Schwarzkopf Sees Iraqis on Edge of Collapse

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia —  Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf said Tuesday the Iraqi military machine is on the verge of collapse and is losing about two battalions of tanks a day to allied air strikes, an attrition rate that no army can survive.

In assessing 34 days of warfare, Schwarzkopf, the U.S. commander of Operation Desert Storm, said Iraq’s military capabilities were probably overrated in the first place.

Its performance, he said, is reflective of something that the allies knew intuitively last fall but seldom talked about publicly: After fighting Iran for eight years, the Iraqi army was simply tired of war and had no real desire to go into battle again.

“Even though they had a large military and probably a very capable one for this part of the world,” the four-star general said, matched against “the sophistication of the U.S. military, there is no comparison. They grossly underestimated the type of war they were getting involved with and they’ve paid a price for that.”

Schwarzkopf tempered his optimistic assessment with some caution during a 90-minute interview, but gave every impression of being a man who knows that an overwhelming military victory is within the grasp of the more than 700,000-member multinational force aligned against Iraq. He portrayed the Iraqi forces as being increasingly demoralized, beset with deserters braving execution squads to flee back home and commanded by an inept leader, Saddam Hussein, who is reduced to communicating with some units by courier.

“Iraq’s military is hurting and hurting very badly,” he said. “Our assessment of them is that they are on the verge of collapse. . . .”

If there is a ground war--the general used that conditional phrase several times, rather than referring to a ground war as a certainty--he said he feels quite sure that Hussein would use artillery to deliver chemical weapons against allied troops. He said he thinks it likely that there would be an attempt to resurrect the remnants of its air force inside Iraq for the same purpose.

Mindful of the ill-founded confidence often expressed by U.S. commanders in Vietnam, where he served two tours, Schwarzkopf said: “I don’t want anyone to think I have assumed away the capabilities of the enemy, because I can still draw up 15 scenarios every day that will cause us a lot of problems. . . . I am not saying the Iraqi military is broken yet.

“But let’s put it this way. If I was getting the same pattern of reports about my forces (that Saddam is getting about his), I’d be dreadfully worried.”

At 6-foot-3 and 240 pounds, Schwarzkopf is an imposing figure. He seemed to fill the door frame as he entered a conference room on the fifth floor of the Saudi Defense Ministry, seconds after an aide had set down a pair of eyeglasses, a pen and a pad of paper on the table, then disappeared like an apparition.

A 34-year Army veteran and West Point graduate, the general was dressed in camouflage fatigues and the boots, size 11, he designed for the Army to use in desert warfare. He wore two wristwatches, one set on Washington time, the other on Saudi time.

Schwarzkopf declined to discuss a timetable for any ground war and also shied away from providing precise numbers for Iraqi equipment losses, although the two-battalion-a-day loss in tanks that he offered would amount to more than 100 tanks.

He also chose not to comment on the Soviet Union’s peace plan for the Gulf. But when asked if he would consider his military mission successful if Iraq withdrew unconditionally from Kuwait, even though Hussein might remain in power with part of his military intact, he replied: “Absolutely.”

“The President has said all along that we weren’t out to destroy the country of Iraq, we weren’t out to destroy the army of Iraq,” he said.

Still, said Schwarzkopf, “I think many of the (Arab) leaders of the coalition would like to see us go a step further and deny him (Hussein) the military that keeps him in power.”

However, the general added, “the Iraqi military has suffered so much damage that even if everything stopped today and Saddam Hussein walked out the door, Iraq would have a very dramatic setback in its military. And if they leave Kuwait quickly, they may have to leave a lot of stuff behind because, like some of the T-72 tanks that are sitting there buried in sand, some things just aren’t going to run.”

As an example of the allies’ selective targeting and limited military goals, Schwarzkopf said Iraq’s ability to produce oil has not been damaged--”something we could have done very easily.” What the allies have done, though, is to destroy Iraq’s ability to refine the oil and gasoline that could be used for military vehicles, he said.

The fact that Hussein now confines his movements to residential neighborhoods, sleeping each night in a different house, is convincing evidence, he said, that even the Iraqi president knows that the allies are not targeting civilian areas.

Schwarzkopf said the only real surprises of the war thus far were how effectively the allied Central Command had pegged Iraq’s military weaknesses, such as its inability to maintain long supply lines, and how poorly the Iraqis had performed.

The general commented that the Iraqi Scud missiles are so inaccurate that he didn’t even bother to get out of the shower during the last missile attack on Riyadh. And their only offensive effort, at the border town of Khafji, was “a joke, an absolute joke,” he said. There is evidence, he added, that the failed attack had been planned personally by Hussein.