Veterans for Common Sense

The final vote tally of 296-133 saw 81 Democrats voting with Republicans to give the president the maneuvering room he said he needs to effectively confront Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

“It is only when the Iraqi dictator is certain of our willingness to wage war if necessary that peace becomes possible,” Rep. Tom Lantos, D-Calif., said prior to the vote.

A similar vote was expected in the Senate within days.

“The House debate was conducted in the best traditions of the United States Congress. It was spirited, civil and it was informed. This is a debate and a decision that all Americans can be proud of,” Bush said shortly after the House vote. “The United States is committed to helping make the world more peaceful and just. We are committed to freedom for all.”

Earlier Thursday, just moments before a Senate test vote, Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle threw his support behind the identical resolution.

“I believe it is important for America to speak with one voice,” Daschle declared.

Daschle was the last of the four congressional leaders to sign on to the resolution, which is expected to pass with wide margins in the Senate as well.

The 75-25 Senate vote to end debate on the measure means that the Senate is choking off opposition and closing in on approval of the resolution.

After that vote, the White House expressed its appreciation for Daschle’s support and the message it conveys abroad.

“The president hopes this will send a strong message to the world, and to Iraq, that if Iraq does not obey the U.N. resolutions, that the United States is prepared to enforce the peace,” White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer said.

House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., joined House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., and Sen. Minority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., last week in agreeing to a resolution that calls for the president to seek support from the United Nations.

The resolution also allows Bush to take unilateral action to prevent Saddam Hussein from continuing to build weapons of mass destruction.

Daschle said he agreed to vote for the resolution because of changes in the president’s approach to getting support from allies and the Congress.

He commended the president for “recognizing that under our Constitution, it is the Congress that authorizes the use of force, and for requesting a resolution providing such authority.”

Daschle said that four elements of the resolution won him over: It focuses on a threat specifically posed by Iraq; it seeks continued cooperation with the U.N. Security Council to secure Iraqi compliance; it forces the president to notify Congress that other means have failed within 48 hours of taking military action; and it orders the president to report to Congress every 60 days on the progress of disarmament.

“For me, the deciding factor is my belief that a united Congress will help the president unite the world. And by uniting the world, we can increase the world’s chances of succeeding in this effort,” Daschle said.

Daschle was one of the few Democratic holdouts left in the Senate. Majority Whip Harry Reid of Nevada, Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joe Biden of Delaware, John Kerry of Massachusetts and Christopher Dodd of Connecticut all recently gave their stamps of approval.

Biden warned, however, that “if Saddam Hussein is around five years from now, we are in deep trouble as a country.”

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin, D-Mich., offered an alternative that would require the president to act in conjunction with the United Nations but to seek support for unilateral action. That substitute measure failed 24-75.

On Wednesday, an amendment by Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., to expand Bush’s authority for pre-emptive military action to include designated five terror organizations went down 88-10. Two other resolutions offered by Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., also failed on Thursday.

Byrd, however, continues to hold out against giving the president any authority.

On Thursday, the 84-year-old president pro tempore of the Senate said Congress would be acting recklessly if it agreed to give the president a “blank check” to take action.

“I’m sorry to see this day,” Byrd said. “This is my 50th year in Congress and I never thought that I’d find a Senate which would lack the backbone to stand up against this stampede, this rush to war.”

In the House, debate went deep into the night both Tuesday and Wednesday, with nearly every member expressing his opinions about the gravity of their action.

“I know the heartache and pain of the families that are left behind,” said a tearful Rep. Randy Cunningham, R-Calif., who was a pilot in the Vietnam War.

“It’s time we go straight to the eye and dismantle the elements from which the storm of brutal, repressive tyranny and terrorism radiate,” said Rep. Porter Goss, R-Fla., chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. “I can attest to the evilness of Saddam Hussein.”

More than three-quarters of House Democrats voted for an alternative proposal similar to Sen. Levin’s, sponsored by Rep. John Spratt, D-S.C., that the president seek congressional approval for action against Iraq if cooperation with the United Nations did not yield adequate support. It failed by a 270-155 vote.

