Troops start major exercise

Daily Telegraph
September 13, 2002

Defence officials have confirmed that the British Army is about to launch a major logistics exercise but denied it was a preparation for military action on Iraq. Operation Log Viper will see up to 6,000 regular troops and Territorial Army reserves shift equipment and supplies to an RAF base in Suffolk and a military port near Southampton. The exercise, which gets under way on Sunday, has been planned for many months and will end on October 12, a Ministry of Defence spokesman said.

The move comes as the MoD adamantly denied reports today that advance parties involving up to 30,000 British troops would start to be deployed to Kuwait over the next two weeks. An MoD spokesman said: "There is absolutely no truth in that whatsoever. It is pure speculation and there are no plans for the deployment of troops."

The news comes as Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said military action against Saddam Hussein's regime will be less likely if the Iraqi dictator readmits United Nations weapons inspectors and gives up his weapons of mass destruction. He said: "What I know, and what I think the whole of the UN knows, is that the only way to get those weapons inspectors back into Iraq and to ensure that Iraq is free of weapons of mass destruction is by the complete and united resolve of the UN, led by the Security Council, and clarity that if the weapons inspectors are not allowed back, then the will of the UN has to be enforced by other means which inevitably would mean military action."

Parliament is to be recalled on September 24 to discuss the growing crisis over Iraq after US President George Bush warned that Saddam Hussein's regime had to strip itself of weapons of mass destruction or be ousted.

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