How the U.S. Plans to Keep Israel on Iraq War Sidelines
Jerusalem Will Get Live View of Battlefield, Early Jump on Any Incoming Scud Missiles

By CARLA ANNE ROBBINS and KARBY LEGGETT
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

March 3, 2002

It's a nightmare scenario, so troubling that U.S. planners are working everishly to head it off:

In a war with Iraq, Saddam Hussein targets Israel, this time with chemical or biological weapons. Israel lashes back. Friendly Arab governments immediately face violent anti-American demonstrations, while inside Iraq Mr. Hussein is suddenly lionized for standing up to the "Zionist-American invaders." If Israel's response is harsh enough, even European leaders, already doubtful about the war and fearful it will spread, demand a halt to the fighting.

Intent on preventing that, the Bush administration is going to unprecedented lengths to protect Israel and keep it out of the fight.
Without public notice, U.S. officials have arranged to give Israeli military leaders access to at least part of the Pentagon's classified communications network so they can monitor the war in real time. They've also quietly delivered to Israel a truck-size early-warning system that downloads data on missile launches directly from U.S. military satellites, which is then instantly relayed to Israel's Arrow missile-defense system. The steps aim to safeguard the Israelis and reassure them there will be no surprises if they wait on the sidelines.

At the same time, U.S. military planners have pledged that western Iraq -- thought to be the home of hidden weapons caches and Scud missile launchers that can reach Israel -- will be one of the first targets for American troops. Gen. Tommy Franks, head of the U.S. Central Command, which will run the war, has established a special sub-command to lead the weapons hunt. Even before any full ground invasion begins, U.S. forces likely will seize one or two largely abandoned air fields in Western and Southern Iraq to use as bases for operations. A small number of Special Operations troops already are on the ground there on scouting missions.

The Pentagon also has sent a two-star Air Force general to Tel Aviv to serve as a military liaison and is expected to send a senior aide to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld as well.

While U.S. officials are reluctant to talk publicly about these efforts, they say the message to the Israeli government is clear. "What we're saying is, 'There's no reason for you to get involved, we're doing everything that can possibly be done and you can see it all,' " explains one top official.

It's hard to know whether this strategy will be enough to restrain Israel if it were to be hit hard.

President Bush, Mr. Rumsfeld and Douglas Feith, a top Rumsfeld aide, have all explicitly asked Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to stay out of the war, officials say. The U.S. has also told the Israelis that if, as a last resort, they do retaliate, any use of nuclear or other weapons of mass destruction would be disastrous and rob them of any world sympathy.

Mr. Sharon has acknowledged the sensitivities, but he's also made clear that he won't stand by if Israel suffers a large number of casualties or if Iraq uses weapons of mass destruction.

"If Iraq attacks Israel but doesn't hit population centers or cause casualties, our interest will be to not make it hard on [the Americans]. If, on the other hand, Israel is harmed, if we suffer casualties or if non-conventional weapons of mass destruction are used against us, then Israel will take the proper actions to defend its citizens," he told the Jerusalem Post last fall.

Raanan Gissin, a Sharon spokesman and adviser, says that is still Israel's policy, adding that "the Iraqis know very well that if they attack us with missiles, with nonconventional weapons, they expose themselves to a whole variety of threats they don't want to expose themselves to." A senior Israeli security official goes even further, predicting that Israel would retaliate against Iraq "in a devastating way."

The reason for all the concern is simple history. In 1991, Iraq tried to provoke Israel into joining the war by launching 39 conventionally armed Scud missiles at Israel. The Israelis came within hours of retaliating. And many Israelis fear their ability to deter enemy attacks was badly weakened by that restraint -- creating a fundamental conflict of interest with the U.S.

This time, U.S. officials believe, the danger may be greater. While Mr. Hussein has fewer Scuds, he's more likely to use chemical or biological weapons, whether by missile, unmanned drone, kamikaze pilot or suitcase. And that will put far more pressure on Jerusalem to fight back.

