U.S. Calls Attack a Political Success Despite the Misses : Persian Gulf: Half of targets were not hit, but Bush says ‘skies are safer’ now. Iraqis dismantle area’s remaining missiles and yield on U.N. flights issue.

Allied forces missed roughly half the intended targets in their strike on Iraq, according to a Pentagon assessment Thursday. But Bush Administration officials declared the mission a success because of the political message it sent to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

Pentagon spokesman Pete Williams said Wednesday’s attack “blew up parts” of four air-defense sites that had served as Baghdad’s eyes and ears in the south but left three mobile air-defense missiles there intact.

But by Thursday morning, the Iraqis had dismantled the remaining missiles--an act Administration officials hailed as a signal that their threats had been heeded by Baghdad.

The preliminary damage assessment confirms the small scale of a mission that had been portrayed in advance as a broad, punishing strike at a defiant enemy. Despite the limited goals and lesser returns, President Bush declared that the attack had achieved its chief goal.

“The skies are safer” for allied patrol planes and Hussein has been sent a clear warning, he said. “They went in there with a wide array of defensive equipment threatening them, and that threat has been severely reduced. That’s the bottom line, that’s the important point,” said Bush.

President-elect Bill Clinton, meanwhile, reiterated his support for the air strike and hotly denied a published report that he might have a better relationship with the Iraqi government than does the Bush Administration.

“There is no difference between my policy and the policy of the present Administration. I will evaluate what I do based on his conduct,” said Clinton in a news conference in Little Rock, Ark.

Clinton said he has “no intention” of returning to normal relations with Baghdad and added, “Based on his (Hussein’s) own conduct, I cannot imagine . . . circumstances” under which he would upgrade current relations with the regime of the Iraqi dictator.

Secretary of State-designate Warren Christopher, in his second day of confirmation hearings, underscored the skepticism with which the new Administration will approach Hussein.

“I’m not very optimistic about any redemption for Saddam Hussein,” he told the Senate Armed Services Committee. “When you read of his character and the things he’s done over the years . . I find it hard to share the Baptist belief in redemption.”

At the United Nations, Iraq sent two letters Thursday to the Security Council expressing some willingness to comply with U.N. resolutions and asking permission to retrieve equipment from the border area with Kuwait.

Nizar Hamdoun, Iraq’s ambassador, met with representatives of the United States, Britain, France and Russia and told them that U.N. inspection planes could begin flying over Iraq again as early as today.

But in a letter to the Security Council, Iraqi Foreign Minister Mohammed Said Sahaf noted only that “the Iraqi government has decided to permit United Nations aircraft to fly to Iraq on a case-by-case basis.”

“We stress clearly,” he wrote, “that Iraq will not assume any responsibility for the safety of United Nations aircraft inside Iraqi airspace, because of the aggression to which Iraq is subjected by United States, United Kingdom and French aircraft.”

Sahaf also confirmed that Iraqi soldiers and workers will stop crossing the border to remove property from the former Iraqi naval base at Umm Qasr, which now lies in a U.N.-patrolled demilitarized zone.

He said it is still important to work out a way for Iraq to recover the property, which he called “an undisputed right.”

While Iraq is giving in on these points, he said, Baghdad does not believe they are central issues. The central issue, he insisted, is the “no-fly zone” that the United States and its allies have imposed on the southern third of Iraq to protect Shiite Muslims.

Wednesday’s attack was prompted in part by Iraq’s insistence last Sunday that U.N. inspectors must use Iraqi aircraft--a demand that would violate Security Council resolutions providing for the inspection and destruction of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

The attack was also spurred by a series of provocative incidents over the weekend in which Iraq sent workers into a demilitarized zone along the border to haul away equipment from a warehouse being used by a U.N. force.

During Wednesday’s air raid, a bomb from one of the allied aircraft missed its mark by roughly a mile and slammed into a still-unidentified building, possibly an apartment house, Williams revealed.

