Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, July 24, 1990 TAG: 9007240470
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A/1 EDITION: EVENING
SOURCE: The Washington Post
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
U.S. military officials said the U.S. Middle East Force, the seven-ship Navy contingent that patrols the Persian Gulf, had been put on alert even though they expect the crisis to blow over. Shore leaves were canceled and ships were readied to get under way.
The United Arab Emirates, which like Kuwait is under verbal attack from Iraq for exceeding its oil production quota, has asked the United States for military assistance to improve its ability to fly combat air patrols over emirates territory and vulnerable offshore oil fields in the southern gulf.
The Iraqi buildup, only days before this week's meeting of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, was spotted during the weekend by a group of Western military attaches allowed to cross the Kuwait-Iraq frontier to travel to Baghdad.
They counted 2,000 to 3,000 Iraqi army vehicles moving south, transporting what the attaches estimated to be two divisions of Republican Guard Corps troops. Convoys included tanks, armored personnel carriers and ground-to-ground battlefield missiles.
Cash-strapped Iraq is angry because it contends Kuwait is exceeding the oil-production levels agreed to by OPEC members, driving down the price of the commodity.
Officials said the United States and Arab governments were treating the Iraqi military buildup as "brinksmanship" and "muscle flexing," because the logistical and supply lines needed to support combat operations were not visible. That attaches were allowed in the area where the convoys were moving was being interpreted as an Iraqi attempt to intimidate Kuwait.
Still, the positioning of military forces able to strike on relatively short notice inflamed the already dangerous standoff between Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and the ruling family of Kuwait, the small and oil-rich neighbor that supported Baghdad during its eight-year war with Iran.
The Iraqi force on the border is larger than Kuwait's entire military, which barely exceeds 20,000 troops.
The Kuwaitis have moved troops and Soviet-made missiles to the border area and Monday reactivated a full military alert that had been called off last Friday, Arab diplomats reported. Kuwaiti military units stepped up patrols on the two strategic islands of Bubiyan and Warba, which command the waterway access to Iraq's chief naval port at Umm Qasr.
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, Jordan's King Hussein and Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz huddled in the Egyptian port of Alexandria Monday to defuse the tension, which was triggered when Hussein publicly denounced OPEC quota cheating by gulf sheikdoms, whose full-production tactics were flooding the market and driving down the price of crude oil.
by CNB