Military

SHAPE News Summary & Analysis

10 March 2003

NATO

• According to AFP, Foreign Minister Kovacs said Saturday that Hungary is likely to approve a NATO request to provide military equipment to help defend Turkey in case of war on Iraq. “I think we can offer something for the defense of Turkey,” he reportedly told a news conference, adding that the Defense Ministry would inform the government Monday whether it could offer NATO any weapons.

Media continue to focus on NATO’s pledges of military aid to Turkey’s defense.
Stressing that the issue challenges NATO, the Wall Street Journal quotes unidentified NATO officials saying NATO has a hard time finding enough chemical-and biological-defense units to fulfill that pledge promptly. The newspaper considers that the predicament underscores the scarcity of these crucial units among the European members of NATO at a time when threats from weapons of mass destruction are on the rise. “Some European toxic-defense equipment is stationed in Kuwait, stretching NATO’s already-thin capability in this field and raising the prospect some of it may have to be transferred to Turkey in the event of war,” stresses the newspaper and adds: “NATO officials say the Alliance eventually will allocate the necessary chemical-biological defense units to Turkey. The Alliance’s military planners are coordinating contributions from various NATO countries, a process that usually takes some time.” The newspaper also quotes a Turkish official saying Friday that “the contributions so far are not satisfactory.”

• Regardless of the stresses and strains at the political level, the networking of Germany’s military planning structures with those of the U.S. armed forces is being reinforced, wrote Welt am Sonntag, March 9. The newspaper stressed it had learned from operations command at Geltow, near Potsdam, that the Bundeswehr is sending a group of high-ranking officers to serve as permanent liaison officers at Norfolk, Va., where the Joint Forces Command has been charged with the task of planning what the armed forces are to develop during the period through 2020. The United States has earmarked only five states to participate directly in this major process: Germany, Britain, Canada, Australia and France, noted the report, adding: “The Americans realize … that the new challenges, such as the war on terror or asymmetric war, can only be effectively tackled by pooling one’s own resources with those of partner states…. For this reason, we are already working on joint use—wherever possible in real time—of our databases, our analytical capabilities, and finally the resulting knowledge.” In addition, the Bundeswehr has been invited by the United States to take on “command functions” on an experimental level, added the article, which underscored “that work at operational level is not adversely affected by current political friction.”
  
  
• Berlin’s DDP quotes a government spokesman saying in Berlin Monday that the German government does not want to restrict the freedom of movement of the U.S. troops in Germany in case of a war in Iraq. Chancellor Schroeder’s promise of unhindered transit and overflights is “not subject to any conditions,” the spokesman reportedly said, adding: “This promise is clear.” According to the dispatch, he was reacting to concerns of the Greens that the overflight rights and the U.S. right to use its military bases in Germany were not covered by NATO’s Status of Forces Agreement and the NATO Treaty in the case of a pre-emptive war.

Divisions within the UN regarding Iraq are prompting media to look at the status of transatlantic relations.
In a contribution to the Financial Times, March 9, Dominique Moisi, deputy director of the Paris-based Institut Francais des Relations Internationales, calls on Europe’s leaders to work together and with the Americans to preserve European unity and shield the transatlantic Alliance from the effects of the crisis. The Americans are going to war and they will win it. The real question is whether they will lose the peace. It is not only a question for the Americans. What Europe is prepared to do in a post-Saddam Middle East in the aftermath of a quick war will determine its role and influence on the world stage in the decades ahead. It will reshape the state of transatlantic relations and the relationship between the West and Islamic world, stresses Moisi. He concludes: “France cannot act as the voice of global resistance to U.S. unilateralism and play a leading role in Europe. The members of the EU, old and new, will not line up against America. If France wants to live in a multipolar world, it needs Europe to stay united and that means, for the foreseeable future at least, maintaining its Euro-Atlantic identity…. War is now inevitable. Instead of trying to stand in its way, Europe should try to limit that damage…. The pre-requisites are simple. The United States must stop insulting the Europeans. Europe, and France in particular, has to prove that it is relevant…. The United States must see the EU not as the key to winning the war but as essential to winning the peace…. The Americans can conquer Baghdad, but only the international community can liberate Iraq…. It is Europe’s duty to press the United States in the right direction to give the Middle East a chance to establish peace and stability.”
The Times reports that in a speech at Turfts University in Massachusetts, the first President Bush stressed that hopes of peace in the Middle East would be ruined if a war with Iraq were not backed by international unity. In what it sees as a message to the current President Bush, the newspaper stresses that he also advised his son to bridge the rift between the United States, France and Germany.
Urging Germany and France to change their course on Iraq, Berliner Zeitung comments meanwhile that the rift in NATO caused by Saddam Hussein does not separate continental Europe from the Americans and English as is often claimed. Rather, stresses the article, the split runs deep through the heart of Europe and makes the project of a common foreign policy improbable or even impossible.

TURKEY

• According to Reuters, Turkish Prime Minister Gul said Monday he would step down from his post to make way for the leader of the ruling party Tayyip Erdogan, who is set to take his oath as a Parliament deputy this week. “I will go to the president and open the way for a new government to be formed after (Erdogan) takes the oath in Parliament,” the dispatch quotes Gul saying in a news conference. CNN expected that Erdogan’s win of elections paving the way for him to become prime minister may increase the prospect of a new vote in Parliament on Washington’s urgent request to deploy troops in Turkey ahead of a possible invasion of Iraq.

BALKANS

• AP reports U.S. peacekeepers said Monday they have detained an ethnic Albanian in Kosovo under suspicion of possible involvement in a plot to blow up a road in volatile southern Serbia frequently used by Serbian troops. Peacekeepers detained Asllan Bajrami Friday after he was stopped at a vehicle checkpoint in Dobrcane, about 45 kilometers southeast of Pristina, the U.S. Command reportedly said in a statement. According to the dispatch, local media identified the detained suspect as a brother of one of two ethnic Albanians shot and killed by Serbian police on Friday as they were allegedly planting a bomb on a key road in the tense area just across Kosovo’s boundary with Serbia.