U.S. Drops ‘Smart’ Bombs in Baghdad Show of Force

American military leaders continued their get-tough campaign Wednesday by dropping some of their most powerful bombs on vacant buildings in Baghdad and offering a $10-million reward for the capture of former Gen. Izzat Ibrahim, the top remaining Iraqi fugitive after Saddam Hussein.

The campaign, which began this week and is described by U.S. military officials as a “show of force,” follows a series of attacks in which insurgents have frustrated coalition soldiers by mounting attacks and then melting into the landscape.

The bombings and raids follow meetings in Washington last week in which coalition civilian administrator L. Paul Bremer III was called in to discuss ways to restore security in Iraq and speed up reconstruction efforts.

In Washington, senior Army officials said Wednesday that heavily armored vehicles that field commanders say could significantly increase protection for troops probably won’t be ready for deployment to Iraq until mid-2005.

Acting Army Secretary Les Brownlee told the Senate Armed Services Committee that all troops in Iraq should have improved body armor by the end of the year and that the Army is reequipping helicopters with new missile alert systems.

But he said it could take until the summer of 2005 for the Army to have enough “up-armored” Humvees capable of resisting 7.62 millimeter bullets. He said the Army is examining options for putting armor on existing vehicles to speed up the process.

The announcement Wednesday of the $10-million reward for Ibrahim’s capture, dead or alive, marked the latest twist in the coalition’s efforts to seize the initiative in a war that is both a struggle over public perception and an armed confrontation.

Coalition officials described Ibrahim as a “mastermind” of recent attacks but acknowledged that they had little information on whether he was consulting with Hussein or even which attacks he had directed. The focus on the former Iraqi general comes as apparently emboldened insurgents have doubled their daily attacks to about 30, even as officials added 101 detainees Wednesday to the 7,400 they held previously.

The coalition has begun using massive and expensive “smart” bombs, ground-strafing AC-130 gunships and heavily armed Apache helicopters for the first time since the springtime march to Baghdad. The display of force is intended to intimidate insurgents, U.S. officials said, but it also has frightened some civilians and surprised some military analysts.

“If your intent is only to blow up the building, then why don’t you send in some engineers and blow up the buildings?” said Dana Robert Dillon, a senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington-area think tank.

One reason, he said, may be to remind Iraqis “of the massive strength of American military.”

“They might be dropping those bombs purely for public perception reasons.”

In Baghdad and elsewhere, U.S. aircraft and other artillery pounded four sites that military officials said had been used for anti-coalition strikes.

“I heard several explosions. The house started shaking,” Hani Ali, a 35-year-old squatter living in a stucco former police outpost along the Euphrates River in Baghdad, said of a barrage that echoed throughout his neighborhood Tuesday night.

“It was very intense,” said Mahmoud Jabbar Ali, 30, who was guarding a building for the National Monarchy Party down the street. “The Americans were shelling. They also attacked them with aircraft.”

Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the coalition’s deputy chief of operations, said the use of $1-million satellite-guided bombs in urban areas was justified.

“I would say that if I were an Iraqi citizen living in Baghdad and I knew that there were terrorists living across the street and I knew that those terrorists were making bombs, shooting Iraqi forces, shooting Iraqi civilians, shooting coalition forces, I would feel less secure,” Kimmitt told reporters in Baghdad. “If I saw that house go away, if I saw those anti-coalition forces being taken out, taken to jail, I’d feel more secure.”

In each case, he said, the buildings were attacked after “strong intelligence” suggested that they had been used to harbor attackers who fired mortars, constructed roadside bombs or allowed former Iraqi regime officials a place to monitor coalition troops and plan attacks.

In Washington, Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, defended the use of large bombs, saying commanders on the ground “are very sensitive to the balance between appropriate military action and not trying to turn the average Iraqi against the coalition. They work this very hard. They have taken great steps to minimize collateral damage.”

Meanwhile, coalition troops conducted 1,588 patrols and 19 raids during a 24-hour period. Some Iraqis said the stepped-up efforts were necessary.

“Nobody’s really scared, because they’ve been through a long war. Most people are against the opposition to the Americans. Many, many innocent people have died” because of attacks by insurgents, said 22-year-old Nasir Ismal, an AK-47-toting private guard protecting a building in Baghdad’s Jaderia neighborhood.

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Times staff writer Esther Schrader in Washington contributed to this report.