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TURQUIE Dans l’attente de la fixation d’une date pour l’ouverture des négociations d’adhésion à l’Union

Sur les rives du Bosphore, l’Europe suscite espoir et irritation
Le premier ministre turc, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, vient d’indiquer qu’il souhaitait une révision des lois afin d’autoriser le port du foulard dans les universités privées en Turquie, malgré le refus des autorités de l’enseignement supérieur. Il a cependant insisté sur la nécessité d’un «consensus social» sur le sujet très sensible en Turquie, pays musulman au régime laïque.
Istanbul : de notre envoyé spécial Claude Lorieux
[13 juillet 2004]
A six mois du «verdict» du Conseil européen, les Turcs sont tantôt remplis d’espoir, tantôt saisis de perplexité devant les exigences de Bruxelles et la constante bonne volonté du gouvernement de Recep Tayyip Erdogan à son égard. Un dessin de presse et une histoire des rues reflètent ces tiraillements. L’histoire, d’abord : affairée à repasser les chemises de son mari, une ménagère turque lui demande : «Mehmet, pourrais-tu aller chercher le pain ? – Non», grommelle l’homme, le nez plongé dans son journal. Réplique imparable de la dame : «Mais c’est l’UE qui l’exige !» On devine la suite. Le mari obtempère.

La population, élite kémaliste incluse, n’en revient pas de la rapidité et de la profondeur des réformes que le gouvernement AKP (Justice et Développement, conservateur musulman) fait subir à l’appareil législatif et à la pratique politique turque. Dans l’ensemble, elle suit. Et d’autant plus volontiers que la République turque ne se réforme guère autrement que sous la pression extérieure, fait remarquer un éditorialiste d’Ankara…
Soixante-dix pour cent des Turcs ont beau s’être déclarés favorables à l’adhésion, certains s’étonnent un peu de la souplesse d’échine d’Erdogan. Un intellectuel istanbuliote, électeur d’AKP de surcroît, avoue carrément ne pas faire confiance à un homme aussi retors…

Ce genre de réflexion vient d’autant plus spontanément que les Turcs trouvent généralement les Européens injustement exigeants à leur égard. L’histoire court les salles de rédaction et circule sur les réseaux Internet : «Fatigués d’avance des interminables négociations qui s’annoncent, les autorités européennes décident plutôt de faire passer un test de culture générale aux ministres des Affaires étrangères de trois Etats candidats. Au Roumain, ils demandent le nom d’une ville japonaise bombardée à l’arme atomique par l’US Air Force. Ils questionnent le Bulgare sur la date du raid américain. Au Turc, ils demandent le nombre de victimes, leur nom et leur adresse… Les deux premiers sont évidemment admis à entrer dans l’UE, le Turc recalé et exclu pour réponse négative.» Bref – et le président Bush n’a rien fait pour les dissuader lors du dernier sommet de l’Otan –, les Turcs reprochent volontiers aux Vingt-Cinq d’user à leur égard du «deux poids deux mesures».

L’espoir d’un rapport positif de la Commission de Bruxelles en octobre et de la fixation d’une date d’ouverture des négociations d’adhésion par le Conseil européen de décembre est d’autant plus vif que la Grande Assemblée nationale, le Parlement, planche sur le dixième et dernier paquet législatif d’harmonisation européenne qui vient de lui être transmis par le gouvernement.
Ce train de réformes abroge notamment les dernières «échappatoires» à la suppression de la peine capitale, qui fut votée il y a plusieurs années, et prive le chef d’état-major des armées du droit de désigner des représentants au Conseil de l’enseignement supérieur et au Conseil de la radiotélévision. Le président Ahmet Sezer vient en outre de signer le texte supprimant les cours de sûreté de l’Etat, instaurées au lendemain du coup d’Etat militaire de 1980.

Le travail accompli pour mettre la Turquie en conformité avec les critères de Copenhague est jugé si avancé qu’un conseiller du premier ministre, Abdullah Gül, déclare : «C’est comme le chantier d’une maison. Le gros oeuvre est terminé. Ils ne restent que les finitions.» Revenant sur une fermeture vieille de vingt-trois ans, le gouvernement prépare également la réouverture du séminaire orthodoxe de Halki, dans une île du Bosphore, le seul de Turquie. Contraint à former ses prêtres en Grèce, le Patriarcat oecuménique du Phanar (Istanbul) réclame cette décision depuis 1971.

Un éditorialiste de la presse d’Ankara estime que les réformes réalisées sont si importantes que «les Européens sont coincés. Ils doivent dire oui». Sinon ? «Eh bien sinon ce sera la «cata» !», tranche un de ses collègues. Le ministre des Affaires étrangères, Abdullah Gül, renchérit : «Si le Conseil européen prenait une décision qui n’est ni objective ni honnête – et je n’envisage pas cette possibilité –, il y aura des conséquences sérieuses pour la Turquie et pour l’Union européenne.»

