Military Action

The question of what's to be done about Iraq has acquired the urgency it has because it's the first concrete test of the new American security policy.

Right now, America's professing a belief in the United Nations. But George Bush has made it unambiguously clear that he believes in his country having overwhelming military superiority to all others, and, crucially, that he believes in a doctrine of 'pre-emption' - of hitting enemies, or potential enemies, first

While the diplomatic wrangling at the United Nations seems likely to tie everyone up over the next few weeks, beyond that lies the threat of possible military action - either in support of UN weapons inspectors or even as a unilateral US campaign.

Mark Urban reported on how soon such a campaign could begin.

MARK URBAN:
We've had a tremendous amount of military and diplomatic action over the past couple of weeks but so far no real sign of any move towards a military strike.

What is the Pentagon planning?

We know it would be bigger than the recent Afghan campaign. On the other hand it would involve smaller forces than the 1991 Desert Storm offensive, when 500,000 troops were deployed.

The Americans would like to move anything up to 200,000 to the region this time. Around 100,000 to 120,000 of these would be ground troops with several key tasks, protecting Kurd allies in the North and Shia ones in the south, attacking the machinery of central power and eventually moving up through southern Iraq, securing oil fields and going all the way to Baghdad.

In order to do that, the Americans would need to send several divisions to the region probably including the 101st Airborne, 1st Cavalry, 3rd Infantry, those last two being heavy armoured units and a couple of US Marine divisions. Since no significant start has been made, it would be a massive task.

Things would be made easier by US store ships in the Gulf and pre-positioned supplies in Kuwait. But these would only provide enough equipment for about three brigades, so even though those soldiers would fly out and pick up their hardware, the Pentagon is planning to send six or seven times that number of troops to the region. So as many as 4,000 armoured vehicles and 1,500 helicopters would have to go by sea.

The first thing to note is the time it takes. Realistically these divisions would take two to three months to deploy, depending on whether they were coming from the US or Europe.

Since none of this has started, we can be sure of one thing - a major ground war against Iraq cannot be launched before early December, or more likely late December or early January.

The second point is that it will require a large take-up of shipping. In 1991, the US took 40 transports out of mothballs and chartered scores more from the private sector. So far we have only seen five vessels booked this time, and even those, the Pentagon insists, were hired long ago for exercises.

One of the first signs that America is serious about launching a war will be large-scale chartering. The same goes for Britain, In 1991 it used more than 100 ships to carry out its own small armoured division to Kuwait. A similar deployment would require similar lift. Once again, we have seen no sign of any of that happening.

As the ground forces build up, the air forces would have to be boosted. Once again, the signs are that the Pentagon would be doing something quite a bit smaller than in 1991. But still they have a long way to go from where they are now.

Currently, they're just set up to enforce the no-fly zones with about 100 aircraft in Saudi Arabia, 60 in Turkey and probably another 100 or so scattered about various Gulf states. The navy has a couple of carriers lurking in the Arabian Sea able to support Afghan and Iraqi operations.

Before launching an Iraqi offensive, the Pentagon would need to deploy hundreds more aircraft to the region. There would also be a call-up of the reservists who man most of the tankers and dozens of those refuelling planes would be posted to such places as Qatar or Bahrain.

So a campaign based on air power alone, like the strikes in 1998, could be ready in a few weeks. But since the White House is determined to prepare options to change the regime in Baghdad, it is planning to commit large ground forces to the region. That means shipping - lots of it - and no start date, realistically, before mid-December.

Before then a big political mountain to climb, at the very least they need land borders in Kuwait and Turkey to get access to Iraq and those governments aren't fully signed up.

This transcript was produced from the teletext subtitles that are generated live for Newsnight. It has been checked against the programme as broadcast, however Newsnight can accept no responsibility for any factual inaccuracies. We will be happy to correct serious errors.