Spratt said that without a multilateral approach, “this will be the United States versus Iraq, and in some quarters the U.S. versus the Arab and the Muslim world.”

On the diplomatic front, the president still had not convinced French President Jacques Chirac of the need for a U.N. Security Council resolution that allows for force if Saddam does not comply with disarmament and verification measures by U.N. weapons inspections.

Bush and Chirac spoke for 25 minutes by telephone Wednesday, and White House spokesman Sean McCormack said that the administration is “continuing our consultations.”

In Moscow, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Yuri Fedotov relayed a stance similar to Chirac’s, even though Secretary of State Colin Powell, interviewed on television Wednesday night, said world leaders were coming together on Iraq.

With the resolutions nearly finished, congressional Democrats can now turn to issues that they want to discuss before the Nov. 5 midterm elections. The hold-up was also threatening Daschle’s status as majority leader.

Nonetheless, the more than 120 House Democrats who voted against the measure apparently feel no threat to their status.

The House was turning its attention on passing a continuing resolution to keep the government operating until Nov. 22. This would allow lawmakers to campaign and then return to finish up the 2003 fiscal year budget.

Fox News’ Tony Snow and the Associated Press contributed to this report.

Many soldiers are sounding off about the poor quality of their bio/chem protection and detection gear and the bio/chem training they’ve received.

They rightly figure that Saddam Hussein will do his worst in a desperate last-ditch stand, and they’ll end up as the meat in the hazmat sandwich.

“I’m the nuclear, biological and chemical [NBC] officer for my unit,” says a leader in a unit bound for Kuwait. “Across the board, my soldiers don’t feel confident with their protective gear or level of training. We know how to use the decontamination kits and other gear, but no one really knows if anything works.”

“I worry about the NBC system on our [Abrams] tanks – there’ve been several fires recently caused by the system,” says a company commander.

“Another worry is all my tanks leak like sieves. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that chemical agents can kill the crew if water can get in our tanks at the wash rack.”

“In two years, my battalion hasn’t done a week of dedicated NBC training,” says a commander. “Our NBC decontamination apparatus hasn’t worked for over a year. The new protective suits haven’t been issued. They tell me we’ll get them just before we deploy – a little late to learn how to use ’em when we’re moving out to fight.”

“The problem I’ve seen is that the hot, bulky suits, gloves and other protective gear gets torn up during our gun-crew drills,” says an artillery CO. “Not good when you have to put steel on target and the Joes are jerking around on the ground. My main bitch is my troops will deploy with basically the same equipment we used 12 years ago during Desert Storm.

Another problem is our CO is totally gun-shy about letting our troops train with our protective gear because it’s time-consuming and restricts their ability to do their job. Like they’ll do it better dead.”

Many Army leaders report that their units are totally unprepared for an extended period of bio/chem warfare and that after the first major battle their supplies will be exhausted. “Not really sure if there’s enough atropine for each soldier in case of a bio/chem attack,” says an NBC sergeant in Kuwait.

“In my company, we have enough for about half the men. If there’s more in Kuwait, we NBC people don’t know about it.”

“The current [protective] mask leaks under the chin,” an Army doctor says. “This same mask was used during Desert Storm, which accounts for part of the health problems of the vets who fought there. My unit has again deployed to the Gulf with this loser.”

“The bio and chemical defense program is [deleted]terrible,” snorts a senior sergeant in Kuwait. “My NBC sergeant said, ‘If the [you know what] hits the fan … I’ll kill myself right away because I am not going to twitch like the rest of you.’ I told him to shut up and stop scaring our people. He shut up … but the scary thing is he’s right.”

The complaints of the folks in the field have been backed up by a recent General Accounting Office report documenting that the Pentagon has provided them with neither sufficient protective equipment nor adequate training to work on an NBC-contaminated battlefield.

The report further states the Pentagon recalled 800,000 suits two years ago after finding defects such as “holes, improper stitching and embedded foreign objects in the fabric” and that 250,000 of these defective suits can’t be located. Many grunts worry that the bad suits are mixed with the to-be-issued stock.

Our military has to fix these life-or-death problems before President Bush hits the “go” button.

