U.S. Muscle-Flexing

While diplomats debated the Fahd peace plan throughout the Middle East, and Arab gulf state potentates met in Riyadh to discuss security arrangements, the U.S. was taking action of quite a different kind last week to buttress the region. The effort involved a long-planned sequence of military exercises in four friendly countries--Egypt, Sudan, Somalia and Oman--occurring over a month's time and involving some 6,000 U.S. personnel. Code-named Bright Star '82, the maneuvers are the biggest trial run yet for the still nebulous U.S. Rapid Deployment Force, which is eventually supposed to have 200,000 troops at the ready to be launched on 48 hours' notice in defense of the strategic Persian Gulf.

Bright Star began impressively. Some 500 U.S. military vehicles, ranging from trucks to armored personnel carriers to self-propelled howitzers and 155-mm field guns, rumbled off U.S. Navy transport ships in Alexandria. Waves of C-5A, C-141 and C-130 transports touched down at Cairo West Air Base, ferrying in supplies, equipment and 4,000 U.S. military personnel wearing newly designed desert camouflage fatigues.

At week's end, 850 members of the 82nd Airborne Division parachuted into the Egyptian desert near Cairo West in a mock assault. In subsequent days and weeks, across the expanse of northeast Africa, other exercises will range from the field testing of water purification systems to full-scale U.S.-Egyptian army exercises. The most spectacular event will occur on Nov. 24, when six B-52 bombers, flying from North Dakota bases and refueled three times in midair, will skim across the Egyptian desert at an altitude of a few hundred feet and drop live bombs (see map), a feat that will not necessarily inspire worldwide awe.

Bright Star stems from the pledges by Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan to oppose Soviet intervention in the Persian Gulf area. But the exercises are only a short step toward that goal. The U.S. still lacks the power to act decisively in the region. The Rapid Deployment Force consists mainly of 56,000 troops borrowed from Fort Bragg's 18th Airborne Corps, and the Pentagon has neither the ships nor the planes to get them into action swiftly.

The Administration had other worries last week about Bright Star: fears that the U.S. would be charged with heavy-handed intervention in the Middle East during a time of uncertainty. For that reason, the Pentagon tried to play down the importance of the maneuvers. Said a spokesman: "It is a normal exercise, long planned." Although they view the U.S. as the ultimate protector of their oil wells, most of the moderate gulf states were concerned that the military maneuver would be exploited by Arab radicals to increase political instability. The states also viewed the maneuvers as an escalation of superpower involvement in the region, one that could trigger a Soviet response. Oman did agree to take part in the exercise, but only after asking that the U.S. Marine operations be scaled down from 2,000 troops to 1,000.

Predictably, the radical Arab states attacked Bright Star.

Syria charged that the Arab regimes cooperating with the maneuvers were "agents of imperialism." Palestine Liberation Organization Leader Yasser Arafat called the maneuvers part of an American-Zionist plot against the Arabs. Libya's Colonel Muammar Gaddafi charged that Bright Star could be expanded into an invasion of Libya.

But the man in the middle, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, whose nation is most closely involved in the Bright Star operations, remained convinced that the maneuver was warranted and necessary to aid the development of the Rapid Deployment Force, which he feels will help Muslim countries resist aggression.

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