US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld today vowed military action of unprecedented scale against Iraq and urged Iraqi troops not to risk their lives for a doomed regime.
Missile attacks into northern Kuwait and reports that Iraqi forces set fire to as many as four oil wells indicated that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has started his own campaign hours after being targeted in Baghdad by US stealth fighters and cruise missiles.
Mr Rumsfeld confirmed that senior Iraqi leaders were the targets of the first raid of an all-out war to topple the Iraqi regime.
"What will follow will not be a repeat of any other conflict. It will be of a force and scope and scale that has been beyond what has been seen before," he said at a Pentagon news conference.
Mr Rumsfeld would not say whether Saddam was believed to be in the compound that was hit in the pre-dawn raid, but other US officials said intelligence pointed to the presence of several members of his inner circle, possibly including the president himself.
"We had, what I would characterize as very good intelligence that it was a senior Iraqi leadership compound," Mr Rumsfeld said, adding that he was still waiting for the battle damage assessment.
Iraqi television broadcast a tape of Saddam reading a speech vowing no surrender. US intelligence agencies were analyzing it to try to determine whether the man was a double or whether its made before the strike.
"There's debate about that," Mr Rumsfeld said. The small scale of the opening night air strikes came as a surprise after a weeks-long buildup in which US military officials had predicted a massive initial campaign to "shock and awe" the Iraqi military into submission.
Mr Rumsfeld and Gen Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, acknowledged that there was a last minute change of script today.
CIA Director George Tenet presented President George W. Bush with intelligence that a small group of senior leaders, possibly including Saddam, were meeting in a Baghdad compound and offered "targets of opportunity" if US forces responded quickly enough, officials said.
F-117 stealth fighters were called in on the target followed by a volley of 40 Tomahawk Land Attack cruise missiles fired from US submarines and surface warships in the Red Sea, the Mediterranean and the Gulf, military officials said.
Not to have seized the opportunity would have been a "terrible mistake," Mr Rumsfeld said.
Mr Rumsfeld made clear that the US military has not set aside plans for an overwhelming air and ground assault Iraq, but is hoping for mass defections from the Iraqi military.
"The more of them there are, the greater the chance that the war will be limited and less broad," he said.