Kuwait Alerts Forces, Awaits U.S. Troops

After spending a long night worrying about a possible Iraqi retaliatory strike, Kuwait put its armed forces on full alert Thursday and awaited the arrival of 1,300 new U.S. troops.

But Kuwaiti officials said they are “quite confident” that Baghdad will not respond militarily to Wednesday’s allied raid against Iraq.

“I can assure you that Kuwait is well protected, civilians are well protected and the border is well protected,” Information Minister Saud al Sabah told reporters. “There is constant surveillance of Iraqi movements in the south, and there is no reason whatsoever to have any fear in Kuwait of any Iraqi retaliation.”

But Western officials here expressed continued concern that Iraq has not removed six police posts in the Kuwaiti section of a nine-mile-wide demilitarized zone, which divides Iraq and Kuwait. The United Nations has warned Iraq that the posts must be vacated by today.

Sites of sporadic, light firefights between Kuwaiti and Iraqi security forces in recent months, the posts have recently been supplied by Iraq with truckloads of automatic weapons; some posts have increased their staff from four or five to as many as a dozen, Western sources said.

Iraq has linked removal of the posts to Kuwaiti compensation for Iraqi farmers displaced by the newly demarcated border between the two countries.

“There is no sign that the Iraqis are pulling out (and instead they) seem to have increased the number of policemen,” said one Western diplomat here. “Those police posts have to go. This certainly could be seen as a violation (of U.N. Security Council resolutions) if they are still there (by day’s end). President Bush has been pretty explicit: no more warnings.”

The continuing dispute over the police posts left an edgy note in a capital fearful of any new military development in the Gulf, almost two years after Kuwait was liberated from a brutal seven-month occupation by Iraq.

As rumors of an impending allied air strike against Iraq circulated Wednesday, Kuwaitis began lining up at gas stations, flooding food cooperatives and drawing dollars out of Kuwaiti banks.

Kuwait television Wednesday night switched to full-time coverage from the American Cable News Network, and the Arabic language station switched live to local analysts, taking questions about possible repercussions of the air strike. Dozens of Kuwaitis clustered around televisions in hotel lobbies and offices to watch.

“My mother called. She said, ‘I’m going to get bread. How much do you want?’ ” recalled one Kuwaiti journalist.

Callers flooded the U.S. Embassy switchboard, demanding to know whether it was true that Baghdad itself was under attack. “They all wanted to believe the worst was going to happen to (Iraqi President) Saddam Hussein,” said one analyst.

After a fearful night spent waiting to see whether Iraq would dispatch a Scud missile or other retaliatory strike toward them, most Kuwaitis awoke Thursday hailing the American, British and French air strikes but regretting that the mission had not gone further.

“Iraq, for all Kuwaitis, Gulf nationals and honest Arabs, is an abscess which has lasted for a long period of time. Bush’s decision to burst it makes us feel relieved,” columnist Fuad Hashem told the daily Kuwait Times, which greeted its readers with a banner headline, “Allies Give Saddam a Bloody Nose.”

Yet Kuwait and some of its Gulf neighbors have become increasingly isolated in their calls for continued efforts to weaken the Iraqi military; other Arabs have begun to see it as a necessary counterweight to an increasingly muscular Iran.

Many other Arab nations expressed reservations about resorting to renewed military force against Iraq, particularly when no action has been taken to enforce U.N. resolutions against Israel to force it to take back more than 400 Palestinians, deported recently into the border zone between Israel and Lebanon.

Even Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, normally a staunch American supporter in the Middle East, voiced “deep regret” that the Iraqi situation had escalated to military action; he emphasized the need for maintaining Iraq’s territorial integrity, echoing widespread fears that the fall of Hussein’s government could lead to the breakup of Iraq into separate Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish republics.

Syria’s foreign minister, Farouk Shareh, told reporters after a session of Arab League foreign ministers in Cairo that “most of the Arab delegates spoke about the double standards. Why should Israel be above the law while other nations are obliged to implement Security Council resolutions?”

But Kuwaiti information minister Saud said Iraq had repeatedly been warned to comply with U.N. authority. “The Iraqi regime must accept full responsibility for what took place yesterday,” Saud said. “They have been warned, and we see last night’s response as a response to Iraq’s continued violation of Security Council resolutions.”

He said the impending arrival of a 1,300-member brigade of armored and mechanized units from the 1st Cavalry Division at Ft. Hood, Tex., is “a message by the U.S. . . . about the (American) commitments . . . to the security, stability and the sovereignty of Kuwait.”