Military

SHAPE News Summary & Analysis

24 March 2003

IRAQ

• Reuters reports the Polish Defense Ministry announced Monday that Polish commandos have seen their first action of the Iraq war, with more than 50 troops joining to five-day-old campaign to oust Saddam Hussein. According to the dispatch, a Defense Ministry spokesman said “GROM” special forces had joined operations in the Gulf port of Umm Qasr, where resistance by Iraqi forces was continuing. The dispatch recalls that Poland has deployed 200 forces to the Gulf region in what it originally said was a supporting, non-combat role. Noting that opinion surveys show that most people in the country do not want Polish troops to take an active part in the fighting, the dispatch stresses that a Defense Ministry spokesman dismissed concerns that the government may have misled the public. “From the outset it was expected that these soldiers would take part in military action, otherwise there wouldn’t have been much point in sending them,” the spokesman reportedly said.
  
  
• According to The Guardian, British and U.S. military planners were conducting an urgent review of their “friend or foe” identification procedures Sunday after a U.S. Patriot missile battery shot down a Tornado over northern Kuwait. British forces reportedly found the Tornado wreckage Sunday and planned to pass the aircraft’s black box to investigators. The newspaper also quotes Defense Secretary Hoon saying “urgent reviews” of why the Patriot missile hit the Tornado were being made. “There is no single technological solution to this problem. It is about having a whole set of procedures in place,” he reportedly stressed. The newspaper notes that U.S. Air Force Maj. Gen. Leaf said RAF jets used the same IFF system as their U.S. allies, and there was no reason why they should be at a greater risk from American weapons.

The war in Iraq continues to prompt international media to look at the status of transatlantic relations. More calls are heard for the UN to come to terms with the doctrine of preventive defense.
A commentary in Welt am Sonntag, March 23, urged Berlin to seek unity with the United States. With the outbreak of the Iraqi war, all the international institutions and states that tried to prevent the United States from intervening are now bearing the stamp of failure, the article claimed, arguing that “the new ‘axis’ of France, Germany, and Russia, an instant alliance to contain the power of the United States, finds itself pushed to the fringe.” The article stressed: “Berlin must face the reality that at least for the years of the Bush presidency, Franco-American relations will be wrecked…. President Chirac has used the breakdown of contacts between the German head of state and Washington and Germany’s traditional influence on U.S. policy .. to implement three … visions: first, to transform the EU into an association of states dominated by Paris…, second, to isolate Central and Eastern European EU candidates with their orientation toward the United States…, and third, to weaken the role of Germany as a central power in Eastern Europe and integrate it into a contra-American concept.” Warning that the “Cold War” between the Atlantic’s main powers will influence an urgently needed reform of the UN, the article continued: “The main task is to adjust valid international law as laid down in the UN Charter to the completely changed realities in the world…. UN diplomacy failed because of the outdated rules of the internal law of war. Under it, only defensive wars are permissible, that is, responding to a preceding attack or evident preparations for an attack…. The terrorism war has put an end to this principle…. After a phase of weakness there are two challenges in store now for Germany’s diplomacy: to reject French control efforts by defining as many new mutual interests with the United States as possible, and to contribute to the adjustment of the international law of war to the requirements of the global fight against terrorism by providing political and legal expertise.”

An editorial in the Washington Times says meanwhile that Germany has permitted itself, through the diplomacy of the last few months, to be supporting France’s vision of establishing Europe as a bipolarity to the United States. Stressing, however, that Germany has no interest in such opposition, the article continues: “Foreign Minister Fischer last week went out of his way to endorse the centrality of a North American-European identity of fundamental interests ‘for the 21st century.’ We should expect to see in the coming months a discrete, but steady, German demarche away from the French vision.”

Under the title, “Transatlantic relations can still be rescued,” the Financial Times, March 23, quoted EU External Affairs Commissioner Chris Patten stressing in an interview that in future, Europe will only matter internationally if Britain and France work together. “I am 110 percent sure that if we are to pull things together again quickly after this terrible wounding period, Britain and France will have to do it,” Patten reportedly said, adding: “We are at a cross roads. Either we decide that the only way we can deal with the problems of the 21st century is to go back to the 19th century in which you rely on national sovereignty, national interests and balance of power relationship (or) we put back together against the institutional shards left from this bruising encounter in the UN.” Patten also expresses the view that dealing with problems ranging from international terrorism to weapons of mass destruction can only be done by reinvigorating and strengthening multilateral institutions.

La Libre Belgique sees plans by Germany, France and Belgium to meet in April to discuss the basis for a new European defense initiative against the background of the war in Iraq and reports of British and U.S. casualties. The newspaper, which deplores the timing of the announcement of the plan by Belgian Prime Minister Verhofstadt, stresses: “Belgium, France and Germany will have to make serious efforts to show that they do not intend to build a European defense on the back of NATO, the Alliance, which, with American help, guarantees Belgium’s defense. It would be suicidal to try to do without NATO as long as the Europeans offer no concrete, credible and definite alternative to the forces deployed by Alliance.”