WASHINGTON, March 2: The Pentagon was Sunday contemplating “Plan B” for its anticipated war in Iraq after Turkey refused to allow some 62,000 US combat troops to launch an invasion from its territory.

A Defence Department official speaking on condition of anonymity, said that no “other decision” had been made regarding war plans in light of the Turkish vote, but US media has reported details of an alternative.

The Washington Post reported that the United States would be forced to airlift troops and equipment to the northern front in Iraq in a “Plan B” that would be “more costly and less militarily advantageous.”

It could also require sending troops “hundreds of miles across the desert from Kuwait.”

For the Pentagon, deploying 62,000 troops in Turkey would allow for a massive offensive from the north while troops advance from Kuwait and other Gulf locales in the south.

“What we’re hoping to get from Turkey ... is the ability to present Saddam Hussein with a very strong military threat from all directions,” Paul Wolfowitz, the number two at the Defence Department told Sky News last week. “It could save a lot of lives for a lot of people, because the shorter the war, the better it is.”

The United States put heavy pressure on Turkey to comply with its plans, offering up to six billion dollars in aid. But on Saturday, in what could prove a serious blow to US-Turkish relations, Turkey’s parliament spurned the US troops.

Parliamentary leaders were mulling a second vote, but a senior party official, Eyup Fatsa, meanwhile, said that there were no plans for a new motion “in the foreseeable future”.

US Senator Joe Biden, ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations committee told Fox News Sunday that he doubted the Turkish government would reverse course.

“I don’t know, but doubt it,” he said, “because there’s so much at stake here for the Turkish government.

Losing the Turkey option, “will not fundamentally affect our ability to succeed militarily,” he said.

“But it will alter our ability to be, in effect, interspersed and be the interlocutors between the Kurds and the Turks, which worries me a great deal in the north about the day after, the week after, the year after, the decade after.”

Former General Joseph Ralston, who Friday left his role as NATO commander, told CBS News that the Turkish parliament’s move would hurt Turkey more than US war plans.

“If President Bush decides to have a military operation in Iraq, we can do that with or without the so-called Northern Option,” he said, adding that instability in northern Iraq would be bad for Turkey and “the best way to keep the instability from occurring is to have US forces on the ground in northern Iraq.”

Ralston said that General Tommy Franks, head of the US Central Command, “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,” he said.—AFP