What Good Did It Do?

By Romesh Ratnesar

The start of it was chillingly familiar: the wail of sirens, the staccato blasts of antiaircraft fire, the tracers lighting up the night sky over Baghdad. Then came the crash of missiles in the distance, sending up an orange glow along the horizon. On just the first night of Operation Desert Fox, U.S. ships and bombers pounded Iraq with 280 American cruise missiles--almost as many as hit the country during the entire Gulf War in 1991. Night after night, waves of warplanes, including B-52s, F-14s, F-18s and British Tornadoes, joined in the attack. Even the B-1 bomber, a cold war relic that had never seen combat despite its $280 million-per-plane price tag, got in on the action. The first night of bombs, Pentagon officials said, disarmed Iraq's air-defense network, flattened its intelligence headquarters and destroyed barracks housing Saddam Hussein's special security forces. General Hugh Shelton, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, showed reporters photographs of several smashed targets and proclaimed success. "There's nothing left but rubble," he said.

By last Saturday, when the President announced an end to the bombing, it was clear that Iraq was heavily damaged, and there were other casualties, including the stature of the United Nations Security Council and the U.S.'s reputation in the eyes of some nations. It wasn't just Republicans who suggested that Clinton had ordered the assault in a Wag the Dog effort to avert impeachment. That theory--though erroneous--echoed in Britain's Parliament, in French editorials and throughout the Arab world. FOR MONICA'S SAKE, IRAQI CHILDREN ARE DYING read a sign waved during a demonstration at a Cairo mosque. From Russia and China came deep grumblings that the U.S. had overstepped itself. Said Boris Yeltsin: "The U.S. and Great Britain have crudely violated the U.N. charter and generally accepted principles of international law and the norms and rules of responsible behavior of states."

And what did the conflict accomplish? Even U.S. military officials recognized that their campaign could not wipe out Iraq's stores of chemical and biological agents. With U.N. inspectors gone, Saddam might speed development of weapons of mass destruction. No one doubted that when the smoke cleared, we would be asking the same nagging questions: When will Saddam fall? What do we do now?

Anyone who wanted to predict the timing of the air strikes merely had to consult Richard Butler's calendar. The head of the U.N.'s Iraq inspection team, known as UNSCOM, had been telling diplomats for weeks that he intended to give the Security Council a crucial report on Iraqi compliance by Dec. 15. Delivered right on schedule, it showed that the Iraqis had been up to their usual tricks: concealing equipment that could be used to make bioweapons, blocking interviews with workers at suspicious sites, lying about sealed documents detailing the military's past uses of chemical agents.

The President needed no prodding for war. A month earlier, Clinton had ordered a meticulously planned assault and called it off only at the last minute, when Saddam promised full cooperation with UNSCOM. At the time, Clinton declared that war would come without warning if Saddam misbehaved again. Months of Iraqi duplicity had convinced the White House that UNSCOM wouldn't get compliance. So when he got advance word on the contents of Butler's report on Sunday, Dec. 13, the President, in Jerusalem at the beginning of his Middle East trip, had no good choice but to act. He gave the Pentagon 72 hours to prepare an attack. Says a senior White House official: "The consequences, the damage, the significance of making an alternative decision are just unimaginable. How could the President not have gone forward?"

By Tuesday afternoon, when Butler's report landed in the hands of U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and the members of the Security Council, the U.S. had begun to accelerate, though quietly, toward war. On the way back from the Middle East on Air Force One on Tuesday morning, Clinton, flanked by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, called his military advisers and Vice President Al Gore to discuss the Butler report. The group agreed air strikes were the right response. Clinton then got assurances of British participation from Prime Minister Tony Blair. At 10 p.m. Tuesday, Peter Burleigh, acting American ambassador to the U.N., called Annan and suggested he begin pulling U.N. personnel out of Iraq. When Annan consulted Berger on Wednesday morning, the National Security Adviser told him the situation was "very serious" but not that Clinton had already ordered an attack. Except Britain, no Security Council members received so much as a phone call informing them of the pending action.

As soon as the missiles started flying, at 1:06 a.m. Thursday, Baghdad time, so did the questions and recriminations. The bombing was a particularly cruel blow to Annan, who had brokered deal after deal to ward off military action. "This is a sad day for me personally," he said. "What has happened cannot be reversed." In an address to the nation, Clinton claimed he had to strike while the Butler report was hot and because "to initiate military action during Ramadan [coming up over the weekend] would be profoundly offensive to the Muslim world." But even within the American military, there were private grumblings about the campaign's awkward timing. "Saddam has been kicking Bill Clinton in the teeth for more than five years," said an Army officer. "And we have to attack on the eve of his impeachment? Give me a break." Iraq Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz lashed out at UNSCOM for giving Washington an advance look at its report, calling Butler "a cheap pawn in the hands of the U.S."

One thing could be said for the timing: just as Washington had hoped, the offensive stunned the Iraqis. Almost none of their antiaircraft radar was turned on. Saddam probably had no notion that his meddling with the inspectors would so quickly invite a full-blooded military assault. Though the U.S. forces massed in the Persian Gulf last week--24,100 troops, 201 aircraft and 22 ships--were only a fraction of the arsenal used in the Gulf War, extensive intelligence on Iraq's warmaking machinery and smarter weapons made officials predict that each Desert Fox sortie would be more punishing than those of 1991. "We are concentrating on military targets," said Defense Secretary William Cohen. "We are not attacking the people of Iraq." Later he told TIME, "We have the capability to level the entire place, but we're not going to do that."

