BRUSSELS: The Pentagon says it can draw up alternative plans for a war against Iraq without Turkey as one of its launch pads, but analysts believe such a campaign would be slower, more costly and far more risky.

The Turkish parliament’s rejection of a plan to let 62,000 US troops into the country all but ruled out the chance of opening a firm northern front against Baghdad, although analysts did not suggest it would delay the start of hostilities.

In a sign of how important the Turkish bases are to its plans, Washington has offered Ankara up to $30 billion in grants and loan guarantees to shield its economy if war breaks out.

Washington may press for another vote in the hope that approval will eventually come, but — assuming hostilities start this month — there is not much time left to station and prepare for battle the thousands of troops sitting off Turkey’s coast.

Tim Garden of the Centre for Defence Studies at King’s College, London, said that even if approval for deployment had come this weekend the United States would still have needed 45 days to get these troops up to operational readiness.

“This was going to be a two-front war and now it’s going to be a one-front war, raising the risks and the complications for the United States,” said Joseph Cirincione at the Carnegie Endowment in Washington.

The Turkish front may not be key for the head of US forces in the region, General Tommy Franks. “It’s not a showstopper, by itself this doesn’t stop the war plan,” Cirincione said.

OTHER OPTIONS: Indeed, Retired General Joseph Ralston, former supreme allied commander in Europe and former vice chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, said there were other plans.

“If President (George W.) Bush decides to have a military operation in Iraq we can do that with or without the so-called northern option, Ralston told CBS’s “Face the Nation”.

“General Franks is not someone sitting there with a single plan. He has options and so we will have to look at other ways to do that. I think we will be able to carry out our objectives...Now it will be harder without the northern option.”

According to a Washington Post report on Sunday, the Bush administration’s plan for an assault envisions simultaneous air and ground operations — in sharp contrast to the 1991 Gulf War, when the land sweep only began after five weeks of bombing.

The main prong would charge north from Kuwait while a division plus some specialised reinforcements, for a total of about 20,000 troops, would punch southwards from Turkey.

“While some troops and gear can be flown into airstrips in Kurdish areas in the north, getting a force that size into Iraq by air would be a logistical nightmare,” the Post said.

Cirincione said time would be lost be moving troops down to bases in Kuwait which have not be set up, and time would be lost sending ground forces all the way up Iraq from the south.

It is time that could aggravate public disapproval of the war in the United States and, militarily, it is time planners may have been counting on to occupy Iraq’s western oilfields.

If there is a vacuum in these areas once fighting starts, Cirincione said, Kurdish militia might move in to secure then.

Thousands of forces could be airdropped to hold northern areas of Iraq while they wait for heavy equipment to arrive.

“It would be a risky operation. You would only do it if you thought that the opposing forces were going to fold simply from seeing you drop from the plane, and that’s a dangerous assumption,” Cirincione said.

KURDISH PROBLEM: Loren Thompson, a Lexington Institute analyst with close ties to the US military, said last month that one strategy being planned involved the insertion of about 5,000 US ground troops using the rugged C-17 Globemaster III cargo aircraft.

In the Kurdish northern areas of Iraq, there are large tracts of land that President Saddam Hussein has no control over, and many boast airstrips suitable for landing a C-17. Thompson said US forces first could airlift a very small ground force via helicopter to seize these airstrips and secure the area before bringing in the C-17s.

Garden said allied forces will still have basing in Turkey for patrolling Iraq’s northern “no-fly” zone.

Senior US defence officials say the United States has now extended the targets being attacked by air patrols in “no-fly” zones to include weapons that could hinder a ground invasion.

Still Ankara’s active support in the campaign against Saddam would have given Washington the comfort of a Muslim ally in a war many in the region deride as an anti-Islam crusade.

And in the absence of American troops, Turkey’s own forces may face bigger risks of confrontation with Iraqi Kurds when, in the event of war, they enter northern Iraq. Turkey fears a breakaway Kurdish state could emerge from the crisis, reigniting armed Kurdish separatists in the Turkish southeast.

But Garden said the Turkish parliament decision could avert an “unholy mess” of Iraq, American, Turkish and Kurdish forces.

“It may be, in terms of tidiness, that this wouldn’t be too bad a thing,” he said. “If the Turks secure their borders, the Kurds keep their heads down and secure their enclave area and the rest of the battle goes on in the rest of Iraq.”—Reuters

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