WASHINGTON — U.S. defense officials predicted Wednesday that they would minimize civilian casualties if there is a war with Iraq, despite Pentagon plans to unleash an intense bombing campaign, the presence of human shields in Baghdad and the prospect of urban warfare.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Army Gen. Tommy Franks, head of the U.S. Central Command, described a war featuring a list of targets that has been honed and vetted over the last 12 years and an air assault with "smart" bombs, designed to paralyze Iraqi forces with a punishing array of pinprick strikes. The campaign would include more, smaller bombs and possibly some novel "nonlethal" weapons.
The result, Pentagon officials said, would be a war that could prove less deadly to civilians than the 1991 Persian Gulf War, in which an estimated 3,500 noncombatants died.
"Our precision capability allows us to keep ... civilian casualties to a lower number than we've ever seen in the past. But there will be some," said a senior U.S. military official who works under Franks at Central Command, which would direct a war in Iraq.
Bush administration officials stressed their efforts to keep down the number of civilian deaths because they are concerned that a large number would intensify opposition to U.S. policy around the world and undermine efforts to rebuild Iraq and foster democratic reforms in the Middle East. As a result, they have insisted that military planners devise rules that keep such casualties as low as possible, even as U.S. forces pursue a more ambitious mission than in 1991, when they drove the Iraqi military out of Kuwait.
Yet even if American and coalition troops avoid killing large numbers of noncombatants in the bombing campaign or in potentially messy urban warfare, intelligence reports suggest that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein would mount an active campaign to convince world opinion otherwise.
In addition to the dangers of urban warfare, civilian casualties could result from Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction and Hussein's strategy of placing military sites near schools, hospitals and mosques.
The effort to minimize civilian deaths is further complicated by antiwar protesters who have driven to Baghdad to volunteer as human shields and by the possibility that captured U.S. troops and others would be forced to protect sites with their lives, as happened in 1991.
