New Weapon Vs. Iraq: Concrete

The Air Force has found a novel way of hitting the Iraqis where it hurts -- without harming civilians. U.S. fighter planes patrolling northern Iraq have begun filling bombs with concrete instead of explosives, the New York Times reported Thursday.

CBS News Military Consultant Perry Smith, a retired U.S. Air Force Major General, says these bombs are especially effective in populated areas.

"They're a way to continue to hold down air defense capability with very little chance of civilian and collateral damage," he said.

The 2,000-pound concrete bombs "create a very big hole," says Smith, "but no blast effect."

For the last nine months, Iraqi forces have routinely fired on American and British forces patrolling the so-called no-flight zones in northern and southern Iraq. The U.S. and British fighters have struck back, in what they say is self-defense, dropping hundreds of bombs during thousands of sorties.

The Times said the concrete bombs were useful in hitting military targets that Iraq has located in residential neighborhoods. It added that U.S. officials believe such positioning is a deliberate policy by President Saddam Hussein to foment international sympathy by publicizing civilian casualties from the air strikes.

The newspaper called the use of concrete an apt symbol of a low-level war against Iraq that it said is dictated as much by political and diplomatic sensitivities as by strategic or military considerations.

The United States and its allies set up the no-fly zones to protect Iraqi Kurds in the north and Shiite Muslims in the south from Iraqi forces after the 1991 Gulf War to oust Iraq from Kuwait. Iraq never accepted the zones.

The current skirmishes began last December after the United States and Britain carried out four days of air attacks to punish Iraq for failing to allow continued U.N. inspections of its nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs.

From then on, Iraq declared the no-fly zones a violation of its sovereignty and began responding to the patrols, firing antiaircraft weapons and launching surface-to-air missiles.

The Times quoted U.S. officials as saying that since December, American and British patrols had flown nearly 16,000 sorties and dropped 550 bombs against 135 targets in southern Iraq.

It said that Iraq reported that nearly 200 people, including many civilians, had been killed in the air strikes this year, a figure that American officials call exaggerated.

France and Russia have criticized the air strikes.