ANTllOLOGY AND ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY                                         61

field where people are risking their lives at all times. There are great heroes out
there, and we ought to be very, very proud of them.
   That's the campaign to date.  That's the strategy to date.    I'd now be very
happy to take any questions anyone might have.

   Q.   I want to go back to the air war.   The chart you showed there with the
attrition rates of the various forces was almost the exact reverse of what most of
us thought was happening.    It showed the front line troops attriaed to 75 per-
cent or more, and the Republican Guard, which a lot of public focus was on
when we were covering the air war, attritted less than 75.      Why is that? How
did it come to pass?
   A:   Let me tell you how we did this.   We started off, of course, against the
strategic targets. I briefed you on that before.   At the same time, we were
hitting the Republican Guard.  But the Republican Guard, you must remember,
is a mechanized armor force for the most part, that is very, very well dug in,
and very, very well spread out.  So in the initial stages of the game, we were
hitting the Republican Guard heavily, but we were hitting them with strategic--
type bombers rather than pinpoint precision bombers.
   For lack of a better word, what happened is the air campaign shifted from
the strategic phase into the theater.  We knew all along that this was the impor-
tant area. The nightmare scenario for all of us would have been to go through,
get hung up in this breach right here, and then have the enemy artillery rain
chemical weapons down on troops that were in a gaggle in the breach right
there.  That was the nightmare scenario.    So one of the things that we felt we
must have established is an absolute, as much destruction as we could possibly
get, of the artillery, the direct support artillery, that would be firing on that
wire.   That's why we shifted it in the very latter days, we absolutely punished
this area very heavily because that was the first challenge.  Once we got through
this and were moving, then it's a different war.  Then we're fighting our kind
of war.  Before we get through that, we're fighting their kind of war, and that's
what we didn't want to have to do.
   At the same time, we continued to attrit the Republican Guard, and that's
why I would tell you that, again, the figures we're giving you are conservative,
they always have been conservative.       But we promised you at the outset we
weren't going to give you anything inflated, we were going to give you the best
we had.

   Q.   He seems to have about 500-600 tanks left out of more than 4,000, as
just an example.    I wonder (f in an overview,      despite these enormously
illustrative pictures, you could say what's left of the Iraqi army in terms of how
they could ever be a regional threat, or a threat to the region again?
   A:    There's not enough left at all for him to be a regional threat to the
region, an offensive regional threat.   As you know, he has a very large army,
but most of the army that is left north of the TigrislEuphrates valley is an
infantry army, it's not an armored army, it's not an armored heavy army, which