More than 160,000 Desert Storm vets are disabled or dead due in part to captured Iraqi bio/chem weapons that Army engineers stupidly exploded in their unprotected faces. What’s the big rush, anyway?

Shouldn’t you make sure we’ve taken care of our soldiers, our nation’s most priceless asset, before we hurry off to another war? Shouldn’t looking after the troops be the top priority of our congressional leadership?

Byrd, who has been criticizing the Iraq war resolution daily since the Senate began its debate on the measure last Thursday, told colleagues at a party luncheon that he planned to make full use of Senate rules to try to derail the legislation, participants said.

Byrd, a former majority leader, is widely regarded for his knowledge and skilled use of Senate rules.

In a surprisingly rosy cost estimate of something which can’t be accurately estimated, the Congressional Budget Office Monday released an analysis of what Gulf War II might cost in real dollars paid by U.S. taxpayers.  Only they left out the most important part: the casualties.

• Actually, as a former tank crewman who has seen combat first-hand, if the situation wasn’t so serious, the CBO estimate would be seen by reasonable people as a cruel hoax on the American public and Congress.

  The CBO estimate is naïve and unrealistic when you consider the kind of war we are preparing to enter – an open-ended war of regime-change and occupation and empire building that may involve heavy casualties in an urban setting such as Baghdad.

  The CBO report is illuminating and instructive for what it avoids.

  CBO uses the word “assume” 30 times, “uncertain” 8 times, “unknown” 4 times. Finally, twice it says there is “no basis” for an estimate on key items. In other words, it’s a wild guess: kind of like taking your broker’s advice to buy Enron or WorldCom last summer.

  CBO states up front: “CBO has no basis for estimating the number of casualties from the conflict,” therefore, any discussion of casualties was simply excluded.

  The result is actually useless, despite the heavy coverage of the CBO report on “all-war all-the-time” Fox News.

  What the report tells us is that if the U.S. uses an arbitrary size force a fraction the size of that deployed for Gulf War I, then Gulf War II might cost somewhere between $9 and $13 billion to simply transport our troops and equipment to the region.

  Then tack on another $6 to $9 billion every month to conduct the war well into the future, and watch the money pour down the sewers, filling the cups of the waiting defense contactors like Halliburton, which already made a bonanza off Afghanistan.

  Remember, CBO neglected to estimate the financial cost of casualties. Chaos, battles, combat and death are the fundamental ingredients of war.

  According to VFW Magazine (January 2001), most of the 1991 Gulf War Killed-in-Action occurred in just a few incidents. 

• 28 U.S. soldiers were killed when their barracks was
  destroyed by an Iraqi missile on February 25, 1991. 
• 26 U.S. soldiers were killed during the Battle for
  Khafji when Iraq mounted a short-lived offensive against Saudi Arabia. 
• 10 U.S. soldiers killed when a 1st
  infantry Division Black Hawk helicopter was shot down over Iraq on February 27
• 5 U.S. soldiers killed from the 101st Infantry Division in a similar incident the same day.
• Seven soldiers from the 27th Engineer Battalion were killed at As Salman on February 26. 

And the list goes on.

These casualties were taken under near ideal circumstances: open terrain, fighting against a demoralized enemy, tactical surprise on most of the battlefield, and no urban fighting, with the exception of Khafji, where we took heavy losses.

More recent experience shows similar results:

·       241 U.S. Marines killed in their barracks Beirut, Lebanon in 1983.

·       18 U.S. soldiers killed in Mogadishu, Somalia in 1993.

·       17 U.S. soldiers killed aboard the U.S.S. Cole in
Aden, Yemen in 2000.

·       6 U.S. soldiers killed in heavy fighting on March
6, 2002 in Afghanistan, where Osama bin Laden escaped (remember him?).

A war in Iraq, fought in urban environments to throw out an entrenched government against soldiers defending their home towns, will certainly result in similar casualties, and quite likely much higher.

Throw in a battlefield already contaminated with 300 tons of cancer-causing depleted uranium radioactive dust from Gulf War I, and the potential for high casualties and financial disaster is clear.

