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U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has been visting Iraq this Wednesday. Following a stop in the southern city of Basra, Rumsfeld moved onto the capital, Baghdad. He met with the U.S. appointed administrator for Iraq, Jay Garner. Later, he spoke to U.S. soldiers at Baghdad's airport. Asked about rumoured plans that Washington was planning to pull troops out of Germany, Rumsfeld said the rumours were true, but that the details had not yet been worked out. Those comments came one day after Rumsfeld announced that U.S. troops were pulling out of Saudi Arabia.

Pentagon Expects Long-Term Access to Four Key Bases in Iraq Sat Apr 19, 2:55 PM ET By THOM SHANKER and ERIC SCHMITT The New York Times WASHINGTON, April 19 The United States is planning a long-term military relationship with the emerging government of Iraq (news - web sites), one that would grant the Pentagon (news - web sites) access to military bases and project American influence into the heart of the unsettled region, senior Bush administration officials say. American military officials, in interviews this week, spoke of maintaining perhaps four bases in Iraq that could be used in the future:...

THE US plans to maintain up to four military bases in post-war Iraq, according to American newspaper reports. The bases in question have so far been used to maintain order and import aid. But the reports say the Pentagon wants to retain access to them. One base is at the Baghdad airport, another is near Nasiriya, a third is in the western desert alongside an oil pipeline, and the last is at Bashur airfield in the Kurdish north. A continuing US military presence runs counter to promises of a swift withdrawal following the war, and could inflame anti-American sentiments in...

Major installations in Rhineland-Palatinate and Bavaria in particular are hugely important to local workers, businesses KAISERSLAUTERN. World affairs take on a distinctly local perspective from “K-Town,“ as this southwestern German city has been known by at least two generations of U.S. soldiers and their families. Polls might show that about 80 percent of Germans support Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's opposition to a war against Iraq, but last month Kaiserslautern businessmen chipped in to present Brigadier General Erwin F. Lessel III of the U.S. Air Force with a poster bearing the message, “Stop anti-American policies!“ With 40,000 soldiers and their dependents living...

Thank you for your e-mail Mel. We Saudi Arabians, as well as almost all countries of the world, do not feel this is an appropriate time to attack Iraq. There are several reasons we feel this way. Saudi Arabia did participate in the Gulf War in 1991, along with the US and 31 other countries which made up the allied coalition, but the Iraq of today is not the same as the Iraq of 1991. Iraq today is not illegally occupying any other country's territory, as it did in 1991. Iraq today has not launched attacks on any other countries...

Access Denied No Longer By Melana Zyla Vickers 04/11/2002 Upon learning from newspaper reports in recent days that the Pentagon is planning to reduce considerably its dependence on basing in Saudi Arabia, many Americans doubtless bristled — after all, such a pullback is exactly what terrorist Osama bin Laden has demanded. Probe the basing issue a little more deeply, though, and one discovers that the bin Laden link is a peripheral, almost coincidental aspect of a problem that reaches far beyond Saudi or indeed the Persian Gulf. Worldwide, the U.S. has been pulling back from bases for years. By the...