SECTION: PART B; COMMENTARY; Pg. B4; LENGTH: 1607 words

by Benjamin Works

Egads! It's LBJ's creeping escalation of "Operation Rolling Thunder," all over again.

The unrecognized war with Iraq has persisted since the mid-December "Operation Desert Fox" when U.S. and British Air Forces sought to degrade Saddam's organs of power and instruments of war, particularly the seven divisions of the Republican Guard. Saddam did not blink. Since Christmas, aircraft have attacked about 100 different air defense targets in just more than two months, without any sign of a halt. Only on Tuesday March 2 did The Washington Post explicitly recognize that the air skirmishes over Iraq constitute "a low-grade air war," kept small so as not to upset the Arab neighbors.

On Dec. 26, less than a week after Desert Fox's terminus, Iraqi anti-air defenses - radar-guided anti-aircraft artillery (AAA) and surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) began harassing aircraft on patrol in both the northern and southern no-fly zones, which Saddam declared to be an illegal infringement of "Iraq's sovereignty and dignity." On and off, day by day, these skirmishes have continued.

At January's end, the United States ordered a widening of the Iraqi target set to include air defense and communications infrastructure as well as the immediately offending batteries, giving pilots greater flexibility in their immediate reactions to the daily threats and giving planners an ability to follow up with measured deliberation. And, briefly in mid-February, it looked to Washington as if Saddam had withdrawn his batteries to safe positions outside the two patrol zones. But days later, the batteries were back and harassment picked up.

By Feb. 28, the U.S. had attacked more than 90 targets and proudly asserted that the U.S.-RAF missions had destroyed or degraded about 20 percent of Iraq's air defense batteries. But this Monday, when harassment continued, the United States knew it had "to send a strong message." Defense Secretary William Cohen permitted a stronger counterattack and 30 precision-guided weapons were unleashed at an even broader range of targets, apparently disabling electrical distribution lines that powered the air defense infrastructure and also the oil pipeline to Turkey, through which U.N.-approved oil for sale flows.

China, president of the U.N. Security Council, has now made an issue of the bombing, while Thursday, Britain confirmed another widening of the target set and rules of engagement.

Thirty guided-weapons. Some punishment. But if the United States escalates, the neighbors' Arab citizenries may start to get loudly upset again. There is no exit strategy visible in this.

Saddam is not impressed; neither is anyone conversant with Lyndon Johnson's creeping escalation of the strategic air war against Hanoi - "Operation Rolling Thunder." Mr. Cohen has unwittingly stepped into Robert McNamara's shoes and become the latest of ingenuous statesmen attempting to practice gunboat discipline against a large, well-armed, determined and ruthless despot.

Let us look at the worldview of this. Saddam has not rolled over after nearly three months of this corporal punishment, yet NATO was blithely threatening a parallel campaign against Yugoslavia's air defenses and military even as Saddam was continuing to absorb our daily punches. Who in Washington really thinks NATO threats propel Serbian compliance?

Further, U.S. plans for "regime-change" via CIA-planned covert operations have not impressed Iraq's neighbors who on Feb. 3 politely rebuffed Secretarsy of State Madeleine Albright's ambassador for regime change, Martin Indyk, on his first trip into the Gulf and rejected the U.S. scheme.

Worse, these light blows do not affect Saddam's ability to dominate his population. Yet, Washington's strategic envisioners still imagine these attacks will encourage a military coup against Saddam - when all else has failed thus far - as Defense Undersecretary Walter Slocombe told a Senate committee last month and as officials now suggest is the plan behind stepped-up bombing.

When LBJ began attacks against a limited set of targets, Hanoi had the chance to absorb those blows, revise its transportation, training, production and other infrastructural arrangements, while bringing in large amounts of Soviet-provided air defense systems. As the U.S. gradually widened the target set, Hanoi, already inured to the strategic interdiction and "punishment," continued to stay a step ahead of America's practice at strategic "limited war." Late in the war, Nixon found a recipe for bombing-as-leverage in the "Linebacker II" Christmas bombing of 1972, but Hanoi recognized it was upagainst a tough president, just re-elected, and with four more years to impede their ambitions.

