Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, February 28, 1991                   TAG: 9102280160
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: RIYADH, SAUDI ARABIA                                LENGTH: Medium

ALLIES' PATH WAS CLEAR, GENERAL SAYS/ DECEPTION OF IRAQIS HERALDED AS KEY TO

In his first briefing since the ground assault began, the hulking allied commander nicknamed "The Bear" wielded a pointer like a West Point tactics professor and boasted about the deception he credited for the land attack's rapid success.

Schwarzkopf described the meticulous hoax that for three months had kept the Iraqis squinting out at the Persian Gulf, wondering whether they would have to repulse the biggest amphibious assault by the U.S. Marines since Inchon.

Before live television cameras that presumably beamed his image into Saddam Hussein's own bunker in Baghdad, Schwarzkopf pounced with obvious delight on a reporter's question about his enemy's combat tactics.

"Hah!" Schwarzkopf said. "As far as Saddam Hussein being a great military strategist, he is neither a strategist, nor is he schooled in the operational arts, nor is he a tactician, nor is he a general, nor is he as a soldier.

"Other than that, he's a great military man, I want you to know that."

"We were 150 miles from Baghdad and there was nothing between us and Baghdad," Schwarzkopf said.

"If it had been our intention to take Iraq, if it had been our intention to destroy the country, if it had been our intention to overrun the country, we could have done it unopposed for all intents and purposes.

"But that was never our intention . . . . Our intention was purely to eject the Iraqis out of Kuwait and to destroy the military power that had come in here."

Schwarzkopf revealed how, he said, the Iraqis were taken in by sham maneuvers and secret movements of entire divisions.

In addition to convincing Iraq that allies planned a huge amphibious landing, the allies used Iraq's lack of airborne intelligence ability to shift large numbers of troops westward without being detected.

Those troops rushed northward through Iraq, outflanking highly touted Republican Guard units and pushing forward to the Euphrates River and later eastward, where Republican Guard tanks tried Wednesday to defend the port city of Basra.

Despite the overwhelming success, marked by the restoration of Kuwait City to allied control, the general said the conflict was far from resolved.

"The war is not over," Schwarzkopf said. "You've got to remember that people are still dying out there. And those people who are dying are my troops."

In his assessment of the campaign, the 56-year-old general spoke for the first time of enemy dead.

The question was what, if there were only 50,000 prisoners, had become of the rest of the 29 Iraqi divisions - some 200,000 soldiers in all - who had been deployed to the Kuwait desert and were now considered "destroyed or combat ineffective."

"There were were very, very large numbers of dead," Schwarzkopf said, adding that U.S. troops had found many in the bunkers and trench lines where Iraqi conscripts had been hammered by allied air strikes.

Schwarzkopf also said there had been "very heavy desertions," totaling up to 30 percent of the troops in some units.

Using the pointer, Schwarzkopf showed how his two Army corps, two Marine divisions and associated units had been brought to the Saudi desert, moved into positions, trained and supplied with enough armaments and other supplies to last for 60 days.

He called the massive effort a "monumental" achievement, conceding that if he'd known how little resistance Iraqis would mount, "We'd never have put 60 days worth of supplies in there."

Schwarzkopf said his strategy relied on two feints that obviously worked in taking the Iraqis by surprise.

They were needed, he said, because Saddam's fighting forces outnumbered the allies by about 2-1, and the coalition should ideally have had a 5-1 advantage to seize heavily defended Iraqi positions.

One ruse was the phantom amphibious assault - 33 navy ships, loaded with 17,000 Marines, cruising in the Persian Gulf and periodically conducting beach assault exercises.

The idea was that the Iraqis, seeing this activity, would have to deploy forces along the coast. They did, also laying mine fields on the beaches and mining the waters of the gulf.

The other was a last-minute shift of two divisons of allied soldiers from their original positions just below the Kuwait border to undefended desert 300 miles to the west. The Iraqis, Schwarzkopf explained, could not know that the forces had moved.

On "G-Day," these divisions drove deep into Iraqi territory, well to the west of the other allied forces and in position to wheel east toward Kuwait, hitting the vaunted Republican Guards from that direction as they concentrated their attention on the threat coming from the south.