JULIAN BORGER, Washington | Thursday
THE United States air force has begun preparations to move its Gulf headquarters from Saudi Arabia to Qatar, to bypass Saudi objections to military action against Iraq, according to Saudi analysts and businesspeople involved in the relocation.
A senior executive of a Saudi contracting firm said several companies had been invited to prepare bids to move computers and electronics from the hi-tech command centre at Prince Sultan air force base.
The independent Saudi Information Agency, based in Washington, reported that US military trucks had been seen leaving the base at al Kharj, 80km south of Riyadh, and arriving at the border with Qatar.
The vast al-Udeid air base in Qatar has become increasingly important to the US air force since the Saudi government refused to allow air raids on Afghanistan to be launched from its soil. The movement of trucks to Qatar may represent a temporary redistribution of resources to pursue the Afghan War, but the request for bids to move sophisticated equipment suggests a more permanent relocation, analysts said.
The move to Qatar would allow the US to conduct an air campaign against Iraq in the face of Saudi refusal to collaborate, overcoming a serious obstacle to the second phase of the US’s “war on terror”.
It would also help alleviate the threat to the stability of the Saudi royal family posed by Sunni Islamic militants for whom the US military presence is a burning issue. Osama bin Laden has challenged the Saudi government’s legitimacy on the grounds that it permitted the US “occupation” of Islam’s holy sites.
At a press conference in Bahrain during his tour of the Gulf last week, US Vice-President Dick Cheney denied there were plans to move.
But the Saudi contractor said his company had been invited to make a bid for a “multimillion dollar contract” to move the Prince Sultan base’s equipment over the border to Qatar.
An executive from a US contractor said his company had also prepared a bid to install telephone switchboards in new US military housing at the al-Udeid base in Qatar.
Ali Alahmed, a Saudi human rights activist who runs the Washington-based Saudi Institute and the Saudi Information Agency, said: “It is clear that this move is happening. We have this now from several sources.”
“They’ve been running the full spectrum of support and combat aircraft out of al-Udeid, so you would expect them to move resources out of Prince Sultan to where they need them,” said John Pike, a military analyst at GlobalSecurity.org, a Washington think tank. “But if they are taking bids for a full-scale move, this would be the first concrete sign of relocation.”
There are about 4 500 US troops at the Prince Sultan base and an unknown number of warplanes. Aircraft from the base are used to patrol the southern no-fly zone over Iraq but, because of Saudi sensitivities, planes from Kuwait are often used for retaliatory air strikes against Iraqi air defences if the patrols are fired on.
Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Abdullah, has been adamant in his opposition to a US attack on Iraq. At the time of Cheney’s visit, he declared that Washington “should not strike Iraq because such an attack would only raise animosity in the region against the US”.
Qatar is seen in Washington as a more stable and willing host. The emir, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, has received strong US backing since overthrowing his father in 1995, and introduced democratic reforms. Among Gulf leaders he has been the strongest advocate of ties with Israel.
The apparent preparations to evacuate the Prince Sultan base are the latest in a series of US moves preparing the ground for a military operation: central command has moved its service headquarters to the Gulf, special forces have set up a base in Oman and, according to Turkish sources, have moved into Kurdish-run areas in northern Iraq.