KUWAIT: For the first Gulf War, Saudi troops were given pride of place in the charge to liberate Kuwait City, but this time round Saudi troops deploying in Kuwait as part of an 8,000 strong Gulf contingent were left in no doubt of their back-room status during any US-led campaign against Iraq.
With Arab popular opinion still set against another war and the US keen to dominate military operations, the forces from Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain and Qatar have been told to keep out of the way.
"We're here to defend Kuwait and that's all," said Col Jassem al-Fadallah, spokesman for the Peninsula Shield Force, as he waited in a traffic jam for an American deployment to finish at a nearby port, shortly after crossing the Saudi-Kuwait border with 2,000 troops.
Should war begin and United Nations peacekeepers who operate on the border with Iraq be forced to leave, these forces may take up the task of patrolling the border.
But otherwise the Saudi force will train at a Kuwaiti base with the 3,000 troops from UAE who arrived last week, doing what many were doing yesterday as they waited in the traffic jam: listening to Arabic music and reading the Western magazines which are banned in Saudi Arabia.