Billowing plumes of dust high into the air, a column of heavy tanks rumbles across the flat Arabian desert just south of the Kuwaiti frontier. The M-60s are American-made, but their crews are Egyptian. Five miles away, a cluster of British-built Chieftain tanks are poised with their guns pointed toward the border. This detachment is part of a Kuwaiti army brigade that managed to escape the Iraqi invaders. "Our mission," says Colonel Ibrahim Al-Wasmi, the unit's deputy commander, "is to return to Kuwait."
The vast inland desert, empty until a few weeks ago, is filling with the troops and equipment of...