Retreat Is Part of U.S. Strategy

With the threat of Saddam Hussein all but extinguished and Arab suspicions of American intentions running deep, senior administration officials say the U.S. military has begun taking steps to significantly reduce its presence in much of the Middle East.

Last week’s quiet removal of 30 of the 80 fighter jets and almost half the 4,500 personnel from Incirlik Air Base in Turkey, where the U.S. has maintained thousands of troops since the 1991 Persian Gulf War, is just the beginning, officials said.

Within months, the Pentagon plans to close down most of its operations at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia, leaving only a skeleton crew, and to move most of its aircraft and troops out of Qatar and Oman.

The plans, which are preliminary and subject to review, are a response to pressure from Arab governments incensed by the U.S. military buildup in the region over the last 12 years, the financial burden of maintaining vast numbers of troops overseas and the strain it has caused for families and military readiness.

“One of the unstated goals of the [Iraq] war was to be able to lance that boil and get out of this steady state of a very high-level commitment of forces in an area where that not only wears out the force, but causes all sorts of political problems,” said retired Army Gen. Joseph P. Hoar, who commanded U.S. forces in the Mideast from 1991 to 1994 and helped negotiate agreements to base U.S. troops throughout the region after the Gulf War.

“The [Iraq] war has always been envisioned as a way to get out of the need to have forces in place designed to protect against an immediate assault,” he said.

The plans are in line with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld’s goal of transforming the military into an agile, more easily deployed force.

By cutting back on costly overseas deployments in places such as Saudi Arabia, where the Pentagon has spent more than $1 billion a year for much of the last decade, Rumsfeld hopes to have more money for new technologies to modernize the armed forces.

In Europe, the Pentagon is reviewing its big military contingents in countries such as Germany and has discussed replacing them with smaller units in Romania, Poland and Bulgaria that could jump rapidly into hot spots.

The decision to shrink what the Pentagon calls its footprint in the Middle East does not, for now, affect the more than 160,000 U.S. troops in Iraq. Pentagon officials said recently that the military plans to maintain large numbers of troops in Iraq for at least a year and probably longer.

And Defense and State department officials have been relatively open about their hopes of using the U.S. presence in Iraq as a stabilizing force throughout the region.

Since the buildup preceding the Gulf War to drive Hussein’s forces from Kuwait, the U.S. military presence in the Persian Gulf region has been the subject of increasing tension. Anger at U.S. troops in the area -- particularly in Saudi Arabia, home of Islam’s two holiest sites -- helped fuel the terrorist activity that led to the Sept. 11 attacks. Osama bin Laden has repeatedly called for their removal from his homeland.

“There’s a certain focused hostility in Saudi Arabia to the presence of U.S. troops on Saudi soil, and, to the extent you can change that, you may be able to change some of the dynamic of tensions to U.S. presence around the Arab world,” said Jon Alterman, a former member of the policy planning staff at the State Department.

“It would not make them start singing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’ but it would remove or lessen a major irritant to U.S.-Saudi or, more broadly, U.S.-Arab relations.”

Prince Saud al Faisal, the Saudi foreign minister, suggested that a change of the troops’ status is only natural in the wake of the Iraq war.

“This is more of a military question, and should be directed to the Ministry of Defense. But what I know is that after the war in Iraq, a new reality has emerged, which is bound to reflect on this question,” he told The Times. “Prince Sultan base was basically used for monitoring the no-fly zone in southern Iraq. One would assume that this will change.”

Saad Fagih, a leader of the London-based Saudi opposition, which has been critical of U.S. troops in the kingdom, said he believes the U.S. waited until after the war to save face.

“They have said that they are aware that the presence of their forces is dangerous to them and gives Bin Laden and people like him an excuse to go on arguing against not only America, but also against the Saudi regime being a traitor to religion and the country.

“So they said, ‘If we remove our forces now, they will say Americans are cowards, they’re just responding to Bin Laden’s call. But if we remove the official cause of the forces, which is surveillance of the no-fly zones, then we have an excuse to say we are now reducing our forces. And if we succeed in our campaign in Iraq, nobody will say we are cowards. We do this decision with confidence, not with fear.’ ”

Even before the buildup for last month’s invasion of Iraq, the Pentagon had 20,000 to 25,000 troops and more than 200 aircraft deployed to the Arabian Peninsula, Turkey, Central Asia and surrounding waters. If the Pentagon follows through on its plans, that number could shrink by more than 12,000 people and more than 100 aircraft within the year, Defense officials said.

