PRINCE SULTAN AIR BASE, Saudi Arabia, April 29 -- Having removed the government of Saddam Hussein from Iraq, the U.S. military will end operations in Saudi Arabia later this year, freeing the kingdom of a major political problem caused by the visible presence of U.S. forces in the land of Islam's two holiest shrines, defense officials announced today.
Shutting down U.S. flights from Prince Sultan air base and moving the U.S. Combined Air Operations Center from here to nearby Qatar mark the beginning of what Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has described as a major realignment of U.S. military forces, not only in the Persian Gulf, but also in Europe and the Far East. Meeting this morning with service members here inside a giant aircraft hangar, Rumsfeld said he is attempting "to refashion and rebalance those arrangements so that we're organized for the future."
Marine Gen. James L. Jones, NATO's top commander, is reviewing U.S. military installations in Germany with an eye toward moving at least some of them to new NATO members in Eastern Europe. "NATO is a different place now, and the center of gravity has in fact shifted from where it was when it was a relatively small organization of 15 countries to a much larger organization of some 26 countries," Rumsfeld told the troops here. NATO has 19 members and seven more countries have been invited to join.
The Pentagon is also considering reductions in the 38,000 military personnel stationed in South Korea and moving those that remain away from the Demilitarized Zone with North Korea. And in Central Asia, Rumsfeld and Gen. Tommy R. Franks, head of the U.S. Central Command, must decide what to do with bases in Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan that were opened in 2001 and 2002 to support the war in Afghanistan.
But the Persian Gulf seems to be the most immediate candidate for change.
A month ago, at the height of the Iraq war, 10,000 U.S. military personnel and 200 fighters, tankers and surveillance aircraft were based at Prince Sultan, a sprawling, 250-square-mile compound in the flat Saudi desert 70 miles southeast of Riyadh, the capital. Even before the war, U.S. warplanes flew from here to patrol the no-fly zone over southern Iraq. Since 1992, the U.S. Air Force has flown 286,000 such sorties, straining budgets, aircraft and personnel.
U.S. planes patrolling a second no-fly zone, over northern Iraq, were based at Incirlik air base in Turkey. The Air Force also plans to withdraw most of those planes, U.S. officials said, after basing them at Incirlik since 1991 to fly patrols designed to protect Iraq's Kurdish minority in a 17,000-square-mile autonomous zone in the northeastern corner of the country.
"Needless to say, the Saudis here have been enormously hospitable to us," Rumsfeld said today. "Now that the Iraqi regime has changed, we're able to discontinue [patrolling the no-fly zones] and those forces will be able to be moved to other assignments and other requirements around the world."
The withdrawal began in earnest Monday when all functions at a high-tech operations center here used to command the air war over Iraq were transferred to a similar facility at Al Udeid air base in Qatar. All aircraft and virtually all military personnel will be gone from this base by the end of the summer, although infrastructure to reactivate the operations center will be left in place, according to Rear Adm. Dave Nichols, the air war's deputy commander.
In addition, two small training missions will remain in the kingdom.
Rumsfeld, on a tour of the Persian Gulf region, and Prince Sultan, Saudi Arabia's defense minister, said the transfer of forces from Saudi Arabia was mutually agreed on. The two countries will continue close military relations, they stressed, particularly training and joint exercises.
Since the fall of Hussein has done away with the need for U.S. aircraft to patrol the southern no-fly zone, Sultan said at a joint news conference with Rumsfeld after talks at his palace in Riyadh, "there is obviously no need for them to remain. This does not mean, having said that, that we requested them to move from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia."
Saudi Arabia's royal family, which regards custody of the shrines at Mecca and Medina as a sacred mission, long has been uneasy at the visible U.S. presence, which is resented by many Saudis and other Arabs as intrusion on holy soil. The basing of U.S. troops here has been denounced repeatedly by Osama bin Laden, a Saudi, who has demanded their withdrawal since the end of the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
While Saudi Arabia balked at assuming the same high-profile role in the latest Iraq war that it did in the 1991 Gulf War, the royal family quietly agreed in February to virtually every U.S. request for military and logistical support, including use of the operations center here and the staging of Special Operations forces from bases in the country. Saudi Arabia also boosted oil production before the war to help stabilize world oil prices.
Despite this cooperation, the Saudis remained highly sensitive about the presence of U.S. military forces in the kingdom, both before and during the war in Iraq, which was unpopular among the Saudi people.
A senior defense official said the decision to leave Saudi Arabia was made in part to help relieve internal political pressure on the royal family. But the official stressed that neither U.S. nor Saudi defense officials have any interest in terminating close military relations.
"The Saudis will be happy when we leave," the U.S. official said. "But they're concerned that it not look as if it's precipitous, because it will look like bin Laden won."
The Pentagon, for its part, will be freed from a burden associated with patrolling the southern no-fly zone to protect Iraq's Shiite population and prevent Hussein's government from threatening its southern neighbors.
During the Iraq war, air missions were flown from 38 bases, stretching from Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean to Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri, home of the B-2 stealth bombers, which flew half of their sorties over Iraq directly from the United States. A dozen of those bases in the region were quickly built specifically for the war. But a year or two from now, the Pentagon expects to have far fewer bases in the region, depending upon the requirements for supporting continuing military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
For the foreseeable future, the U.S. military presence in the region will remain high, with 135,000 military personnel now in Iraq. Some inside and outside the Pentagon, including Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, the Army's chief of staff, believe stability operations could require several hundred thousand U.S. and allied forces for some time. But Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul D. Wolfowitz, have said they believe the mission will require far fewer troops.
Rumsfeld said in an interview Monday on al-Jazeera, the Qatar-based satellite television network, that he has no intention of establishing permanent military bases inside Iraq. But the U.S. military is currently using Baghdad's airport and five other military airfields to support stability operations and deliver humanitarian supplies.
