Israel's strategy shaped by war it sat out

By Howard Goller

JERUSALEM (Reuters): The 39 Scud missiles that Iraq fired at Israel 10 years ago drove home a non-conventional message -- that the Jewish state could stay out of a war and emerge a winner.

Night after night for six weeks, millions of Israelis strapped gas masks over their faces and sought shelter in rooms sealed against the chemical weapons President Saddam Hussein had threatened would scorch half of their country.

Under orders from the United States, which led an alliance with Arab states to victory over Saddam, Israel sat on its superior arsenal rather than risk turning the Gulf War into a broader, more dangerous Arab-Israeli conflict.

The policy offered no relief for a people accustomed to swift, often brutal reprisals. Ehud Barak, then deputy army chief and now prime minister, said Israel's fingers itched to do the job even if restraint was the order of the day.

For once, then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, a serial naysayer to U.S. Middle East peace ideas, said "no" to any reprisals and the world loved him for it. By keeping Israel out of the war, he kept the alliance from crumbling and ensured its victory.

It was a bittersweet victory at that. As Israel's then- President Chaim Herzog said: "I won't feel that the war is over if Saddam Hussein stays on as president."

By the time the war was over, one Israeli had died from a direct Scud hit. More died from heart attacks or misusing gas masks. But no Scud had the feared poison -- a tribute, experts said, to Israel's chief asset: military deterrence.

The war reminded Israel not only of the value of deterrence, including its nuclear option, but also the importance of modern defenses and the crucial role of politics -- of Israel and of others -- in strategic thinking.

When the war ended -- and with it, the emergency requirements to carry gas masks -- Washington turned the success of its alliance with the Arabs into a peace drive. It led to Israel's first talks with its frontline Arab neighbors in Madrid that October.

Similarly, the Gulf War demonstrated how politics could bring Israel into a military confrontation with a country with which it shared no border, analysts say. The threat of another such conflict remains.

"Saddam is clearly re-emerging as a major player. He is trying to attract attention by threatening to become involved in a bigger Arab-Israeli conflict triggered by the Palestinian issue," said analyst Gerald Steinberg.

"(But) he does not have the kind of capabilities he had in 1990, both conventional and non-conventional, at this stage," said Steinberg, director of a center on conflict resolution at Bar-Ilan University.

"What it means in the bigger picture is that as long as this confrontation with the Palestinians goes on, Israel cannot extricate itself from anything that goes on in the Arab world," said analyst Mark Heller.

"There's no way it can be in a position of interested and innocent bystander. The Israeli issue will always be mobilized by one party or another (for its own purposes) even though there's no intrinsic contact," said Heller, of Tel Aviv University's Jaffee Centre for Strategic Studies.

Some Israelis insist that by holding back in the war, Israel weakened its overall deterrence, emboldening Hizbollah guerrillas in Lebanon and Palestinian militants in the West Bank and Gaza Strip attacking Israelis.

Some experts suggest that in the future Israel will have to lower the threshold of restraint. But others defend that restraint, including Steinberg who said Israel's Gulf War policy may even have reinforced its deterrence.

"These were pinpricks and Israel didn't need to prove it had the capability to respond. The credibility of the deterrence wasn't brought into question -- except perhaps by some Israeli commentators," Steinberg said.

Israel, by far the leading high-tech military power in the Middle East, is known to have a nuclear option. Israel has neither confirmed nor denied having such weapons, vowing only not to be the first to introduce them into the region.

"If there is a renewed threat of Scuds with chemical or biological weapons on them, the lesson from the Gulf War is that deterrence works, even against people considered to be fanatics like Saddam Hussein," Steinberg said.

The war underscored the importance of advanced technology to counter the missile threat, prompting heavy investment in weapons, satellite-based systems, precision-guided weapons -- what experts call "Scud-hunting" techniques.

Israel's most highly touted new weapon against Iraq's Scuds and their ilk is its U.S.-backed, missile-killing Arrow 2 rockets. In October, Israel announced the rockets were ready to intercept surface-to-surface missiles such as the Scuds.

The Arrow project, which only existed on paper 10 years ago, is supposed to protect Israel from missile attacks by Iraq, Iran and Syria. The price tag is expected to exceed US$2 billion by 2010, of which direct U.S. financing will account for a third.

During the Gulf War, the United States rushed new Patriot missiles to Israel designed to kill the Scuds. News reports have quoted Israeli defense officials since as saying that despite U.S. claims to a near-perfect record, the Patriots were a dud.

They have been upgraded since.

First and foremost, Israeli strategic analysts say the lesson of the Gulf War is that Israel cannot act alone. Israel was upstaged by the main event -- the U.S.-led bid to oust Iraq from Kuwait -- but had the potential of stealing the show.

Asked what had been the main lesson for Israel, Heller said: "That you can be attacked even if you haven't done anything.

"Nothing in Israeli-Palestinian bilateral relations comes out of the clear blue sky the way the Iraqi Scud missiles did."

Analysts say Israel had to think big.

"Iraq's invasion of Kuwait shouldn't have had any link to Israel but by the time it was over, Israel was very closely involved," Steinberg said. "And the role of the United States in forging a regional security framework is essential."