Here are some numbers we need to add to the report. To date, more than 400 U.S. soldiers died in Southwest Asia since 1990. If the U.S. loses an additional 500 service members, not an unlikely number, most will be entitled to $200,000 life insurance, totaling $100 million. That’s if casualties are very low.

That’s not all, of course. The financial toll from the 1991 Gulf War continues. Disability compensation payments to Gulf War veterans – excluding any Gulf War veterans who also served in Vietnam – amounted to $1.8 billion last year, according to a recent report on the Department of Veterans Affairs web site.

U.S. taxpayers are still paying $3 billion a year to World War Two veterans. If we take the Gulf War as a basis, and assume $1.8 billion per year for disability to Gulf War II veterans for the next fifty years, add $90 billion to the overall tab for Gulf War II.

Current U.S. taxpayers will be paying for Gulf War II for the rest of their lives.

Of course, what everyone avoids discussing is the pain and suffering faced by the warriors who will die on the battlefield, those injured, and their families.

There is also the emotional toll on veterans (and their families) who return home, their lives shattered by incredible violence. According to a study of Vietnam veterans published in the Federal Practitioner (March 1995), over twenty thousand Vietnam veterans have committed suicide. Some estimates place the numbers much higher.

Then there is the enormous price of the lives of the people the U.S. intends to “liberate” from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein by killing them.

So let’s be candid and serious: there will be enormous financial and social costs of another Gulf war.

The tragedy is these costs pale in comparison to the trillions of dollars in profits oil companies stand to gain when a “pro-Western dictator” is installed, as Congressman Tom Lantos has suggested, and all of Iraq’s oil reserves are opened up to campaign donors.

But that’s another story.

Isn’t war is easy when it’s someone else’s kid doing the fighting and dying for someone else’s pocketbook?

Charles Sheehan-Miles, a decorated Gulf War combat
veteran, is the author of “Prayer at Rumayla” (XLibris, 2001) and is a former
President of the National Gulf War Resource Center. He can be contacted at

http://www.sheehanmiles.com. He is working with a group of Gulf War veterans
to bring full debate to the issue of Iraq – more information is available at

http://www.veteransforcommonsense.org

The feverish war talk pouring forth from Washington and the cable networks this past year was inevitable, given 9/11. But lately, the relentless barrage of military enthusiasm has caused me to wonder: How did war itself — that is, killing, maiming, bombing and burning — come to be such a popular program in American political and media circles?

Logically, human beings ought to be terrified of war; after all, you or someone you know might die in one, or suffer a hideous wound, either as a combatant or an innocent bystander. Yet some in the Bush administration — not just the cynical political operatives who would count votes before they would count corpses — seem positively thrilled by the notion of smashing Iraq, and a lot of Iraqis, to pieces.

There being little opposition among elected politicians here at home to leveling Afghan villages and destroying Iraqi sewage plants, I had to look elsewhere for an explanation — to an interview I conducted last April with a German of Second World War vintage, Helmut Schmidt, who was West Germany’s Social Democratic chancellor from 1974 to 1982.

A venerable 83 years old when I met him in a midtown Manhattan hotel room, Mr. Schmidt seemed not to care much what American politicians thought of him any more, or European politicians for that matter, so I figured I’d come to the right place. His generation of Cold War leaders has passed from the public stage and he now spends his days as the elder statesman publisher of Die Zeit, the great Hamburg-based intellectual weekly.

The problem with all the self-righteous, post 9/11 saber rattling, Mr. Schmidt told me, was that the politicians doing the rattling literally don’t know what they’re talking about. “In none of the European capitals do you still have individuals who have lived through war as grown-up people, be it as soldiers, be it in concentration camps as prisoners, be it in the basements of cities where the bombs and the fire were falling from the sky,” he said. “They don’t know what war is. They haven’t experienced it. . . . Mr. Clinton hasn’t, Mr. Bush hasn’t. They don’t know what war means to people. And they are, therefore, more easily inclined to intervene by force, even under humanitarian auspices . . . without conceiving the loss of lives that any military intervention brings with it.”

In short, outside of some octogenarian Chinese Communists, world leaders are not sufficiently “afraid of war.”