Front-Row View

The decision to give Israel a front-row view of the war is a major change from the first Persian Gulf War. Back then, the U.S. kept the Israelis at arm's length and privately denied them any real-time intelligence that would have made retaliation easier. It also comes with some risk for President Bush, already viewed by the Arab world and much of Europe as too closely linked to Israel and the hardline Mr. Sharon. If the Israelis ignore U.S. pleas and retaliate, the U.S. would have a hard time denying any involvement.

Under strong pressure last week from British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Spain's Jose Maria Aznar, Mr. Bush spoke for the first time in months about the stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace process, repeating his commitment to the eventual creation of a Palestinian state and calling for a halt to Israeli settlements in the occupied territories, once violence subsides. But White House officials said privately that they don't expect any real movement until after the war.

In 1991, a mixture of luck, poor technology and Mr. Hussein's decision to stick to conventional warheads saved Israel from a major disaster. One target that Iraq's missiles missed was Israel's Dimona nuclear reactor. Only one person died as a direct result of the 39 Scud hits on Israel, though another dozen died from heart attacks and related accidents in the ensuing chaos. Still, the pressure to retaliate was enormous.

U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, then a top Pentagon aide, recalls that after two nights of Scuds hammering Israel, the director general of Israel's Defense Ministry, David Ivri, phoned to "announce they were getting ready to launch fighter aircraft and C-130s with special forces troops into western Iraq. He was calling me to give us the timing and the coordinates" of Israeli planes so coalition forces didn't attack them by accident.

Mr. Wolfowitz reminded him that then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir had promised President Bush that he would consult before taking any action. "I said I would take down the information but he shouldn't mistake that for consultation or approval. There was silence on the other end of the phone." Mr. Wolfowitz adds: "By the end of the afternoon they had calmed down."

Mr. Ivri says the decision not to retaliate "was the right thing to do." But he says that if the war had gone on much longer, the political pressures would have been too hard to resist. He also says that Pentagon leaders made clear to him that if the Israelis decided they had no choice but to hit western Iraq, they would move U.S. planes out of the way. "The question they asked us was, 'What can you do that we can't?' " A former U.S. official involved says that any such understanding was "informal."

The subsequent deployment of U.S. Patriot antimissile batteries relieved some of the pressure, and the two countries set up a high-level military team in Tel Aviv -- called the Operations Intelligence Cell -- so the Israelis could pass on targeting and tactical advice to the U.S. Scud hunt. Even then, the Israelis were never allowed direct contact with the U.S. military command center based in Saudi Arabia. A former U.S. official involved says that the Pentagon intentionally delayed passing any real-time intelligence back to the Israelis that could have made retaliation easier.

Today, this President Bush has a much closer personal relationship with Israel's prime minister, Mr. Sharon. Indeed, some U.S. officials worry the Israelis might misinterpret President Bush's often uncritical support as a carte blanche for retaliation, despite what the President has said. U.S. officials say they've also learned from the 1991 experience, and that their best hope of restraining the Israelis now is to let them see for themselves that everything possible is being done to smash the Iraqi threat.

So this Bush administration has decided to let the Israelis see the war unfolding as it happens. The U.S. has set up a joint-command center, attached to the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv, that will be linked to the Central Command communications network system, according to a U.S. official. That will allow Israeli officials to view the "common air picture," a sophisticated version of an air-traffic controller's view of enemy and allied aircraft. It is the same picture seen by commanders directing the war.

Beyond that sensitive step, the U.S is moving aggressively to protect Israel from missiles. In the wake of the Gulf War, Israel has rushed to build its own missile-defense system, and the U.S. has picked up about half the $2 billion tab.

The Pentagon has been working hard to help fine-tune the Arrow system. In November U.S. and Israeli scientists gathered at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California to watch as two Scuds -- which confounded the Patriots with their uneven trajectories and their tendency to break up in midflight -- were launched into the ocean. In January the U.S. sent 3 Patriot batteries, an Aegis radar destroyer, and 600 U.S. troops to Israel to participate in a long-scheduled joint missile defense exercise. That exercise ended late last month , but Israeli and U.S. officials say the equipment and troops are staying for now.

