Cheney Ushers U.S. Forces From Iraq to Kuwait : Pullout: Troops and tanks roll south. The defense secretary says the last of the American units will be over the border by Thursday.

Defense Secretary Dick Cheney on Tuesday crossed from Kuwait into a pockmarked stretch of southern Iraq and told one of the last American military units there that they will be out of the country they vanquished by Thursday.

As he spoke, hundreds of other American troops in tanks and armored cars roared out of southern Iraq, starting their final withdrawal from the Iraqi-Kuwaiti border.

On his first visit to Kuwait--and Iraq--since the war’s end, Cheney said the U.S. units, which have occupied parts of southern Iraq since offensive operations ended in late February, began a 48-hour pullout Tuesday that will bring an end to the U.S. military presence in southern Iraq.

The defense secretary flew 30 minutes by helicopter from Kuwait city, crossing burning oil fields and a moonscape of burned-out tank emplacements, to praise the “Bandits”--a tank unit of the 3rd Armored Division--for their lonely vigil in a place he called “not the most glamorous part of the world to be in.”

Within a few hundred yards of the Bandits, camped in a “buffer zone” about five miles inside Iraq, the white tents of a United Nations observer force baked in a brutal desert sun.

A lightly armed, 1,440-member U.N. contingent is now taking control of a 250-mile stretch of the Kuwaiti-Iraqi border straddled by a demilitarized zone. The buffer reaches six miles into Iraq on one side of the border and three miles into Kuwait on the other side. All American and Iraqi troops have to be out of the demilitarized zone by the end of this week as part of a formal U.N. cease-fire agreement.

Cheney also said U.S. warplanes had halted their flights over southern Iraq on Monday night, “consistent with our withdrawal of U.S. forces from the (demilitarized zone)” and with U.N. Security Council resolutions.

He said the 8th Marine Regiment and all but one brigade of GIs from the Army’s 3rd Armored Division will withdraw into Saudi Arabia. The armored brigade--about 4,000 people--will cross over the buffer zone into Kuwait, where Cheney said they would remain “for the time being.”

The defense secretary’s visit came on the second day of a four-day swing through the Persian Gulf, where he is discussing postwar security arrangements with governments of the region. His comments on the 48-hour U.S. pullout clarified earlier reports from the region suggesting that the American withdrawal would be accomplished in a single day.

In meetings Tuesday with Kuwait’s crown prince and prime minister, Sheik Saad al Abdullah al Sabah, and the emirate’s defense minister, Sheik Ali al Salim al Sabah, Cheney repeated that the United States wants “to avoid any permanent basing of U.S. forces on the ground in the Gulf.”

Cheney’s warning is likely to disappoint some Kuwaiti leaders, who have eagerly offered the United States bases and naval facilities, according to official sources in the region.

Although the Administration is expected to negotiate some form of stepped-up naval access to Kuwaiti ports, officials said President Bush has ruled out the permanent basing of ground troops anywhere in the Gulf.

On Tuesday, Cheney witnessed firsthand the reason for Kuwait’s continued wariness toward its neighbor, Iraq, which invaded the emirate and occupied it for seven months before being ousted by a U.S.-led military coalition. From the air, thousands of Iraq’s vaunted tank revetments and defensive strongholds looked like paw prints and claw marks in the desert floor.

Destroyed Iraqi vehicles were visible. But more remarkable was the number of defensive positions that had been abandoned by vehicles that appeared to have escaped.

Many of those vehicles helped crush a Shiite Muslim insurrection within sight of the unit that Cheney visited Tuesday.

“It would have been nice to finish it off,” said the commander of the Bandits, Lt. Col. Tim Reischl of Sherman Oaks, Calif. “But that wasn’t the charter. We did the job we were supposed to do, and while it was a shame to see (Iraqi President Saddam Hussein) in power at the end, we’re going to let someone else do that job.”

At the same time, knowledgeable U.S. officials said Kuwaiti leaders remain concerned about an Iraqi adversary that is still potent, yet stung by military defeat.

“The Kuwaitis would love to build us a base, and there are some--among them, some of Kuwait’s most ardent nationalists--who have suggested that we take Bubiyan Island as a naval base,” said a U.S. official with detailed knowledge of the region. “We are the ones putting the brakes on” the Kuwaitis, he added.

American military officials in Kuwait predicted that some U.S. military specialists could remain in Kuwait for six months to a year, helping to manage the reconstruction of the country’s infrastructure and overseeing disposal of unexploded bombs and ammunition.

Meanwhile, oil workers by early this week had capped or brought under control 94 of about 600 wells torched by fleeing Iraqi troops.

Cheney’s flight from Saudi Arabia into soot-blackened Kuwait dramatized the scope of the damage.

“It’s terrible,” Cheney said of the scene. “Everybody who wants to lift these sanctions on Saddam Hussein ought to come look at that--see how much tolerance they’ve got.”

Near the southern Iraqi town of Safwan, devastated by war and home to thousands of Iraqis who received food and water from the U.S. troops, the American withdrawal began early Tuesday and continued through most of the day.

As the U.N. peacekeeping force moved into place, convoys of American tanks, trucks and artillery pieces, kicking up huge clouds of sand, made their way toward staging areas about 20 miles inside Kuwait. Barefoot Iraqi children lined the rutted desert roads and waved as troops passed.

The instruction to roll was “the happiest order I ever heard,” said Capt. Tom Meara, a tank commander.

Col. Bill Nash, a brigade commander from the 3rd Armored Division, sat in a Humvee parked in the middle of a sandstorm and monitored the day’s progress.

Finally the last battalion under Nash’s command, Bayonet, moved into position.

“OK, Bayonet, let’s go home,” Nash radioed. His Humvee sped away to join the convoy, then passed it and halted at an intersection where he got out and saluted each tank that barreled by.