Finding The Time To Start A Little War Politics, Parents’ Day, Muslim Pilgrimage Confound Pentagon

Everyone’s got the calendar out, trying to schedule a manageable little war with Iraq. There are the Islamic holy days to consider, the cycles of the moon, the president’s trip to Africa and even parents’ weekend at Stanford University, where a certain first daughter goes to school.

“You really do hear some unusual things in the corridors,” a senior Defense Department official said. “Talk about Ramadan, and the feast after Ramadan, whatever that was called, and before that there was Christmas. And now it’s the Olympics and the haj. I guess there never really is a convenient time.”

The guessing game has extended to whether the Stanford parents’ weekend and the haj, the annual pilgrimage of Muslims to Mecca, are factors as consequential for scheduling warfare as whether President Saddam Hussein of Iraq agrees to “full and unfettered access” to suspected weapons sites by United Nations inspectors, which is the Clinton administration’s bottom line for a settlement.

In conflicts like this, care for the sensitivities of one’s allies can be more important than the urgency of any threat.

It is one matter if war is forced on a country by invasion or self-defense. But what the United States and Britain are contemplating is a limited military strike in pursuit of a political objective, and the intricacies of the Muslim religious calendar are as important as the dates for moonless nights, long a favorite of military planners.

“This isn’t exactly Pearl Harbor,” said a senior American official. “But there’s no question the Joint Chiefs don’t usually plan their battles this way.”

Convenience is not the point, said the official, who, like the others quoted, spoke on condition of anonymity. “We’re more concerned with meteorological and astronomical contingencies,” he said.

There has been much debate over the importance of moonless nights and when they come, because the bombing of Baghdad that began the Persian Gulf war in January 1991 took place on just such a night.

Although Stealth aircraft are hard to see on radar screens, on a bright day or a clear night they appear big and black and are more vulnerable to attack.

According to the United States Naval Observatory, the next new moon over the Middle East will be on Feb. 26, and the one after that will be on March 28. The two or three nights both before and after those dates are the darkest.

In the end, a political judgment will have to be made about when diplomatic efforts to seek a peaceful solution to the Iraq crisis finally have run their course. That is not likely for at least a week or so, especially if U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan travels to Baghdad this week.

There is an even stronger hint in President Clinton’s travel schedule, since presidents do not usually start wars when they are away from Washington. The Clintons are scheduled to go to Stanford for parents’ weekend, Feb. 25 through March 1, though the trip is not yet officially confirmed.

So it is not clear that military action can come in this month’s moonless window, and it is fairly obvious that it will not come in the next. The reason? President Clinton is traveling again, scheduled to leave on a five-country African tour on March 22 and to return on April 2.

A senior Defense Department official said the moon theory was “a little overdone.” The American military “is awfully good at night fighting, so night is better,” he said, especially for an initial attack to suppress what he called “the largely reconstituted Iraqi integrated air defense.”

During the gulf war, the official said, “we bombed 40 days and 40 nights through new moons and old moons and all kinds of moons.”

“If we had to, we could exercise today any plan the president chooses,” the defense official said. “We don’t have to take into account the Olympics or the president’s little domestic problems or media frenzies.”

But politicians do, and they must also consider the sensibilities of their allies and friends, especially in the region. When Secretary of State Madeleine Albright began her tour of the gulf countries late last month, talking of diplomacy while seeking support for war, the problem was the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which ended in a three-day feast called Id al-Fitr.

That prompted some to play armchair general and conclude that warfare was impossible at least until the government of Saudi Arabia returned to work on Feb. 7, and then until Defense Secretary William Cohen returned from the gulf and Moscow, which he did on Friday.

Then there was also the convention that countries refrain from warfare during the Olympics, a request made specific by the host country, Japan, and by the International Olympic Committee. American officials said the Olympics would stop nothing, but the Games were a factor in their thinking, the officials admit, and they are not due to end until Feb. 22.

And Israel is asking for more time to equip its citizens with gas masks, even though American and British officials regard the chance of an Iraqi poison gas attack on Israel to be nearly zero.

Now the Islamic observance on every wagging tongue is the haj, the annual pilgrimage to the holy places of Mecca and Medina, in Saudi Arabia, made by a million or so Muslims a year.

The Islamic Institute in Washington says the haj climaxes this year on April 6 and 7, and the month centered on the haj begins on March 30. But pilgrims will begin to travel from every Muslim country to Saudi Arabia from about March 20.

So does that leave a window for war for the four weeks from Feb. 23 through March 20? Or not?

One senior Western official said that timing seemed reasonable enough to him, but he said there would be more reliable signs. First, he said, would be the petering out of diplomacy, which would be pretty apparent. Second, he suggested, watch the State Department’s travel advisories for the region, available on the department’s home page on the World Wide Web (www.state.gov).

With near certainty, hostilities will be preceded by a warning, called “authorized departure,” which tells nonessential American staff members and other citizens to leave for safer places, the official said.

“When you see that,” a senior U.S. official said, “then I’d start looking at my calendar.”