Powerful Attack on Iraq Urged if Talks Fail

National security officials involved in past confrontations with Iraq are pressing President Clinton to go beyond the small-scale attacks of recent years and conduct sustained strikes against a broad range of targets if diplomacy fails to end the current standoff with Baghdad.

With the situation growing more serious, the former officials, including those from the top ranks of the State Department, CIA and National Security Council, are weighing in on a growing debate about how big, and potentially risky, a military approach the U.S. should consider.

The clamor for tougher action, coming particularly from members of former President Bush’s foreign policy team, is much stronger than during confrontations with Iraq in 1993, 1994 and 1996.

The officials are urging Clinton to move beyond the “pinprick” missile and airstrikes of the past unless diplomacy and sanctions persuade Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to allow American weapons inspectors to return to their duties overseeing the dismantling of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.

In recent days, former Secretary of State James A. Baker III has warned that “the only thing that he’s going to understand is strength and resolve and force,” while former CIA chief Robert M. Gates has called for a “powerful” air and missile campaign against Iraq’s elite Republican Guard if talk doesn’t work.

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Several of these former officials have argued publicly that Clinton’s past measures, such as the relatively mild missile strikes, could now be worse than nothing at all because they would convince Hussein that he can defy the fragmented Persian Gulf War alliance.

Some of the advisors have been more outspoken than others, and they may differ on some points, but their views are “pretty close” to one another, said Richard Haass, who was the top National Security Council advisor on the region during the war.

Their opinions may carry a certain amount of weight with Clinton administration officials, in part because their prosecution of the war was largely a success.

The advisors “have been part of the conversation” about what to do in Iraq, a White House official said.

Baker said he believes Clinton needs to step up efforts to mend an alliance that Bush and his team worked furiously to hold together in 1990 and 1991. Clinton should not turn to a missile strike in Baghdad without allied approval, as the United States did in 1993 in an attack to punish Iraq for plotting to assassinate Bush, because such a move would split the allies, as it did then, Baker said.

“That’s what got the coalition separated the last time,” Baker said. “We went out there and hit them on our own, and we didn’t do a good job of consultation.”

But he insisted that “we ought to take whatever forceful steps are required.” Hussein has been “up to his old tricks, and the only thing he’s going to understand, in my view, is strength and resolve and force.”

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Brent Scowcroft, Bush’s national security advisor during the war, believes the administration has exhausted almost all economic and diplomatic steps that might work with Hussein.

“I think it is unlikely that anything but military force will be sufficient for him,” Scowcroft said. The comments of Baker and Scowcroft were made in interviews with Cable News Network.

Reading the riot act to Hussein “is just a waste of time,” Scowcroft said. “We have learned through brutal experience that the only thing he understands is force. And it has to be sufficient to teach him that it is not useful to continue these probing actions.”

Scowcroft said Clinton’s move should come quickly--”the sooner the better.”

Like Baker, Haass said the administration needs to move beyond “pinprick” cruise missile strikes. In an interview, Haass argued for an air campaign of not one but many attacks against military and political targets, designed to show Hussein that the allies will continue to hit him for as long as he holds out.

The goal is not to punish, he said, but to convince the Iraqi regime that it is futile to resist.

Winning U.N. Security Council support for such a campaign will be “extraordinarily hard to impossible,” Haass conceded. But if efforts to enlist the United Nations fail, he said, the United States may be able to line up an informal coalition, perhaps including Britain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Turkey.

Considering the damage Hussein can do with his weapons programs, “I don’t see how we can allow Saddam to continue without an effective weapons inspection,” he said.

Gates warned that Hussein probably expects another cruise missile attack. He believes he can easily absorb that, Gates said, and can then brag to his people and fellow Arabs that he’s able to take anything the United States can hurl at him.

Gates said he believes the United States should take enough time to exhaust the diplomatic possibilities--not because he believes they will work, but “to show that ultimately there’s no alternative to the use of force.”

And when the allies do apply force, it shouldn’t be “a one-shot deal, but a sustained campaign” sufficient to convince Hussein he has no choice but to follow the U.N.’s requirements.

In the event of a military strike, the United States should concentrate on the Republican Guard, Gates said. It is important that the guard is sent a message about international resolve, “because they’re a pillar of Saddam’s support,” he said.

He acknowledged that such forceful action will probably require the United States to act with the support of a “very narrow coalition.”

Bush has been somewhat less outspoken, apparently sensitive to being seen as pressuring his successor at a tough moment. But in an appearance earlier this month at the opening of his presidential library in Texas, Bush seemed to hint at how he believes Hussein should be treated.

The right approach is to be “firm with this man” Bush said, adding that Clinton had been taking just that approach.

Some former officials of Clinton’s own administration say they believe he needs to move to tough measures now.

R. James Woolsey, Clinton’s first CIA director, said the administration has mistakenly emphasized the idea of reacting with “proportional” responses to Hussein’s misdeeds. Administration officials believe that such carefully calibrated responses are more easily accepted by U.S. allies.

But Woolsey said Hussein “is not a man who can be convinced by gradualism, or a few missiles hitting an empty building in downtown Baghdad. . . . He needs a disproportionate response.”

Woolsey said a campaign of airstrikes has disadvantages: There are no critical industrial sites to pound, and Hussein has dispersed his chemical and biological warfare arsenal, and much of his military.

Instead, Woolsey suggested barring the Iraqi military from flying any aircraft, which would mean expanding the two existing “no-fly” zones over northern and southern Iraq to include the entire country. The “no-fly” zones were imposed largely to prevent Hussein from attacking his own people.

A blanket “no-fly” restriction would harm Hussein’s ability to govern the country--including by suppressing threatened coups. It might prompt Hussein to strike U.S. aircraft, Woolsey said, making him the military aggressor.