Mr. Schmidt is most decidedly conscious of war’s destructive power, both as perpetrator and victim. He says that despite being told by his mother that he had a Jewish grandfather on his father’s side (this was hidden from the Nazi authorities for obvious reasons), he fought loyally — as a German, he insists, not a Nazi — for Hitler’s Wehrmacht. He served on the Eastern Front as a lieutenant in the anti-aircraft unit of a tank division and participated in the brutal siege of Leningrad and later the assault on Moscow. In his memoir, Men and Powers, he writes of his “profound horror at the dreadful screams of another soldier dying of a serious abdominal wound.”

While I’m not convinced of Mr. Schmidt’s “German” explanation for supporting Hitler’s enterprise (he did join Hitler Youth), his critique of warlike foreign policy goes well beyond a visceral rejection of violence. He objects in principle to what has recently been labeled the new American doctrine of pre-emptive war.

And his rationale for opposing the NATO attack on Serbia could just as well apply to George W. Bush’s push for war against Iraq. “To oppose it, you need not be a liberal; you only have to read the United Nations Charter to know that to use force against a state can only be legitimated under two premises: number one, if you had to defend your own country, which was not the case, or by a decision of the Security Council of the United Nations . . . And neither the Americans, nor NATO in the case of Serbia, have obeyed the Charter.”

For the Bushies, the UN is nothing more than a Third World debating society. So it almost seems quaint to hear Mr. Schmidt’s attachment to international law and to the old, pre-1991 idea of maintaining a balance of power. Mr. Schmidt refers with some irony to the “so-called Cold War” (he no doubt recalls the Korean War, as well as the U.S. invasion of Vietnam and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan) but he categorically states that “during the Cold War, America would not have thrown bombs on Serbia.”

The man is no knee-jerk America-basher; he broke with his own party in 1983 by supporting deployment in West Germany of U.S. Pershing cruise missiles aimed at Moscow. But he is pointedly critical of the U.S. response to al-Qaeda’s kamikaze attack on the World Trade Center.

“America doesn’t understand any of Islam,” he said. As a European, Mr. Schmidt fears that turning “the fight against a relatively small faction of so-called Islamist terrorists” (he prefers the word “criminals”) into a confrontation with more than a billion Muslim believers “is a very dangerous trip.”

Europeans have a slightly better understanding of Islam — they know the difference between a Shiite and a Sunni, for example — because of the Muslim world’s proximity to Europe and the potential danger it poses. “They [Muslims] are not going to sail over the ocean, but it’s very easy to cross the Mediterranean. And if you’re coming by land, you need not cross any sea at all.”

U.S. ignorance and inconsistency in world affairs can be attributed to the indisputable fact that, unlike the era of Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, “the general understanding of history in your country is rather on a low level, which does include the bulk of American politicians.” Mr. Schmidt blames “a mass society . . . educated by the television and Internet, no longer reading books.”

I asked Mr. Schmidt what he thought of the widespread American belief that the United States “defeated” the repressive Soviet system, rather than the Soviet Union collapsing from within. “That’s not really so important,” he replied curtly. “If you talk about history, then what comes to my mind is . . . 600 years of Ottoman [read Islamic] acquisition” in the Middle East and Europe, not to mention “twice trying to conquer Vienna and Austria.”

As for Soviet tyranny, Mr. Schmidt said it’s useful to recall that “Russia has never been a country in which human rights or democracy ever have played a great role, except in some leftist intellectuals’ minds.”

Returning to the topic of blood and iron, I tried unsuccessfully to get him to elaborate on his wartime experience on the Eastern Front. Not surprisingly, the German army veteran preferred to highlight an instance of German victimization — when he was on leave in Hamburg, by happenstance during the Allied firebombing in 1943.

This led directly back to the subject of Sept. 11. Two weeks before our interview, Mr. Schmidt said he was chatting with a U.S. maritime lawyer about the effects of 9/11 on the American psyche. “I asked him, ‘How long will it take until the American nation and the inhabitants of New York get over this overwhelming impact of Sept. 11?’ And his immediate answer was, ‘Never, never, never.’ And I said, ‘I really wonder. You had 3,000 people killed. I remember these three days in my own city of Hamburg, where 35,000 people were killed. It’s hardly being mentioned nowadays.'”

