They Don't Need to Fight

By Bruce W. Nelan

Billowing plumes of dust high into the air, a column of heavy tanks rumbles across the flat Arabian desert just south of the Kuwaiti frontier. The M-60s are American-made, but their crews are Egyptian. Five miles away, a cluster of British-built Chieftain tanks are poised with their guns pointed toward the border. This detachment is part of a Kuwaiti army brigade that managed to escape the Iraqi invaders. "Our mission," says Colonel Ibrahim Al-Wasmi, the unit's deputy commander, "is to return to Kuwait."

The vast inland desert, empty until a few weeks ago, is filling with the troops and equipment of 11 Arab and Islamic armies committed to the liberation of Kuwait. On paper they make up a formidable military force: 60,000 Saudis, 10,000 men of the other gulf states, armored divisions from Egypt and Syria, infantry regiments from Bangladesh, Morocco and Pakistan. By joining publicly with the U.S. and its European allies, they have already made their most important contribution by proving that the confrontation with Iraq is not a neocolonial attack on the Arab nation. But if a war begins, the Islamic armies could vastly complicate problems of command.

One key question is whether the Arabs would carry the fight across the border into Kuwait. The Saudi Defense Minister, Prince Sultan, said early in the crisis that his country could not be used as a launching pad for an attack on Iraq without King Fahd's approval. Commanders of the Egyptian and Syrian units have said their troops are deployed to defend Saudi Arabia and not for offensive operations. While a United Nations resolution authorizing force against Saddam Hussein might galvanize the Islamic forces, for some of them the thought of killing their "Arab brothers" is still a strong deterrent to their involvement in an offensive against Iraq.

Since the Arab armies are positioned between the Kuwaiti border and the more than 200,000 American, British and French troops in Saudi Arabia, their commitment to an offensive would be no small matter. "The Arab forces complicate Saddam's problems if he chooses to go south," says retired U.S. Army Lieut. General William Odom, now an analyst with the Hudson Institute in Washington. "They complicate ours if we choose to go north."

If the Islamic forces do enter the fray, there are doubts about how well they might fare. In a major battle, only those units equipped with large numbers of tanks could play a significant role: the Saudis, Egyptians and Syrians. While the Saudi air force is modern and well trained, the army is not. According to Anthony Cordesman, an expert on Middle East military issues, the Saudi army is at least 30% under strength. Most army units are commanded by members of the Saudi royal family selected for loyalty rather than military prowess. Exercises involving more than 6,000 men are rare. If it becomes necessary to move larger numbers, "considerable confusion at the front" is likely, says Cordesman.

The Egyptian armored units have been slow to arrive, and only 300 tanks are on station in the desert so far. Those are mostly older M-60s, slower and packing less punch than the new M-1 Abrams. One big advantage: Egyptian forces have been training with the U.S. army for several years in biannual Bright Star maneuvers in Egypt.

Syria has pledged an armored division -- 15,000 men, 300 Soviet-made T-72 tanks -- but they too are trickling in, with only 3,000 troops deployed so far in Saudi Arabia, though more were expected last weekend. Coordination between the Syrian and Western forces would face another serious obstacle: the Syrians are armed mostly with Soviet hardware. As a radical Arab state standing shoulder to shoulder with the conservative royalty of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, Syria's greatest value is political. "If they never fire a shot," says Jeffrey Record, a Washington military analyst, "they are worth their weight in gold." But the idea of an alliance with the U.S. grates on many in Syria, and the official press is protesting increased American arms shipments to Israel.

If fighting starts, the biggest problem of all will be command and control, forging the various forces into a cohesive military whole. The Islamic troops are officially under the command of the Saudi chief of staff, General Khalid bin Sultan. But the Saudis use American weapons and tactics, while the Syrians operate like the Soviet army. Even talking to one another is difficult. The Saudis and Moroccans speak different Arabic dialects, while the Arabs have to use English to communicate with the Pakistanis and Bangladeshis.

U.S. contingency plans call for heavy use of air power against Iraqi targets. At some point, however, ground forces would surely be needed to drive Saddam's army out of Kuwait. The U.S. would mount this attack as a lightning strike at night -- a style of warfare the Arab allies are not equipped or trained for. In that moment, American planners in Washington say, they hope the Islamic units can move aside and leave the way clear for a U.S. dash forward.

There is even a political problem with that hope. If an invasion force composed solely of American and European troops moves against Iraq, the attack would be seen as a Western assault on the Arab nation. To prevent a ground swell of resentment from sweeping across the Islamic world, some of the blood shed by Saddam's foes will have to be that of Muslims.

With reporting by William Dowell at the Saudi-Kuwaiti border and Bruce van Voorst/Washington