Posted on 12/08/2002 4:50:11 PM PST by blam
US forces ready to strike Iraq 'in weeks'
By Toby Harnden and David Blair
(Filed: 09/12/2002)
American forces will be ready for war in the Gulf by next month, much earlier than many had predicted, Pentagon officials said yesterday.
The disclosure came as Iraq challenged Britain and the US to prove that Saddam Hussein's regime still possesses weapons of mass destruction.
Iraq's 43-volume declaration that it has no nuclear, chemical and biological weapons reached the United Nations headquarters in New York, but the White House maintained a stony silence over the denial.
Gen Amer al-Saadi, Iraq's presidential adviser on armaments affairs, sought the diplomatic advantage. Speaking in Baghdad, he repeated Iraq's mantra that it possessed no weapons of mass destruction.
US troops on exercise in the northern Kuwait desert
That declaration, he insisted, should be enough for America and Britain.
"We hope it will satisfy them because it is currently accurate, truthful and comprehensive. If they have anything against it, they can come up with it . . . Why don't they?"
Iraq handed the declaration to arms inspectors on Saturday, a day before a deadline set by a UN resolution requiring Baghdad to give a full account of any past and current nuclear, chemical or biological weapons programmes.
UN powers differed in their reactions. Russia said the fact that Baghdad met the deadline showed that Iraq was complying with the disarmament resolution, while Britain warned that Saddam's previous disclosures were "a pack of lies".
Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, told BBC Television: "None of them have been accurate or full disclosures. Normally, they have been a pack of lies.
"It remains to be seen whether this . . . disclosure is consistent with his past behaviour or that he at long last has got the message that the international community's patience is about to run out."
The declaration was flown to the UN Monitoring, Verification and Observation Commission in New York and the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna.
The UN is due to give copies to member countries this week and the US has made clear it will not make a final pronouncement on whether Iraq has committed a "material breach" of the UN resolution until after then.
But US officials have said that military preparation for Saddam's overthrow are continuing apace.
After conducting a comprehensive assessment of the build-up ordered by the Pentagon, the New York Times concluded that America would soon have enough ships, aircraft, tanks, troops and munitions in the Gulf region to launch an attack on Iraq in January.
Many experts had suggested that this would not be the case until February or March.
There are about 60,000 US soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen, as well as about 200 planes, in or near the gulf. The US army has 9,000 soldiers, 24 Apache helicopter gunships and enough heavy equipment in Kuwait for two armoured brigades.
By late next week, four aircraft carriers will be poised to strike Iraq at short notice, including the Harry S Truman, which sailed from Norfolk, Virginia last week. A fifth will be just days away.
Gen Tommy Franks, US commander in the region, and some 1,000 senior officers have gathered in Qatar and other gulf states for Exercise Internal Look, a dry run for an attack on Iraq.
US Special Operations forces in the Gulf are finalising plans to seek and destroy Scud missiles. Britain is expected to send several thousand troops to join the American-led offensive.
All in all, the force in place by next month would be big enough to begin an offensive while extra personnel and equipment was rapidly flown in to sustain an operation that could involve 250,000 troops.
Iraq claimed yesterday that all of its weapons of mass destruction programmes ceased before 1998, when the previous UN inspection teams left the country. Any activity since that date, Saddam's aides said, fell into the category of "dual use", not weapons development.
But the declaration, which runs to 12,169 pages and 12 CD roms, provides a "comprehensive" history of weapons programmes the very existence of which Iraq once denied.
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Iraq consistently claimed that it had no nuclear weapons programme and repeated declarations to this effect were made to the UN.
Gen al-Saadi chose to disown those previous denials yesterday. "We never denied having a nuclear weapons programme," he said.
There has been some tension within the Bush administration over how long the inspection process should be allowed to run.
But a striking aspect of the debate in Washington has been the lack of criticism of Mr Bush from the Right even though he agreed to an inspections process to which most hawks were opposed.
A former official who is close to the White House said this was because they were content that war would come before March and that as far as Mr Bush was concerned the inspections would simply provide a justification that would be accepted by the world.
"We can debate the tactics of inspections and the UN all day," said one hawk. "I look at it kind of simply - is Bush for war with Iraq or for containment? The answer is undoubtedly that he is for the war."
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