John R. MacArthur is publisher of Harper’s Magazine.

“What have they done to hurt us? Nothing. No attacks on a person or property. No evidence that Iraq is involved in the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Is it against the law to build weapons of mass destruction?… There are nine members of the nuclear club and we don’t go to war with them,” says the former senator in a wide-ranging interview in his home in Mitchell, S.D.

A prairie preacher’s son, Mr. McGovern was the most eloquent spokesman of his generation against the war in Vietnam. He was also a World War II hero, flying 35 combat missions as a B-24 bomber pilot, including once landing a disabled plane on one wheel – for which he won the Distinguished Flying Cross. In a September 1970 speech to overflowing galleries, he railed against the Congress for allowing the “cruelest, the most barbaric, and the most stupid war in our national history” to continue.

“And every senator in this chamber is partly responsible for sending 50,000 young Americans to an early grave,” he said. The Sept. 1 vote to end the war failed, but some scholars call it the beginning of the end of that war.

Today, he wonders why the antiwar movement in Congress appears so feeble.

IT’S a question not so much of parallel situations – thousands of Americans had died in Vietnam by 1970 – as of national memory. When Congress debated launching the Gulf War in 1991, the perils of that war were relatively fresh in memory, and many lawmakers opposed war. Today, America’s quick successes from Operation Desert Storm through the recent campaign in Afghanistan have eclipsed some of Vietnam’s trauma.

Still, a small but growing number of current lawmakers, many of whom came into politics in the McGovern era, are differing with President Bush.

As Congress moves toward agreement on a resolution to use force in Iraq, dissenters are struggling to rally some form of opposition. In the House, some 40 members of the Iraq Working Group are trying to avert military action altogether. Meanwhile, 73 have signed a petition asking for the vote to be delayed until after the election.

But they acknowledge that the agreement reached yesterday between Mr. Bush and House leaders makes even the goal of winning more time for debate unlikely. They hope that a credible opposition could at least pressure the White House into more aggressive diplomatic efforts to build an international consensus on how to proceed. “The biggest mistake we could make is trying to do this alone,” says Rep. Jim McDermott (D) of Washington, who just returned from a “humanitarian mission” to Iraq with Reps. David Bonior (D) of Michigan and Mike Thompson (D) of California. The three Democrats said that the purpose of their trip was to convince Saddam Hussein to comply with UN inspectors.

They returned to harsh criticism from GOP leaders, as well as many political commentators who dubbed the three Democrats everything from “useful idiots for Saddam” to traitors.

“At a time when America is fighting a war on terror, talk like this only helps enemies of freedom…. It’s one thing to have a civil discourse on the merits of a preemptive strike or war. It’s another to fly to Iraq and take the word of a tyrant over the American president and the American people,” says Republican Conference Chairman J.C. Watts (R) of Oklahoma.

But Congressman McDermott – who recently won his primary race in his liberal district of Seattle with 77 percent of the vote – says the issue is worth the heat. As a former Navy psychiatrist who treated Vietnam veterans, he says that “dealing with the casualties of Vietnam” compels him to look at any future commitment of troops with great care.

His Democratic colleagues also saw service during the Vietnam era. Mr. Bonior served in the Air Force stateside, while Mike Thompson served in the Army in Vietnam and earned a purple heart. While McDermott and Thompson’s district are solidly Democratic, Mr. Bonior’s stance on the war put him at risk in a suburban Detroit district that often votes Republican. He recently lost a primary bid for governor.

In fact, a war record is emerging as one of the key credentials in the emerging congressional debate. Nebraska Sen. Chuck Hagel’s Vietnam record has also amplified his voice as a GOP moderate urging a multilateral approach on Iraq.

“America alone cannot defeat this scourge of mankind. We will require partners,” he said in a speech Monday. It’s a view George McGovern could support.

KUWAIT

About 9,000 U.S. military permanently stationed in the country liberated from Iraqi invasion in 1991. Two Army and one Air Force base built or upgraded by the United States. At least two Patriot anti-missile batteries.

