US warplanes attacked air defenses in northern Iraq yesterday as President George W Bush insisted last week's controversial US-British raids jets near Baghdad were successful although some "smart" bombs missed their targets.
Mr Bush said last Friday's strikes on radars and military communications sites around Baghdad were designed to let Iraqi President Saddam Hussein know the Bush administration would remain engaged in the Gulf and to degrade Iraq's air defenses.
"We got his (Saddam's) attention," the new president told reporters in his first White House news conference. "I believe we succeeded in both of those missions."
But US defense and Navy officials said privately that fewer than half of the US Navy's new satellite-guided glide bombs, costing more than $300,000 each and dropped from afar, struck radar sites near Baghdad last Friday.
Yesterday's attacks in a northern Iraq no-fly zone, which the US European Command said were in response to Iraqi anti-aircraft fire and radar targeting near Mosul, came as Washington and London struggled under criticism from the Arab world to develop a new policy toward Baghdad.
All of the US jets returned safely to their base in Turkey after the raids, the US European Command said. British military sources in London said British aircraft were not involved in yesterday's strikes.
US and British jets, which have repeatedly attacked sites in no-fly zones of northern and southern Iraq over the past decade, last Friday targeted some 25 - including nearly 20 radars - outside of the southern zone near Baghdad to stop efforts to improve Iraqi defenses.