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| Iraq |
| Kuwait May Take U.S. Troops After Turk Refusal |
| 2003-03-03 |
| 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 |
| #3 Well, if things all work out, we just might TELL the world afterwards that it was all a big show. I mean, we couldn't say it too loudly, or no one would believe us, but we would leak a whole bunch of "hints." |
| Posted by: Michael Levy 2003-03-03 23:33:05 |
| #2 I doubt it, joe. I profoundly wish it were true, but I doubt it. |
| Posted by: Ptah 2003-03-03 21:24:37 |
| #1 It's good of Kuwait to make the offer, but I have to think that it's at least partially a political maneuver designed to (as noted in the comments) help Turkey change its mind, for the simple reason that Kuwait is already stuffed to the maximum with U.S. and British troops, not to mention Kuwait's own army and the Peninsula shield contingents. I have to confess that I'm kind of bewildered as to just what the current status of the Turkish matter is. The Istanbul stock market tanked today, but the government in Ankara keeps saying it has no plans to resubmit the agreement for a new vote, and the Turkish army has been silent so far - at least in public. In the meantime, I have no idea whether the ships that have been hovering offshore are still there or are moving toward Suez, and I don't have the foggiest as to what's going on with the materiel and personnel that have already been offloaded. Then again, perhaps the whole thing is a gigantic, deliberate disinformation operation that would make the greatest Russian masters of maskirovka turn green with envy. |
| Posted by: Joe 2003-03-03 17:25:12 |