An armored brigade of the Army’s 3rd Infantry from Fort Stewart, Ga., is arriving for exercises in Kuwait, replacing a similar brigade from Fort Benning, Ga. Each brigade has about 3,000 combat troops.

The U.S. military has pre-positioned enough equipment for two heavy armored brigades in Kuwait, which include about 115 M-1A1 Abrams tanks, 60 M-2A2 Bradley fighting vehicles and other equipment, ammunition and fuel.

BAHRAIN

This island nation in the Persian Gulf is headquarters for the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet. About 4,200 military personnel are stationed there. Bahrain also has pre-positioned equipment stocks and an air base.

QATAR

About 3,300 U.S. soldiers are stationed here. The U.S. has recently upgraded the al-Udeid air base with the region’s longest runway and other high-tech features. About 600 top officials from the U.S. Central Command plan to come here in al-Udeid in November, and the Pentagon says the base probably will become a forward command center.

The U.S. also has pre-positioned equipment for at least one heavy armored brigade here.

SAUDI ARABIA

About 6,000 U.S. troops are stationed here. While Saudi Arabia has expressed opposition to a U.S. invasion of Iraq, that opposition has softened in recent weeks.

Besides pre-positioned equipment, Saudi Arabia is home to a command center at the Prince Sultan Air Base near Riyadh, where U.S. commanders ran the Persian Gulf War.

OMAN

About 2,400 U.S. troops are here, mostly Air Force personnel at bases in this Gulf nation.

UNITED ARAB EMIRATES

About 500 U.S. forces, mostly Air Force personnel.

TURKEY

About 1,700 U.S. military forces are stationed in Turkey, mostly at the air base in Incirlik, where planes patrolling Iraq’s northern no-fly zone are based.

DJIBOUTI

This small nation on Africa’s Red Sea coast has been home to about 800 U.S. special operations troops since April.

AT SEA

The USS Abraham Lincoln and its battle group are in the northern Arabian Sea and are expected to patrol in the Persian Gulf. The Lincoln is carrying the first overseas deployment of the new F/A-18 Super Hornet, which has longer range and better weapons than older F/A-18 warplanes.

The USS George Washington, which will remain in striking range of Iraq as it returns to its base in Virginia, also is available. Its replacement, the USS Harry Truman, is due in the area in late November.

Taha Yassin Ramadan said the duel could be held at a neutral site and with UN secretary general Kofi Annan as the referee.

Ramadan made his remarks without giving any outward sign he was joking, although reporters detected a note of irony in his voice.

“A president against a president and vice-president against a vice-president and a duel takes place, if they are serious, and in this way we are saving the American and the Iraqi people,” Ramadan told The Associated Press Television Network.

Iraq has two vice-presidents, and Ramadan did not say whether he or Taha Muhie-eldin Marouf should take on Dick Cheney.

White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said the Iraqi offer didn’t warrant a “serious response.”

“I just want to point out that, in the past when Iraq had disputes, it invaded its neighbours. There were no duels, there were invasions. There was use of weapons of mass destruction and the military; that’s how Iraq settles its disputes,” Fleischer said.

But, earlier this week Fleischer said “the cost of one bullet” intended for Saddam would be a less expensive alternative than attacking Baghdad.

He suggested it would be “a one-way ticket” for Saddam.

Asked if he’s advocating Saddam’s assassination, Fleischer replied: “Never underestimate the yearning of a people to stop being tortured.”

Only a fraction of training time is spent teaching soldiers and commanders how to operate in the restricted, confusing and inevitably lethal environment of house-to-house combat and it could be 10 years before units are “up to speed” on urban battle techniques.

The US Department of Defence has now launched a study into urban warfare tactics which could involve troops using miniature robot spy planes and tracked robot scouts to probe enemy-held areas.

General William Kernan, head of the US joint forces command, said yesterday: “Fighting in a city is probably the most complex environment for military operations. It has been compared to a knife-fight in a telephone booth. Casualties in the average rifle company can run as high as 30{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d}.

“It is vastly complicated by the presence of civilians and the need to minimise casualties among them and it is a potential nightmare when trying to avoid friendly fire incidents. Hi-tech superiority counts for little when every house is a potential strongpoint.

