Defectors: Jordan Stalls, Follows Turkey

January 17, 2003

Jordan Stalls, Follows Turkey

Two of America's three designated warfronts against Iraq are buckling. However, they may not be a total loss. The new February 15 timeline leaves all the parties space to indulge in gainful maneuvers and still climb back on the US war wagon at the end of the day.

Turkey was the first defector. This week, Jordan followed.

Ankara raised the stakes Thursday, January 16, by calling a regional summit to discuss ways of preventing the American war against Iraq, inviting Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Iran and Saudi Arabia to attend.

The Jordanian setback caught United States war planners still shuffling the board round under the shock of Turkey's refusal to let US forces use its bases and territory for the leap into Iraq from the north (as DEBKA-Net-Weekly 92 first revealed on 10 January 2003). They discovered that the second staunch American partner, Jordan's King Abdullah, had developed cold feet. The monarch suddenly called off the deployment of Marines in Jordanian bases, just as American military planners were frantically mapping out new plans for re-routing entire armored divisions, squadrons of warplanes and fleets of ships, which had been on the point of shipping out to Turkey from their home bases.

Two of the three designated US invasion fronts against Iraq were on the point of folding. The two defections - if sustained - leave US war commander General Tommy Franks with one last invasion front: the south. US ground assault can only come now from Kuwait and Qatar bases plus a Marine landing from vessels of the US naval armada piling up in the Persian Gulf.

DEBKA-Net-Weekly's military sources and experts expect the United States to partly offset the loss of Turkish bases by a general mobilization of Kurdish militias in northern Iraq - some 50,000 paramilitary fighters. They are no substitute for the estimated 70,000 Turkish troops supposed to have fought alongside US soldiers, but they are up to the task of commandeering northern Iraqi oilfields - with the help of US special forces present in Kurdish command centers and air cover from US aircraft carriers deployed in the eastern and central Mediterranean.

The Kurdish militias cannot be counted on to capture the key northern Iraqi oil cities of Mosul and Kirkuk. For this mission, the US war command will have to reassign at least one elite 101st Airborne Division contingent especially trained for months for parachuting missions into the Baghdad metropolitan area. The US command will have to make do with only two-thirds of the force originally dedicated to the battle for Baghdad and Saddam Hussein's second seat of government, Tikrit.

If US military planners can successfully redraw their battle plan and allocation of forces in Iraq, some of the harm can be offset..

Nonetheless, unless the king recants, the damage caused by Jordan's withdrawal and the loss of the Western front, as weighed up by DEBKA-Net-Weekly's military sources, is considerable:

A. The strategic Iraqi air bases - especially the H2 and H3 complexes, which defend the central Iraqi region around Baghdad and Tikrit - will be left in Iraqi hands. The US originally planned to drop American airborne forces on those bases or nearby and wrest control of their facilities with the help of Jordanian special and rapid deployment troops. This plan will have to abandoned, leaving Iraqi troops assigned to defending this sector against the raiding force free to head south and, from the west, harass American tank columns as they advance, or else race to the aid of the Iraqi defenders of Baghdad.

B. Nothing much will stand in the way of Saddam Hussein launching his 60 to 80 al-Hussein surface-to-surface missiles, most of which are hidden in western Iraq, against the advancing American columns or against Israel. The Al Hussein, an improved version of the Scud missile (32 of which wrought heavy damage in the Tel Aviv area in 1991), has a range of about 800 km (500 miles).

DEBKA-Net-Weekly's military experts warn that, should Jordan persist in staying out of the conflict - and western Iraq is consequently left in Saddam's hands - this could tilt the military balance in Iraq's favor and trigger the kinds of radical military developments that US President George W. Bush has been at pains to avert for nearly two years.

These developments are linked to another of Jordan's actions, revealed here for the first time by DEBKA-Net-Weekly's military sources.

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