Not from Rhode Island, they couldn't. Between Arab solidarity and GWB's brilliant transformation of 9/11 into a UN resolution compliance problem, we've got no forward basing except for Israel, maybe Qatar, maybe Kuwait, and Turkey, which is a mountain range (with not many good roads) away from Iraq.
Bahahahahaha!! Good one! Forward bases? Didn't I hear the doom & gloomers fretting about that in Afghanistan too? That was a prescient argument, wasn't it? So was the nilly willy worrying about the cave fighting. We've got the entire country of Iraq to choose as a forwarding base. We can either seize their air strips or build our own. And they don't have the capacity to stop us.