Military

SHAPE News Morning Update

10 July 2003

IRAQ

• NATO has no immediate plans to widen its role in Iraq beyond providing backup to a multinational peacekeeping force led by Poland, officials said on Wednesday. U.S. Senator Joseph Lieberman, a Democratic presidential candidate, suggested this week that Washington should ask NATO to take command of forces in Iraq to relieve the burden on American troops. “America cannot sustain supplying 150,000 out of 160,000 of the troops on the ground for any length of time,” Lieberman wrote Monday in The Washington Post. “Nations we need as partners are unwilling to join force with us under unilateral American command. NATO command is the answer.” Diplomats at alliance headquarters stressed that NATO had not ruled out a wider role but said such move was not currently in the cards. British defense analyst Sir Timothy Garden, shared Lieberman’s view that NATO’s success in the Balkans made the alliance a likely candidate for an Iraq role, but said another peacekeeping mission would raise questions about NATO’s function. “NATO is still a bit uncomfortable cast in the role of sweeping up after the U.S.,” said Garden, an expert at London’s Royal Institute of International Affairs. (AP 091659 Jul 03)
  
  
• Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said on Wednesday that the United States did not go to war with Iraq because of dramatic new evidence of banned weapons but because it saw existing information on Iraqi arms programs in a new light after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. “The coalition did not act in Iraq because we had discovered dramatic new evidence of Iraq’s pursuit” of weapons of mass destruction, Rumsfeld told the Senate Armed Services Committee. “We acted because we saw the evidence in a dramatic new light -- through the prism of our experience on 9-11.” With U.S. and British forces facing almost daily assaults, he also told the committee that talks were under way to increase NATO involvement in Iraq peacekeeping efforts. He said he had “no objection” to NATO as an organization taking part, including troops from Germany and France that opposed the war. (Reuters 091905 GMT Jul 03)

BALKANS

• Up to 460,000 small weapons remain illegally in the hands of civilians in Kosovo despite a widespread international peacekeeping presence in the province four years after the end of war, a UN report revealed on Wednesday. In a 70-page report titled “Kosovo and the Gun,” the United Nations Development Program and the Geneva-based Small Arms Survey said the widespread availability and misuse of small arms constitute “a central challenge” in reducing insecurity and promoting development in Kosovo. “The possession of small arms is an enormous obstacle to really establishing security and rule of law in Kosovo,” Robert Piper, the local head of the UN development agency, said. The report said most of the weapons remain from the 1998-1999 war, and that few weapons are illegally bought and sold today. (AP 091907 Jul 03)
  
  
• Albania, Macedonia (sic) and Italy are holding joint military exercises aimed at coordinating search and rescue missions on land and sea, the Albanian Defense Ministry said on Wednesday in Tirana. The exercises began Monday and run until Friday. (AP 091522 Jul 03)

MIDDLE EAST

• France has called for the Middle East peace drive to go “further, faster”, saying Syria and Lebanon must be involved in a broad effort to resolve the region’s troubles. In an interview with the French daily Le Figaro, Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin welcomed recent U.S. efforts to kick-start the drive for Middle East peace but said the whole international community needed to get behind the process. Holding an international conference would offer the opportunity to open a “new stage” in the peace process, he added. (Reuters 092036 GMT Jul 03)

AFRICA

• The EU is ready to contribute funds to an African standby peacekeeping force to help quell conflicts on the continent, a senior EU official said on Wednesday as African leaders gathered to discuss such a force in Maputo, the capital of Mozambique. Poul Nielson, European Commissioner for Development and Humanitarian Aid, said that the EU was awaiting a formal adoption of the force by African Union leaders. (Reuters 091949 GMT Jul 03)