WASHINGTON, 28 March 2003 — Thousands of fresh US troops headed for Iraq yesterday as British Prime Minister Tony Blair and US President George W. Bush discussed the effort to oust Saddam Hussein, which some senior US military officials warn could last months.
About 1,000 soldiers from the US Army’s 173rd Airborne Brigade parachuted into an airfield in a Kurdish-controlled area of northern Iraq, establishing a base through which to bring in more troops and tanks, Pentagon officials said.
And some 12,000 soldiers from the US Army’s 4th Infantry Division, which was supposed to have gone into northern Iraq through Turkey, began flying out of Fort Hood, Texas, yesterday to the region, a military spokeswoman said.
The soldiers are to meet up with ships transporting their equipment, which is arriving in Kuwait from the Mediterranean, where it had been idling for weeks on navy ships awaiting Turkey’s decision.
Also yesterday, six warships from the United States, Spain and Denmark entered the Suez Canal on their way to the Gulf.
The war in Iraq could last months and require considerable US military reinforcements to assure a victory, the Washington Post reported yesterday, quoting senior US military officials.
Sandstorms, dangerously long supply lines and a recalcitrant enemy “has led to a broad reassessment by some top generals of US military expectations and timelines,” the Post reports.
Most US Army commanders believe it is critical to pause the breakneck advance toward Baghdad to secure the supply lines and make sure weapons are operable and troops re-supplied after days of powerful sandstorms and damage inflicted by Iraqi attacks, the Post reports.
The Post also quoted Central Intelligence Agency and Pentagon intelligence analysts complaining that Bush officials largely ignored their warning that Iraqi irregular forces would use commando tactics and offer significant resistance.
Publicly US officials have insisted that the war is going according to plan, and the most advanced US forces are currently some 100 kilometers outside of Baghdad.
US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld dismissed worries that there were insufficient forces in the Gulf region if the battle for Baghdad goes wrong.
After briefing US senators on the war, Rumsfeld told reporters that the number of forces “has been increasing and it will continue to do so until it is finished.”
Bush gave a new, stronger warning that the war could become drawn out. He said yesterday the conflict will last “however long it takes to win”.
Bush and Blair concluded two days of talks at the president’s Camp David retreat with an appeal to the United Nations to immediately resume the oil-for-food program in Iraq to address urgent humanitarian needs triggered by the weekold war.
Bush made clear to the Iraqi people that the US is resolved to fight on no matter what. “As they approach Baghdad, our fighting units are facing the most desperate elements of a doomed regime,” Bush told cheering military personnel Wednesday at the Florida headquarters of Central Command.
“We cannot predict the final day of the Iraqi regime, but I can assure you — and I assure the long-suffering people of Iraq — there will be a day of reckoning for the Iraqi regime, and that day is drawing near,” he said.
