border zone and that it allow U.N. aircraft to land in Iraq once again.

But the allies went ahead with the air attacks anyway, with officials warning that Baghdad also must agree to comply with a spate of other U.N. requirements, including allowing U.N. weapons-inspectors to go wherever they want to investigate Iraqi weapons caches.

U.S. officials have said it is not merely the latest violations that angered them, but the pattern Iraq has established of flouting U.N. requirements over most of the two years since the Gulf War ended.

The Outlook

U.S. officials expressed hope that Wednesday’s attack would make Hussein leery, at least for the time being, of challenging the Western allies anytime soon, perhaps ending further Iraqi provocations at least until Clinton has gotten settled in office.

They said they purposely did not target any of Baghdad because they wanted to minimize the danger of inflicting casualties on civilians. The West has been sensitive politically to charges that it might unfairly hurt innocent Arabs.

But some critics warned that the scaling-back of the allied action might backfire and only encourage Hussein to test Western resolve again promptly, figuring that he got away relatively lightly this time.

Anthony Cordesman, a Georgetown University military analyst, said that opting for less-severe blows “rarely works” in dealing with personalities such as Hussein. “It would be very surprising if we did not see another round of tests by Saddam Hussein,” he predicted.

Times staff writers Mark Fineman in Nicosia, Cyprus, and Stanley Meisler at the United Nations contributed to this report.