Rumsfeld Visits Base in Qatar

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was 30 minutes into a 37-minute “town hall meeting” at this top-secret facility that cracked its doors open Thursday, when a 26-year-old Army captain asked the question on everyone’s mind.

Accompanied by Central Command chief Gen. Tommy Franks on a visit to this forward command base that would run any war with Iraq, Rumsfeld stood before hundreds of officers and soldiers in a massive bomb-resistant warehouse where he discussed military pay, medical insurance, smallpox vaccines and even the price of oil.

Then, Capt. Amy Souza of the Logistics Task Force 559 out of Savannah, Ga., uttered the “I” word.

“What are your assessments of Iraq’s cooperation in the weapons inspections?” she asked Rumsfeld and Franks.

Rumsfeld’s answer was boilerplate wait-and-see. But Capt. Souza’s need to know was not.

Souza’s husband, she later explained, is in an armored battalion based in the Kuwaiti desert just over Iraq’s southern border. He’ll be there until March. She is stationed for six months at another Qatari base that also would be central to any military operations against Iraq.

“So I have a special interest in what’s going on,” she said.

In a holiday season punctuated by drumbeats of war from Washington and with more than 50,000 American troops already deployed throughout the Persian Gulf, many here share her concerns -- even the supreme commander of all those forces.

It is, Franks said at the town meeting, “perhaps the most stressful time that any of us have seen in our lives.”

As yet, war has been just a game here this week -- a computer war simulation run out of a $58-million high-tech mobile command center tucked away in an identical warehouse adjacent to the town meeting.

Dubbed Internal Look, it is the first command-and-control exercise the U.S. military has staged abroad, and Franks called it a centerpiece of the transformation to a lighter, more rapidly deployable force.

To demonstrate how well it is going, Franks and his senior commanders brought members of the press to As Sayliyah and allowed them the first tour of the Command Deployable Headquarters. Raytheon Corp. built the center in the U.S., flew it 7,000 miles to Qatar, where it was assembled inside this bunkered army base more than a month ago.

The facility, which mirrors Franks’ headquarters in Tampa, Fla., can be broken down and packed up in less than two weeks and flown anywhere in the 25 African, Middle Eastern and Southwestern Asian nations in his command area, senior officials said.

A labyrinth of long, semicircular tents and room-sized military-style modules similar to shipping containers, the command fills one of 33 anonymous, sand-colored warehouses here. Each warehouse is longer than a football field, and together they occupy most of the 262-acre As Sayliyah base.

The main war room is inside a module in the heart of the warehouse, beyond a barbed-wire fence and a tent where intelligence gathered from around the world is compiled; the tent is protected from electronic eavesdropping by a constant stream of “white noise” music. On Thursday, there were Christmas carols.

Military commanders call the Joint Operations Center “the nerve cell” -- the brain trust that would coordinate any attack on Iraq. And it is located just 700 miles south of Baghdad -- a 60-by-20-foot, fluorescent-white room that is staffed by about 40 officers from the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and Special Operations.

Seated before four large war screens Thursday, the officers were entering the second phase of the computer war games that began Monday and continue through the weekend.

The exercise, Franks said, is a clear sign that America is ready to fight what he called “the first war of the 21st century” -- the global war on terrorism. The command, control and communications drill is also designed to test the hardware and software and to find holes in its ability to wage war.

But it was the prospect of the real thing that shadowed the exercise, the press tour and Rumsfeld’s 24-hour visit to Qatar. Yet at every step, the defense secretary was uncharacteristically muted on Iraq.

From the podium of a stage fashioned from flatbed trucks and flanked by Humvees, Rumsfeld told Capt. Souza that it will take time to pore over what he said was as many as 24,000 pages of Iraq’s declaration outlining its weapons of mass destruction programs.

“In fairness to the process, it would be kind of out of line for me to opine as to what it might turn out to be,” Rumsfeld said of a final verdict on whether Iraq has come clean.

“Time will tell.”

Instead, the secretary focused largely on America’s continuing “unconventional” global war on terrorism, which was the theme of a four-nation tour that ended when he departed As Sayliyah for Washington on Thursday evening.

Rumsfeld also thanked the troops for sacrificing their holidays with family.

“You are what stands between our people, the American people ... and an evil that cannot be appeased, that cannot be ignored and must not be allowed to win,” he told them.