Weaponry and equipment stored for years in warehouses in Kuwait are likely to remain, officials said last week. A small number of U.S. troops will remain in Kuwait, which has been spending more than $200 million a year to maintain a U.S. military presence on its territory, and wants at least some U.S. troops to remain, officials said. But the Army battalion that has been deployed there since the early 1990s is likely to move out, Defense officials said.

A skeleton force of U.S. military aircraft and their crews will remain at air bases in Oman, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar. Other troops will rotate into the region regularly to conduct military exercises and maintain the United States’ ability to deploy to emerging trouble spots in the region.

But the multibillion-dollar operations in Turkey and Saudi Arabia and the vast buildup of ground troops in Kuwait will soon be history. So too will much of the U.S. military presence in Central Asia, where the Pentagon refurbished and flew out of former Soviet air bases to support the war in Afghanistan.

Left to take a primary role in future U.S. missions in the region will be the aircraft carriers and other surface ships that ply area waters and the 4,500 sailors of the Navy’s 5th Fleet in Bahrain.

The Pentagon has been publicly circumspect about its plans for the region. But the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, hinted Tuesday at the changes when he told a group of Arab reporters at the Foreign Press Club in Washington that the future of bases in the Persian Gulf “is being looked at.”

“Clearly, one of the reasons we had U.S. forces in the region prior to this was to enforce the [no-fly zones] in Iraq,” Myers said.

“And so those forces that were in Turkey for that purpose, they’ve already returned home. You know we had forces in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait as well. And clearly, they’re not going to be needed in the future for that. So that’s all going into the examination of this, and I think that sometime here in the fairly near future, we’ll be able to publicly talk about what kind of U.S. footprint would be in the region.”

The number of U.S. troops and ships operating in the Middle East went up and down periodically for decades -- up in 1980 after the fall of the shah of Iran, then down in the late 1980s with the end of the Cold War.

But not until Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990 did the permanent U.S. military presence in the region swell to tens of thousands of troops stocked with tons of weaponry and equipment at air bases, ports, warehouses and barracks in more than a dozen countries.

“Prior to the Gulf War, our presence in the region was really primarily just a naval presence,” said retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni, who was responsible for U.S. forces in the Horn of Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia from 1997 to 2000.

“After the Gulf War, we wanted to create a set of circumstances where we could limit Saddam’s movements in the country and not allow him to attack dissident elements,” Zinni said. “Today, with the fall of Hussein, there’s going to be a new environment and it’s going to require new strategic thinking, new security structures out there. It’s going to require new relationships, and we probably don’t need those large assets at Incirlik, in Saudi and elsewhere in the region.”

In practice, a defense official said, “this all means that Prince Sultan is going to be emptied out of permanently deployed forces, and we’re probably going to get out of Incirlik too, while maintaining the connections that allow us to move back in if we need to.”

At Incirlik, nearly all of the 80 U.S. warplanes that have been flying missions over Iraq daily for years wll be redeployed, along with 4,500 military personnel.

At Prince Sultan Air Base, 50 miles south of Riyadh, the Saudi capital, most of the 4,200 U.S. service members and 70 to 80 airplanes whose mission was to patrol southern Iraq’s no-fly zone will begin leaving within the year, defense officials said.

The Pentagon opened a high-tech Combined Air Operations Center at the base in June 2001 that served as the command post for the air campaign in Afghanistan. The vast majority of U.S. forces in the country are Air Force personnel.

And the Saudi government, while publicly decrying the U.S. military presence in its country, has quietly invested hundreds of millions of dollars in improving the base for U.S. troops, building a housing complex, a gymnasium and recreation and health centers, and has dished out an undisclosed amount of money to help feed and supply U.S. troops at the air base and more than half a dozen other military facilities to help counter the Iraqi threat.

The Pentagon is likely to maintain access to the base and to use it with some frequency for military exercises, and it probably will keep equipment there and elsewhere in Saudi Arabia, defense officials said.

The cutbacks in the region will not affect the U.S. naval presence in Bahrain, which dates back almost 50 years, former defense officials and military analysts said. The ships and fleet headquarters there have been welcomed by the Bahrain government, even as their numbers have increased since 1990.

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Times staff writer Kim Murphy in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, contributed to this report.