Cheney Defends Troop Dispatch to Kuwait

Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney on Saturday described the dispatch of 2,400 American soldiers to Kuwait as a demonstration “to would-be adversaries that the U.S. is ready to go on short notice,” but he acknowledged that the exercise had been planned long before the latest flare-up with Saddam Hussein.

Interviewed on Cable News Network’s “Newsmaker Saturday” show, Cheney also denied that President Bush is orchestrating his responses to Iraq for political gain during his reelection campaign. “I categorically reject that notion,” the secretary said.

Cheney said Hussein had provoked the recent flare-up with the United Nations by refusing for three weeks to let U.N. inspectors enter the Agriculture Ministry building in Baghdad. “He’s the one who escalated things,” Cheney said. “It certainly wasn’t a choice we made.”

The Pentagon announced Friday that troops of the 1st Cavalry based in Ft. Hood, Tex., and of the 5th Special Forces Group based in Ft. Campbell, Ky., would be sent to Kuwait this month as part of a “field training exercise.”

Cheney said the joint exercise with Kuwaiti troops had been planned since the end of the Gulf War with the original aim of demonstrating “the continued U.S. commitment to Kuwait’s independence.” When the confrontation between Iraq and the U.N. inspectors erupted in early July, however, the Bush Administration decided to advance the scheduled date of the exercise from September to August.

Although the confrontation has subsided, Cheney went on, the U.S. troops will go to Kuwait in August rather than revert to the original September schedule. He said they will remain in Kuwait “a matter of weeks or a couple of months at most.”

Explaining the Bush Administration’s readiness to take on Hussein while remaining unwilling to commit troops to stop the Serbian offensive in Bosnia-Herzegovina in the former Yugoslavia, Cheney said there had been a case of clear aggression in Kuwait while “in Yugoslavia, we’ve got an internal civil war.”

When reminded that the former Yugoslav republic of Bosnia is now an independent country recognized by the United States, Cheney added that the “strategic interest in the Middle East” is another reason for the U.S. involvement there.

Cheney appeared to paint the Kuwaiti exercise both as a normal activity and as part of an extensive program to discourage Iraq from any aggressive and defiant acts. The latter, he indicated, would “reassure our friends, such as the Saudis, such as the Kuwaitis and the other Gulf states, that we are prepared to come to their assistance if it’s needed.”

“If there had never been a dust-up at the Agriculture Ministry, if there was no controversy at all with Iraq today, we still would have done this exercise in September,” Cheney said.

He called the exercise “excellent training for our guys.”

“They get firsthand experience operating in that part of the world,” he said. “It demonstrates a U.S. commitment and resolve. So it’s a useful kind of thing for us to do.”

Cheney dismissed Iraqi contentions that the Bush Administration is trying to provoke Hussein with the Army exercise and with previously announced military moves such as the shipment of a battery of Patriot antimissile missiles to Kuwait and the positioning of two aircraft carriers within striking distance of Iraq.

“This notion that somehow this is designed to be a provocative act,” the secretary said, “I put over there in the category with their claim in recent days that Kuwait is part of Iraq. It would be laughable if it weren’t so tragic, because this is a government that clearly is out of touch with reality, refuses to recognize that two-thirds of their army was destroyed in the Gulf War, that it’s a shadow of its former self in terms of military capability.”

On the Yugoslav issue, Cheney said Bush is prepared to use air and naval forces to support the humanitarian relief operation in Bosnia but is not prepared to go any further.

“I don’t think we want to put U.S. forces on the ground in Yugoslavia with the mission of trying to end the war,” he said.