With support for operations in Iraq flagging in allied nations, US Defense Secretary Donald Rums-feld gathered 18 defense ministers aboard this symbol of American military might on Saturday to discuss strategy and stiffen resolve back home.
Rumsfeld often says that more than 30 countries have contributed to operations in Iraq, but the US has 138,000 of the roughly 160,000 troops there, and has borne most of the costs.
Warplanes from the carrier's air wing have been flying about 20 combat missions a day over Iraq and played a pivotal role in air strikes in insurgent-controlled Fallujah last month that killed an important member of a terrorist network led by the Jordanian-born militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
The unusual meeting at sea, which was not publicly an-nounced, assembled defense ministers largely from new NATO members and former Soviet republics, as well as from Iraq, Qatar and Bahrain.
The countries have contributed troops, bases and other support to the allied campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. The US intent on Saturday was to inform and to dazzle, military officials said.
In the carrier's cramped war room, the ministers heard General George Casey, the top US commander in Iraq, lay out by teleconference from Baghdad the military's plans for an increasingly violent conflict: to train and equip 145,000 Iraqi security forces in time for national elections in January and to start hundreds of new reconstruction and economic projects.
In the wake of offensives in Tal Afar, Samarra and northern Babil province, Casey said that a majority of Iraq's security problems were concentrated in four of Iraq's 18 provinces, including Baghdad and Anbar. Many of the country's population centers are in those restive areas, scaring off international aid organizations.
"The goal was to mobilize us and show public opinion that we really and truly are together on this," said Defense Minister Jerzy Szmajdzinski of Poland, which has 2,500 troops in southern Iraq. Public opinion in Poland has been running hard against the Iraq operation, with some leaders there suggesting that Poland should withdraw its forces by the end of next year.
The Iraqi defense minister, Hazim al-Shalaan, tried to counter reports that Iraq was descending into worsening violence. "Samarra is a sign of things to come, and Fallujah will soon be next," he said.
For Rumsfeld, a former naval aviator, the four-and-a-half-hour meeting on the carrier allowed him to show off US military technology as an example to ministers from fledgling NATO countries, prospective alliance members and other nations that the Bush administration has recruited in its efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
With elections held in Afghanistan on Saturday, Rumsfeld exhorted his colleagues to hold fast in that country, in a message that could well have applied to Iraq. "There are always naysayers and doomsayers, and people who are faint-hearted," he said. "But the people who have been determined and steadfast have been proved correct."
The ministers got the aircraft carrier experience by arriving and departing on a C-2A Greyhound, a twin-engine cargo plane that lands with a violent stop after the aircraft's trailing hook snags a cable strung across the flight deck.
The carrier's air wing is flying 60 missions a day, including flights to Iraq, 250 miles to the northwest, and about 30 others in support of operations in the Persian Gulf.
Captain Mark Guadagnini, the commander of the 70 aircraft aboard the Kennedy, said, "We're trying not to bomb unless it's absolutely required." He said that a roaring flyby might deter insurgents on the ground. "We're doing absolutely everything we can to prevent civilian casualties."
In most cases, the jets fly to a preassigned sector in Iraq and bomb targets revealed by fresh intelligence or stand ready to help ground troops that come under fire.
That is what happened on the night of Sept. 26, when intelligence showed suspicious tractor-trailers unloading weapons into buildings in Fallujah. Three Navy attack planes dropped 1,000-pound laser-guided bombs. "We took out two buildings," he said. US officials said they learned later that the strike killed Abu Ahmed Tabouki, a Saudi believed to be Zarqawi's right-hand man in Fallujah.
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