Kuwait on alert
for war in Persian Gulf?
http://www.presstv.com/detail.aspx?id=66352§ionid=351020101
Kuwait has activated its Emergency
War Plan after an armada of US naval battle groups headed for the Persian Gulf, Middle East Times reports.
The report comes after DEBKAfiles claimed on Monday that the USS Theodore
Roosevelt, the USS Ronald Reagan, and the USS Iwo Jima are sailing toward the Persian Gulf to reinforce the US strike
forces in the region.
The US naval force
is accompanied by a British Royal Navy carrier battle group and a French
nuclear hunter-killer submarine.
The deployment is believed
to be the largest naval task force assembled by the United States and its allies in the
region since the Persian Gulf war in 1991.
The move comes nearly a week
after Operation Brimstone, which saw more than a dozen warships from US,
British and French naval forces conduct war games in the Atlantic Ocean in
preparation for a possible confrontation with Iran.
Kuwait, located on the coast of Persian Gulf, has placed its military on 'war alert' to
avoid being caught off-guard by any possible conflict in the region.
"Kuwait was
caught by surprise last time, when Iraqi troops invaded the small emirate and
routed the Kuwaiti army in just a few hours,"
a former US diplomat to Kuwait told the Middle East Times.
Washington and allies accuse
Iran, a signatory to the
nuclear Non- Proliferation Treaty (NPT), of pursuing a
military nuclear program and have threatened to launch military strikes on Iran should the
country continue its uranium enrichment.
The UN nuclear watchdog,
International Atomic Energy Agency, has confirmed that Iran's uranium
enrichment does not exceed 3 percent and is therefore within the limits of the
nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
The military build-up in the
Persian Gulf comes amid speculation that Israel
is lobbying to push the Bush administration to launch a joint attack on Iran before
President George W. Bush leaves office in January 2009.