Sunday, November 24, 2002

Wage War, but Don't Start One

THOUGH President Bush has made no decision to execute the detailed battle plan now on his desk, events of recent days help answer the question, Will America go to war with Iraq?

America already is at war with Iraq.

It is a highly restrained conflict, to be sure, and has been waged at varying tempos for months, even years. But war accurately describes the sustained combat operations in which a dozen allied jets scream into Iraqi air space to fire a score of precision-guided munitions at multiple targets, responding to attacks from surface-to-air missiles or antiaircraft guns.

"The gulf war did not end in February of 1991," said Eliot A. Cohen, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. "For a decade now, we've been fighting this low-level war without calling it such. But barely a day goes by without the Iraqis trying to kill an American or British pilot."

In this nervous time, the goading and counterpunching taking place with such deadly intensity over Iraq constitute part of a shadow war that may set the terms under which the real one would be fought.

On the ground in Iraq, United Nations weapons inspectors are setting up shop ahead of a Dec. 8 deadline set by the Security Council for President Saddam Hussein to give a full accounting of his weapons of mass destruction. As that day nears, the Bush administration and the Hussein regime face a similar quandary: how to pursue strategic goals without making a mistake that somehow strengthens the other.

For the United States, the trick is to keep combat operations in the northern and southern no-flight zones at sufficiently low levels so that it appears Mr. Hussein is the one trying to ratchet up tensions when his forces shoot at American or British warplanes and offer bounties for coalition pilots.…
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/24/weekinreview/24SHAN.html

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