Magazine Sketches U.S. Plan for 4-Day Iraq War

PARIS — A news magazine reported Friday that U.S. military officials have made plans to defeat Iraq and liberate Kuwait in a four-day offensive that would destroy Saddam Hussein’s armed forces.

L’Express, a weekly news magazine with one of the largest circulations in France, said it obtained an outline of the plan from an unidentified adviser to Defense Secretary Dick Cheney. The report said U.S. planners estimated the offensive might cost 20,000 American lives.

In Washington, Pentagon officials declined comment on the report.

“You know we don’t talk about any contingency plans,” one Defense Department official said. Officials at the American Embassy in Paris said their policy is not to comment on stories published in the local press.

The magazine said that, in addition to projected loss of lives, planners had two other reservations: that Iraq might retaliate with chemical weapons and that Baghdad might succeed in wrecking Saudi Arabian oil fields.

The so-called Operation Night Camel would begin on a November night with an air assault by American warplanes dispatched from Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the aircraft carrier Independence, the magazine said.

The planes, including B-52s with cruise missiles, would aim to destroy Iraq’s air power before Iraqi planes could counterattack. Radar systems would be neutralized, missile bases bombed and air bases attacked, L’Express said. The magazine said this first phase would last less than six hours.

In a second phase, warplanes and missiles would be used to “annihilate” Iraq’s entire military industrial complex, L’Express said. An air attack would also be mounted on Iraqi tank units massed near the border with Saudi Arabia in the second phase, L’Express said.

In a third phase, the goal would be to cut off links between Kuwait and Iraq, the magazine said. The multinational force would then launch an offensive along the Iraqi-Kuwait border involving tank-killer planes, combat helicopters and U.S. M-1 tanks to cut off Iraqi soldiers in Kuwait from supplies and reinforcements, the magazine said.

In a fourth and final phase, there would be an even larger offensive to reconquer Kuwait, L’Express said.