On Thursday morning it was difficult to see much destruction at all in Baghdad. The Iraqi government was hard pressed to muster much of a display of civilian casualties (the regime said 25 people had died); the best it could do was show off a 20-ft. sinkhole in a residential street. American planes' initial runs focused on southern Iraq, where Iraqi pilots are barred from flying. As the bombing campaign wore on, U.S. and British forces zeroed in on targets around Baghdad and Saddam's hometown of Tikrit.

Iraq's military infrastructure took a pummeling. In Baghdad, word flew that the barracks of Saddam's Republican Guard had been badly damaged. The first two days' strikes also tagged 18 command centers, 19 bases charged with protecting Iraq's mass-destruction weapons, 11 arms-production sites and five helicopter-gunship airfields. On Friday night a Baghdad site thought to be the headquarters of the ruling Baath Party withstood five hits in the course of 40 min. But Shelton and Cohen conceded that only a small number of the 90-plus targets attacked had been severely damaged. "Not all have gone as planned," Shelton said. There was a good chance some smart bombs were finding empty warehouses and factories. "I've walked every square inch of those buildings [the intelligence headquarters and Special Republican Guard barracks]," Scott Ritter, the former Marine who resigned as a U.N. weapons inspector last August, told TIME, "and I know there was nothing of significance in there. It looks to me that the President has done something that is pretty stupid."

The reaction from foreign capitals was more diverse. Germany, Spain and Canada endorsed the attacks; France lamented the bombing but blamed Saddam for bringing it on himself. Many Arab countries called for the raids to stop, but their own distrust of Saddam kept them from raising their voices too loudly. The angriest countries were Russia and China. Moscow recalled its ambassadors from Washington and London--an astonishing, anachronistic protest--after demanding in the Security Council that the U.S. halt the strikes. China had privately expressed "understanding" when approached about a possible U.S. attack last month, but President Jiang Zemin last week denounced Desert Fox. American officials in Beijing were ordered to remain on call late Thursday night in case Albright wanted to use the hot line to assuage Chinese leaders. She didn't call. But Albright did announce later that she would go to Moscow the last week in January to consult with the Russians.

Among the more serious consequences of last week's action could be a breakdown--or at least a slow erosion--of the consensus for sanctions against Iraq. China has long called for a lifting of the embargo to ensure an uninterrupted flow of imported oil. Lawmakers in Moscow too muttered darkly about unilateral removal of trade restrictions. Even if sanctions survive, there's no guarantee that Saddam will become less dangerous, just as a toothless UNSCOM didn't keep him in check.

The American goal was simple: to cripple Iraq's ability to brew and deliver weapons of mass destruction. Because biological and chemical weapons can be made quite easily, the Pentagon went after the bigger things--like missile factories and the Special Republican Guards--vital to the weapons' protection and production. And there was another wrinkle: while Pentagon officials said they avoided hitting storage sites that might spew deadly plumes of toxins, they privately conceded they had no idea where such stockpiles might be even if they wanted to attack them.

In the Administration's best-case scenario, the bombings will lead either to Saddam's downfall or to fuller inspections by UNSCOM, assuming a chastened Iraq allows the teams to return. At worst the air war will end UNSCOM inspections for good without having done much to debilitate Saddam's capacity to manufacture his lethal weapons. UNSCOM has been stymied by Saddam to the point of impotence, but it did provide a mechanism for measuring how and when sanctions could be lifted. Its demise could boost sentiment among Arab nations to drop the embargo, with Russia and China possibly pulling out as well. And if UNSCOM dissolves, the U.S. will have little alternative to a continued struggle with the dictator, containing Iraq with periodic bombings when it steps out of line.

That won't do much for America's image. But it could well bolster Saddam's. He has always believed defiance, as in surviving a military onslaught, brings admiration. That's why Saddam's fall from power--the ultimate goal of the Administration--seems as elusive as ever. The already weak Iraqi opposition groups to whom the U.S. has given its blessing watched last week's raids with a sense of mounting dread. The Administration has so far withheld outright military assistance for a guerrilla campaign, and would-be recipients fear the bombings will create a false impression of progress toward Saddam's ouster. "Saddam can emerge as a hero who faced down U.S. imperialism," said Hamid Bayati, spokesman for the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, an opposition group backed by Iran. "He will attract more sympathy for Iraq among Muslims. Mounting the strikes without a political strategy to overthrow the regime could be counterproductive."

By the end of last week, the world seemed to be turned upside down. Iraq weathered days of relentless assault without offering much of a defense, yet without UNSCOM's presence the Baghdad regime may have a freer hand for pursuing its destructive aims. Iraq had defied the will of the international community for months, yet now the U.S. is going it almost alone. And, of course, the greatest irony of all: after the most decisive military campaign of the Clinton presidency, the fate of the American President appeared more precarious than that of Saddam Hussein's.

--Reported by Johanna McGeary/Baghdad, Jaime FlorCruz/Beijing, Scott MacLeod/Cairo, Barry Hillenbrand/London, Paul Quinn-Judge/Moscow, William Dowell/U.N. and J.F.O. McAllister and Mark Thompson/Washington

With reporting by Johanna McGeary/Baghdad, Jaime FlorCruz/Beijing, Scott MacLeod/Cairo, Barry Hillenbrand/London, Paul Quinn-Judge/Moscow, William Dowell/U.N. and J.F.O. McAllister and Mark Thompson/Washington