ABC WORLD NEWS TONIGHT ABC TV 7:00 PM August 14, 2002
Road to War
 Al Udeid Airbase, Qatar Picture of the Week |
ELIZABETH VARGAS: Good evening. We have the clearest indication yet that the U.S. is preparing for war should the Bush administration decide to go after Saddam Hussein and invade Iraq. A military build-up is quietly taking place in the Persian Gulf, a build-up designed to accommodate a very large number of American troops.
ABC News has learned details of the preparation of what could be the road to war. Here's our national security correspondent John McWethy.
JOHN McWETHY: American forces are training in Jordan this week, but some much larger scale preparations for a possible invasion of Iraq are under way far from public view.
First, in the tiny Persian Gulf nation of Qatar, an increasingly important friend of the U.S., commercial satellite images show an airfield recently modernized to American specifications at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. It has one of the longest runways in the region, about 14,000 feet. In January, workers broke ground on an 18-acre parking area for aircraft. It is complete today. Eight months ago, work had just begun on a new command center. It is now approaching completion, and is considered the place from which the U.S. would most likely run a war against Iraq.
There are also two giant bomb-proof hangers that could house up to 40 planes each, hangers designed like no others aviation experts have ever seen.
JOHN PIKE [director, GlobalSecurity.org]: This is one of the first Stealth-like hangers that we've seen. It looks like the angles of this hangar would make it more difficult for an incoming attack airplane to use its radar to home in on the hangar or to target the hangar.
McWETHY: Sources tell ABC News the U.S. is also improving facilities in Bahrain, Oman, and Kuwait, laying in additional supplies so troops and aircraft can move in quickly, ready to fight when they arrive with little visible build-up.
Sources say there are also preparations being made in eastern Turkey, and on the ground at airfields in the extreme northern part of Iraq controlled by the Kurds.
One of the more interesting steps the U.S. is considering, to be revealed tomorrow in the Financial Times, is a 6.6 million dollar effort to try to recruit various humanitarian troops to provide help in Iraq, but not just in the northern part where they now have easy access, but to the entire country. The implication here is who controls Iraq may soon be changing. Elizabeth?
VARGAS: All right. John McWethy. Thank you for that report.
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