World

Clinton: No Relief For Saddam

By CBSNews.com staff CBSNews.com staff

February 22, 1999 / 6:54 AM EST / CBS

The president indicated Wednesday that there will be no let up in what has become a continual air war over Iraq, CBS News Senior White House Correspondent Scott Pelley reports.

"They are trying, obviously, for the symbolic victory of shooting one of these planes down and perhaps trying to intimidate us from patrolling the no-fly zone," the president said at a new conference. "I regret this. I wish he would stop doing that."

The president's comments came just hours after U.S. Air Force and Navy jets attacked two Iraqi missile sites south of Baghdad. The clash occurred after anti-aircraft guns fired on the warplanes, the Pentagon said.

Air raid sirens sounded and anti-aircraft fire could be heard in the Iraqi capital, but U.S. defense officials said the targets were within a "no-fly" zone in southern Iraq - which does not extend into Baghdad itself.

In a statement issued from the U.S. military's Central Command, the Pentagon said the bombing attacks by U.S. Air Force F-15E and Navy F/A-18 jets hit two surface-to-air missile (SAM) sites near Al Iskandariyah, about 30 miles south of Baghdad.

"The strikes were in response to an Iraqi aircraft violation of the "no-fly" zone and anti-aircraft artillery fire directed at coalition aircraft," the statement said.

It said that no U.S. aircraft were damaged in the exchange, the latest of dozens involving U.S. and British warplanes and Iraqi air defenses in the northern and southern "no-fly" zones since mid-December.

In Baghdad, a communiqué carried by the official Iraqi news agency said U.S. and British warplanes attacked Baghdad Wednesday, killing one person and wounding others. It said the planes hit some targets in the suburbs of the capital but did not immediately say what the targets were.

Pentagon officials said no attacks were launched against targets in Baghdad.

It was the fourth consecutive day of raids by U.S. or British warplanes policing the two "no-fly" zones. In December, Iraq said it would no longer recognize the zones after the U.S. and Britain launched a 4-day air military campaign to punish Iraq for obstructing inspectors on a U.N. mandated search for weapons of mass destruction.

The Western-patrolled "no-fly" zones were set up after the 1991 Gulf War, ostensibly to protect Kurds in northern Iraq and Muslim Shi'ites in the south from attack by Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's forces.

The southern zone now extends northward to the 33rd parallel, almost to the southern suburbs of Baghdad.

The Pentagon said Tuesday that two months of tit-for-tat raids against Iraqi air defenses in response to "provocations" had not caused any losses of allied warplanes but had destroyed about 20 percent of Iraq's anti-aircraft missile batteries.

"I think he (Saddam) has demonstrated to his own people, to people in the region, that he can't defend his own territory or his installations," Pentagon spokesman Ken Bacon tld reporters.