One of the Israelis' biggest complaints during the Gulf War was that they got only about a three-minute warning of an attack by a Scud. An Iraqi Scud, originally a Soviet-made medium-range missile, takes six to seven minutes to reach Israel. But by the time U.S. military satellites had picked up a launch, relayed the data back to the Colorado early-warning center for processing and then sent the information back out, half the flight time had elapsed.

In 1996 the Clinton administration upgraded Israel's early-warning capability, hooking its missile-defense system into the more-sophisticated ALERT system based in Colorado that senses and passes on data about launches of shorter-range missiles.

The ALERT system still has a delay of at least 90 seconds. So the Bush administration has gone further in recent weeks, sending Israel a small, transportable early-warning ground station, known as a JTAGS, that uses its own satellite dishes to receive data on Iraqi Scud launches from U.S. early-warning satellites. The information will allow Israel to immediately point its radar in the right direction on the horizon and give the Arrow system more time to track the Scud and shoot it down.

The decision to send a JTAGS to Israel is a sensitive one, says John Pike of GlobalSecurity.Org, an independent military-analysis group. The ALERT system is still controlled by the U.S., which can limit the Israelis' view or turn it off. With JTAGS, there's no filter. "In theory the Israelis could take U.S. intelligence on Pakistani missile launches and sell it to India," says Mr. Pike.

High Priority

One of the most significant changes is that Gen. Franks -- unlike his predecessor Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf -- agrees that hunting Scuds is a top military priority, to protect Israel as well as U.S. troops and bases in neighboring Arab states. The biggest single loss of American lives during the Gulf War came from a Scud hit on a U.S. barracks near Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, when 28 soldiers were killed and another 98 wounded.

The Israelis have been pushing what they call the "Western Iraq first" strategy since before anyone in Washington was seriously contemplating a war with Iraq. Israeli officials pressed the idea hard in a fall 2001 meeting in Washington, and a few months later Israeli intelligence officials brought a briefing detailing suspected Scud and weapons sites to go after.

The special subcommand Gen. Franks has set up for both western and southern Iraq will go after hidden weapons and missiles and anything else that can threaten Israel and Iraq's neighbors. It will be headed by a Special Operations general who will have Predator and Global Hawk unmanned surveillance planes to seek out launchers and weapons caches, fighter and attack planes to bomb them, and Special Operations troops to press the hunt on the ground.

Mr. Hussein appears to have anticipated at least one of the subcommand's early moves. U.S. spy satellites show that over the last year Iraqis have put heavy concrete barriers on and around the runways of at least two airbases in western Iraq to make them harder to seize, a U.S. defense official says. Meanwhile, U.S. warplanes recently destroyed a mobile radar in western Iraq. The Iraqis were using it to monitor the movement in neighboring Jordan of U.S. helicopters that will ferry in special-operations troops for the weapons hunt.

Asked about the odds that all these steps will protect Israel from missiles, a senior U.S. defense official says: "Is the capability perfect? No. There are always going to be a few Scuds that will slip through. But we think we have a few surprises up our sleeve. We're not going to do this the same way we did in the Gulf War."

Whether these changes could make it easier for the Israelis to retaliate this time is the matter of some debate. With real-time intelligence, the Israelis could find it easier to select targets, especially any they feel the U.S. may be neglecting. But U.S. officials and military experts say that even access to the common air picture won't be enough to let the Israelis fly into Iraqi airspace without accidentally drawing U.S. fire or firing on U.S. planes.

For that, the Israelis would need the U.S. to provide the so-called IFF, or Identification Friend or Foe, codes -- electronic passwords that are used by aircraft to recognize allied and enemy planes. The Israelis requested the codes during the Gulf War and Washington turned them down. U.S. officials say they won't give them the codes this time either. Yet the senior Israeli security official paints a different picture. Asked repeatedly about Washington's willingness to share the IFF codes, he said, "That is a technical matter and it is not an obstacle."