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Kuwait May Take U.S. Troops After Turk Refusal
Kuwait said on Monday it would consider accepting U.S. troops which Washington intended to deploy in Turkey after the Turkish parliament refused to allow them into the country, the Kuwaiti defense minister said. "If they (United States) present a formal request we are willing," Defense Minister Sheikh Jaber al-Hamad al-Sabah told reporters. "There has been no formal request. If they present a formal request it will be presented to the leadership and if they agree then there will be no problem."You don't suppose somebody mentioned that such a statement right now could help change Turkeys mind, do you? Kuwait currently hosts 100,000 U.S. troops and 20,000 U.S. soldiers, Sheikh Jaber said. They are training for a possible war against neighboring Iraq. In a setback to U.S. plans for a "northern front" against Iraq, Turkey's parliament on Saturday narrowly rejected a motion to allow as many as 62,000 U.S. troops to be deployed in Turkey. The United States is consulting with Turkey on future steps after the decision, a U.S. official said on Sunday. A top U.S. military official said a U.S. presence in Turkey would give the United States an advantage but added that a war would still be successful even without a northern front. "I don't think it's absolutely a showstopper in terms of whether you have a northern front or not," said General James L. Jones, the Supreme Allied Commander, Europe, and the Commander of the United States European Command. "We're going to be successful regardless of what we're limited to," he told a news conference at EUCOM headquarters in the southwestern German town of Stuttgart. "But to have a presence in the northern part of Iraq -- we would definitely have an advantage, and they would have to pay more attention to the North." Yup. Posted by: Steve 2003-03-03 |
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