But Williams noted that Iraq’s southern air defenses were “seriously degraded” by the attack and that allied actions had prompted Baghdad to bend to the Western powers’ military demands.

“We’re not disappointed with this mission,” he said.

As if to reduce the mission’s magnitude further, military officials said Thursday that bomb-carrying planes spent only 15 minutes, not the previously described half hour, over their Iraqi targets.

“I’ve seen the rhetoric about ‘the mother of all battles’ and everything,” Williams said, referring to rhetoric Hussein employed in a fiery speech to his people early Thursday. “This wasn’t even the second cousin of all battles. This was a very small operation, intended to deal with the threat to coalition aircraft south of the 32-degree line. And we believe that mission was successful.”

Baghdad said that 19 people, including two civilians, were killed and 15 people were wounded in the air strike.

Administration officials continued to declare that they reserve the right to send allied aircraft back in after Iraqi targets. But they acknowledged that a further strike is unlikely.

“It would have been nice to knock them all out--intellectually, militarily, politically--and it would have satisfied our adrenaline,” said one Pentagon official. “But we did pretty damn serious damage. Their air-defense system in the south is already blind. Do we now have to go back and knock it down?”

The official added that as long as Iraq’s air-defense missiles have been “packed up and put in a U-Haul,” they can’t threaten allied aircraft. “And if they set up somewhere else, we might pop them there.”

Military officials who discussed the aerial attack said that it exacted its greatest damage on radar and communication sites from which Iraqi aircraft would be warned of, and directed to, allied aircraft enforcing the no-fly zone.

Air-defense complexes in Amarah and Tallil were reported “severely damaged,” with radars and several buildings on the sites destroyed by 2,000-pound laser-guided bombs and 1,000-pound iron (conventional) bombs.

But bombs from Navy and Air Force planes exacted “moderate” damage on the air-defense complex at Najaf, and a fourth site at Samawah suffered only light damage in the bombing.

U.S. intelligence sources, however, concluded Thursday that the attack had knocked the network out of operation, at least temporarily. Throughout the day, Iraqi military crews communicated with each other on open radio frequencies--a clear indication that their secure communications lines had been cut.

In total, officials said that 18 Navy planes and four British Tornado jets flew primarily against fixed air-defense complexes, while 18 Air Force aircraft, including the F-117A Stealth fighter and the F-15E Eagle, were sent to attack fixed sites and the more elusive mobile missiles.

Pentagon officials said that bad weather had delayed Wednesday’s strike by a day and clouds continued to hamper the operation when it did go forward, obscuring pilots’ views of some smaller targets on the ground.

Still, some military analysts expressed surprise that with approval for only one quick strike, the Pentagon did not add more planes and a possible rapid return to targets to its plan to ensure more complete destruction. One Pentagon official, however, said that the number of allied warplanes in the region, believed to total more than 200, imposed some constraints on the size of the operation.

And while the analysis of Wednesday’s Iraq efforts was under way, in Kuwait officials discussed plans for the American contingent Bush planned to send.

They said the brigade will join its already-positioned equipment at Kuwait’s Camp Doha before moving into the north-central Kuwaiti desert to conduct military exercises with Kuwaiti troops.

About 300 other U.S. troops already are in Kuwait conducting a scheduled exercise; 200 to 400 others are permanently stationed in the tiny Gulf emirate to maintain U.S. military equipment based there.

Units from Kuwait’s 11,700-strong armed forces have been deployed in northern Kuwait near the perimeter of the demilitarized zone, and Kuwait’s defense minister, Sheik Ali al Salim al Sabah, said Kuwait is ready to defend itself it attacked. “If Iraq commits any stupid action, the answer will be violent, very violent,” he told the Kuwaiti daily, Al Anbah.

Times staff writers Stanley Meisler at the United Nations and Kim Murphy in Kuwait city contributed to this report.