“The chaos experienced by US Rangers and Delta Force troopers in the warren of alleys in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1993 is typical. It is easy to become lost, sniper fire can come from any window or doorway, and exercising control is next to impossible.”

The US lost 18 men killed in a running street battle against Somali militiamen and several helicopters were shot down or damaged as they tried to extract trapped and wounded soldiers.

On using robots, Captain Tom Johnston, who heads a team studying the problems, said: “We have the capacity to ‘own the city’ in much the same way as we already own the night and own the skies through the application of cutting-edge technology.” But he admitted it “could be a decade before all the pieces come together”.

The Israeli army already uses robot drones to spot sniper positions and to pick out key buildings to be occupied.

The US army says it would take four to five weeks to teach the average infantry battalion to cope with street fighting, and refresher training would then have to be carried out every 30 days.

Pentagon investigators have also admitted that many soldiers who might have to spearhead an assault into Iraq have insufficient training to cope with an environment contaminated by nerve gas or germ agents.

Although the US Marine Corps spends time teaching its riflemen to use protective suits and fight in a lethally-polluted atmosphere, the army has dedicated less prominence to this form of combat since the end of the Cold War.

Analysts think Saddam Hussein would turn several major cities into fortresses and use chemical and biological weapons to inflict maximum casualties on a US-led invasion force.

All British service personnel are given regular training in the use of protective “Noddy suits” and decontamination procedures in the event of exposure to nerve and germ agents.

Dr Hans Blix said there had been an “erosion” of the inspection regime and pressure needed to be put on Iraq to comply with the UN-mandated checks.

He was speaking after a meeting with US Secretary of State Colin Powell and Mohammed El-Baradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency which would be responsible for checking any nuclear programme in Iraq.

Mr Powell said the US favoured a single, strong new UN resolution demanding action from Iraq but acknowledged there were other views in the Security Council, which have been hardening against the US.

The Americans have circulated a controversial draft resolution which carries a clear threat of military intervention if Baghdad fails to comply with the mission of the weapons inspectors.

Dr Blix had wanted to return to Baghdad by the middle of this month, but acknowledged it would be awkward if his team received new instructions from the Security Council once they were in Iraq.

Instead, he said, it would be helpful to have new, more stringent rules for the Iraqis to follow before they left.

“The Security Council resolution that is now being discussed is one that I think we would welcome,” he said.

“It’s clear that there has to be constant pressure to get the Iraqis to comply,” he added.

US ‘optimistic’

Mr Powell said he was optimistic that an agreement would be reached soon among the 15 members of the UN Security Council.

“There has been, as Dr Blix said, an erosion of the inspection regime… and we have to fix that,” he said.

But opposition to the US line on Iraq has been hardening at the United Nations, with Russia and France rejecting the tough draft resolution on weapons inspections.

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin said on Friday that UN weapons inspectors had to go back to Iraq “as soon as possible”.

A spokesman for the French Foreign Ministry later said there was “no legal precondition for a new resolution” on weapons inspections in Iraq.

And Turkey, a key US military ally bordering Iraq, said any US attack on Iraq must have international backing.

A senior US official told the Reuters news agency that Washington was working with Britain and France to reach a compromise.

Britain, a permanent member of the UN Security Council, has already said it will support the US, but any resolution could be brought down by a veto from one of the other permanent members – France, Russia or China.

The French have been pushing a two-phase set of resolutions – the first outlining the inspectors’ mission and the second, only if needed, detailing action to be taken against Iraq.

No go

The US said again on Friday that Iraq had illegal programmes to develop weapons of mass destruction and was moving to conceal them from any future inspections.

The US and Britain do not want inspectors from the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (Unmovic) on the ground in Iraq until a new UN mandate has been agreed.

President Bush is to deliver a televised speech on Iraq on Monday.

Meanwhile, bombing in Iraq’s no-fly zones has continued, with a strike on an air defence command centre on Thursday in retaliation for an attempt by the Iraqi military to shoot down US and UK planes dropping leaflets warning Iraqi gunners not to fire on planes patrolling the zones.