Pentagon Orders Key Marine, Army Staffs to Kuwait

In a move that suggests Pentagon preparations for a possible war against Iraq, key Army and Marine Corps battle staffs are being sent to Kuwait, two officials familiar with the planning said. Several thousand U.S. personnel already are in Kuwait.

The Pentagon has taken numerous steps in recent weeks to position U.S. forces to reduce the time required to launch an attack on Iraq, should President Bush decide to do so.

In the latest move, the battle staffs of the Army’s V Corps, with headquarters at Heidelberg, Germany, and the Marine Corps’ 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, based at Camp Pendleton, Calif., were ordered to Kuwait, the two officials said.

Those moves strongly suggest that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld is putting in place the battle planners and command staffs that would be called on to spearhead any assault on Iraq.

The V Corps is the Army’s only corps headquarters based outside the United States, and its combat units, including the 1st Armored Division and the 1st Infantry Division, are specifically trained to fight in Europe or the Middle East. The V Corps is commanded by Lt. Gen. William Wallace and has 41,000 troops.

The battle staff of the U.S. Central Command, which would have overall responsibility for war in Iraq, is planning to move to an air base in Qatar next month from its headquarters in Tampa, Fla. The move is billed as an exercise, but officials say the staff may remain in Qatar.

In Baghdad, meanwhile, Iraq’s Foreign Minister Naji Sabri briefed parliament Saturday on U.S. war threats and Washington’s attempts to pass a tough United Nations resolution on arms inspections, the Iraqi News Agency said.

The report said Sabri had briefed the 250-member parliament “on the dimensions of the rude American threats to launch a new aggression against Iraq under false pretexts.”

Meanwhile, about 500 Iraqi Muslim clerics and scholars issued a religious edict calling on Muslims to launch a holy war to “burn the earth under the feet” of the United States if it attacked Iraq.

Iraqi authorities also took foreign journalists to a site suspected by Washington to be involved in Baghdad’s alleged nuclear program. Officials told the reporters at the Al-Furat site, about 16 miles from Baghdad, that it was a center to develop electronics for conventional weapons, such as radars, activity not banned by U.N. resolutions.