Clinton Urged to Weigh Heavier Attacks on Iraq

As President-elect Bill Clinton prepares to take command, his defense advisers are urging him to consider a sharp escalation in air strikes against military targets in Iraq to apply greater pressure on Iraqi armed forces to topple Saddam Hussein, transition sources said Monday.

These sources said that Gen. Colin L. Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and several Clinton advisers are eager to break with what they see as the Bush Administration’s wavering, inconsistent policy, which they believe has ceded the initiative to Hussein. They are recommending that Clinton warn Hussein of stepped-up action, then follow through, if he does not comply with U.N. resolutions that ended the Persian Gulf War.

Frustrated by the Iraqi president’s ability to remain in power and to flout the United Nations’ authority in the wake of the war, U.S. military officials have concluded that only Iraq’s armed forces have the ability to oust Hussein.

But Iraqi military leaders are unlikely to act, U.S. officials believe, unless allied forces embolden them by inflicting greater damage.

Pentagon sources said that Powell and Clinton’s advisers hope a stepped-up aerial campaign will demonstrate that the Iraqi military will suffer for Hussein’s continued violations of U.N. and allied coalition demands. But the officials acknowledge that Hussein’s elite units are far from being frustrated or angry enough to act against their leader.

U.S. officials hope a campaign of wide-ranging military strikes against weapons depots and troop concentrations of elite forces--including the Republican Guard and Presidential Guard, which remain loyal to the Iraqi leader--would change that.

The increase in air strikes would be accompanied by long-term diplomatic and intelligence efforts.

“The United States hasn’t done a particularly effective job of convincing the Iraqi military that when Saddam Hussein flouts the sanctions, it’s the military that’s going to pay and not Saddam,” said a Clinton transition adviser close to the deliberations. “When that realization comes through, there’ll be a better sense on their part of what they can do.”

Powell met with Clinton here Sunday night and laid out, for the first time in detail, his military recommendations on Iraq.

On Sunday, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney said on ABC television’s “This Week with David Brinkley” that “from our perspective, we ought to try to achieve some sort of seamless web in terms of U.S. policy that is handled by the Bush Administration up till noon on Jan. 20 and then picked up by the Clinton Administration thereafter.”

Bush, in his final days in office, has rejected plans for a broad attack, adopting instead a series of individual attacks on Iraqi military facilities. On Jan. 13, Bush chose what he called “proportionate” attacks on air defense complexes and missiles in the “no-fly zone” in southern Iraq.

On Sunday, Bush shifted the focus of attack to a suspected nuclear weapons plant. Bush officials said that target was chosen to punish Iraq for its continued violations of Security Council resolutions requiring Baghdad to grant U.N. weapons inspectors unfettered access to Iraqi sites. On Monday, Bush ordered U.S. warplanes once more to attack air defense sites in the northern and southern no-fly zones, which the allies created to protect Iraqi Kurds in the north and Shiite Muslims in the south.

But Bush has rejected as too risky and too provocative proposals to attack vulnerable Republican Guard and Presidential Guard formations. A knowledgeable Pentagon official said that Bush shrank from those targets because “it would be perceived as Bush going after Saddam Hussein and not getting him.”

“They (the Bush strategists) are conducting this policy without a political goal,” said a source familiar with the transition team’s national security planning. “Any policy of Clinton’s would be conducted within the context of political ends. With Clinton, there’ll be a larger purpose to the violence.”

Officials said the Administration’s broad plan was refined at the Pentagon and among lower-level political advisers over recent months as U.S. officials sought to devise new responses to Iraq’s persistent defiance of the United Nations and to Hussein’s successful efforts to consolidate power.

Roughly a year ago, Bush signed a top-secret intelligence finding directing the CIA to undertake covert action to topple Hussein. But Powell then argued against massive strikes against Iraq’s military.

Several Clinton Administration officials have been briefed on the new plan and have embraced the idea of imposing a new strategic plan that would be a clear departure from the Bush Administration’s responses.

Sources familiar with the thinking of Les Aspin, the defense secretary-designate, said that the new strategy would be consistent with his recent statements on use of force. A plan to threaten Iraqi military targets would fall in line with Aspin’s oft-repeated notion of “compellance”--using force to induce desired behavior from an adversary.

“The question is, ‘Can we now use military power not to achieve direct ends, but to influence behavior?’ ” asked a source. “Can we bomb the hell out of everything the military holds dear until they learn that they must get rid of Saddam Hussein?”

In a recent interview with The Times, David Kay, who led U.N. nuclear weapons inspections in Iraq until recently, added his voice to a growing chorus of experts calling for a broader response to Iraq, which focuses on the Iraqi military.

“The U.S. policy has no conceptual basis for how to move Iraq out of ‘cheat and retreat’ mode, and the challenge for Clinton is how to get beyond this and hold out to Saddam Hussein that, if he abides by the resolutions, we can talk about a new relationship and, if he doesn’t, we’re going to hit him hard,” said Kay, until recently an official with the International Atomic Energy Agency.

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