While it is true Saddam may not import more batteries, it is also true that he has plenty left and can absorb months of punishment, even deprivation, which he has forced Iraqis to bear since 1991. Allied airstrikes increasingly appear to be the impotent tantrums of a tyrant global despot against a nasty local despot - a spitting contest between two skunks.

Wider implications: Mr. Clinton's National Security policy team has managed to demystify the carefully cultivated myth of the global reach of America's strategic and tactical air forces - the chill is gone. Sure, the U.S. can hit any target it wants. But without the will and the internationally recognized justification for going to war, local despots increasingly understand they can survive America's aerial tantrums, our lethal air shows.

Worse, it is increasingly understood there are electronic means of short-range and wide-area jamming of Global Positioning Satellite System (GPSS) guidance that steers our Tomahawks and AGM-130 short-range missile and the shorter-range GPSS-guided glide bombs. Any radio signal band including GPSS may be jammed. In one current "intelligence" item circulating on the internet, a Russian scientist alleges to have provided Iraq with a design scheme to create jammers at a cost of 125 British pounds - $200. But that's just one of many means and many rumors. Still, a few of our weapons have wandered off course. Fortunately, Anglo-American aviators also have laser and infra-red TV-guided weapons, while Tomahawks still retain their ground map following capability as well as GPSS. Redundant and multiple guidance options are good to have.

A side-effect of militaries' developing GPSS jamming defenses is that these become available to terrorists and saboteurs. Aviation Week reported this week the FAA is pushing a switch to GPSS guidance as sole-guidance for all aircraft. This U.S. initiative would lead to a global change to all-GPSS guidance for all commercial aircraft, so it can scrap more expensive local guidance systems, which will need replacement in the first decade of the next century. I think redundancy in navigation aids is a prudent idea even setting aside the issue of local area GPS jamming.

Inexorable logic: Mr. Clinton spoke last week of Americans accepting "the inexorable logic of globalism" in which the sovereignty of states and their citizens will increasingly be subordinated to the will of international treaty organizations, for the benefit of commerce, trade and good government.

Ambassador Christopher Hill let slip a telling remark about the administration's real attitude towards the constitutional sovereignty of the U.S. and other states. A fixation on nationalist governments, Mr. Hill finds, "is a bit antiquated," according to Radio Free Europe analyst Paul Goble, writing of Rambouillet on Feb. 23.

The Republican Congress appears to be buffaloed. In an act of circular logic, Mr. Clinton, in his ongoing campaign of coercion against Yugoslavia has invoked a NATO ministers' resolution to apply force as a substitute for congressional authority under the War Powers act and the Constitution. Mr. Clinton is, in effect, undermining sovereign rights of the United States to a collective NATO decision made by appointed defense ministers, rather than elected officials. This is his idea of the roadway leading to Globalism "Gee, guys; Denmark, Iceland and Luxembourg all agree we really gotta do this!"

Saddam will likely remain in power long after Mr. Clinton has gone off to tend his legacy, but the United States will be stuck with the maintenance of Iraq's containment, frayed relations with its neighbors, and with the ongoing occupation in the Balkans. By then, the continued U.S. practice of disciplinary bombing threats and practice will be further discredited.

In the world, Mr. Clinton will have both exhausted our armed forces and discredited many forms of limited force usage. And within, Mr. Clinton will have further weakened our Constitution by using treaty membership to obviate congressional action. His aggressive actions will also be used by anti-nationalist critics at the United Nations, OSCE, EU and other Globalist bodies aspiring to govern the masses, as justification for further reducing the sovereign rights of the U.S. and other states, and we may see ourselves further along the road to subordination within a universal empire. For a society or civilization to fall from without, it must first be fatally wounded by the irresponsible "enemy within." Clintonian foreign policy pursuits, and domestic big-spending social initiatives sum up to a very effective enemy within.

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Benjamin Works, executive director of the Strategic Issues Research Institute in New York. Mr. Works publishes an internet foreign affairs newsletter and analyzes national security matters for CBS and FoxNews networks.

GRAPHIC: Cartoon, (copilot to pilot Bill Clinton in a jet cockpit wit a frowning smart bomb under its belly) IT (the bomb) SAID: 'HEY, BLOCKHEAD, AIRSTRIKES WON'T ACCOMPLISH A THING.', By Mike Thompson/The State Journal-Register (Copley News Service, '98)