Et pourquoi pas pour le gouvernement lui-même ? Le premier ministre a beau affirmer, bravache, que «les réformes continueront de toute façon. Les «critères d’Ankara» succéderont aux «critères de Copenhague»», certains commentateurs prédisent déjà qu’il devra alors s’expliquer sur le coût politique et financier de sa stratégie à l’égard de Bruxelles…

Un économiste, ancien dirigeant de la Banque centrale, souligne surtout qu’un «niet» de l’Union européenne aurait des conséquences dramatiques sur les investissements étrangers, dont la Turquie a un immense besoin pour lutter contre le chômage et qu’elle attend comme une retombée de l’adhésion. Il fait valoir qu’avec 15 dollars par habitant, le montant des investissements étrangers en Turquie est inférieur à celui constaté dans des pays comme l’Egypte et l’Algérie. Or les Turcs espèrent qu’une dynamique d’adhésion, même tardive, provoquera un appel d’air où s’engouffreront les investissements étrangers.
Mais, encore une fois, personne ne veut croire à un échec. L’antichambre du ministre des Affaires étrangères est décorée d’un grand tableau réunissant autour de lord Raglan des généraux de Saint-Arnaud et Canrobert, et d’un ministre de la Sublime Porte, les vainqueurs de la Russie, lors de la guerre de Crimée. En arrêt devant cette page d’histoire, un diplomate turc s’exclame : «Et il y a des gens, en Europe, qui prétendent que nous n’avons pas d’histoire commune !»

http://www.lefigaro.fr/international/20040713.FIG0038.html

Central Europe may host US missile defence

13.07.2004 - 09:33 CET | By Andrew Beatty
Washington is said to be in talks with Poland and the Czech Republic to position the biggest missile defence site outside the US in central Europe.

According to the Guardian newspaper, talks have been in train for eight months over the two countries’ hosting of part of the US’ ballistic missile defence system, dubbed “son of star wars”.

According to the paper, Prague and Warsaw are keen to set up advance radar warning sites and Poland may even play host to interceptor missiles.

The UK and Denmark had previously said they may take part in the plan.

However, Russia has voiced concerns about Washington’s plans and the hosting of sites, particularly missile sites, so close to their borders is likely to increase opposition.

The plan also caused some consternation in Europe when the US unilaterally pulled out of the anti-ballistic missile treaty, seen as a key non-proliferation agreement between Russia and the US
http://euobserver.com/?aid=16880&rk=1
US in talks over biggest missile defence site in Europe

Ian Traynor in Warsaw
Tuesday July 13, 2004
The Guardian

The US administration is negotiating with Poland and the Czech Republic over its controversial missile defence programme, with a view to positioning the biggest missile defence site outside the US in central Europe.
Polish government officials confirmed to the Guardian that talks have been going on with Washington for eight months and made clear that Poland was keen to take part in the project, which is supposed to shield the US and its allies from long-range ballistic missile attacks.
Senior officials in Prague also confirmed that talks were under way over the establishment of American advanced radar stations in the Czech Republic as part of the missile shield project.
“We’re very interested in becoming a concrete part of the arrangement,” said Boguslaw Majewski, the Polish foreign ministry spokesman. “We have been debating this with the Americans since the end of last year.”
Other sources in Warsaw said Pentagon officers have been scouting the mountain territory of southern Poland, pinpointing suitable sites for two or three radar stations connected to the so-called “Son of Star Wars” programme.
As well as radar sites, the Poles say they want to host a missile interceptor site, a large reinforced underground silo from where long-range missiles would be launched to intercept and destroy incoming rockets.
Under Bush administration plans, two missile interceptor sites are being built in the US - one in California, the other in Alaska. Such a site in Poland would be the first outside America and the only one in Europe.
“An interceptor site would be more attractive. It wouldn’t be a hard sell in Poland,” said Janusz Onyszkiewicz, a former Polish defence minister.
“This is a serious runner,” said a west European diplomat in Warsaw. “It’s pretty substantial. The Poles are very keen to have an interceptor site. They want a physical American presence on their territory. They wouldn’t be paying anything. It would be a totally American facility.”
“I knew about possible radar sites, but I was surprised to hear talk about missile silos,” said another source in Warsaw.
In the Czech Republic, too, the proposed radar site, extending to 100 sq km, could be declared extraterritorial and a sovereign US base.
The talks are at the exploratory stage and no decisions have been taken, officials stressed. US officials played down talk of central European participation in the missile shield. But the confidential nature of the negotiations, being led on the US side by John Bolton, the hardline under-secretary of state for arms control, has angered senior defence officials in the region who have been kept in the dark.
Milos Titz, deputy chairman of the Czech parliament’s defence and security committee, learned of the talks last week and immediately called the defence minister, Miroslav Kostelka, to demand an explanation. According to the Czech web newspaper, Britske Listy, Mr Kostelka conceded to Mr Titz that the talks were going ahead and promised to supply details to the committee this week.
The committee is to hold an extraordinary session today, apparently to demand more information on the issue from the government.
According to the Washington-based thinktank, the Arms Control Association, the Pentagon has already requested modest funding for preliminary studies on a third missile interceptor site based in Europe.
Lieutenant General Ronald Kadish, director of the Pentagon’s Missile Defence Agency (MDA), told Congress this year of plans to construct a missile shield base abroad. “We are preparing to move forward when appropriate to build a third [ground-based interceptor] site at a location outside the United States,” he said.
In addition to Poland and the Czech Republic, the Washington thinktank reported last week that the US was also talking to Hungary about possible involvement in the missile shield which is yet to be properly tested and which many experts believe is unworkable. Sources in Warsaw said the US was also talking to Romania and Bulgaria. Last week, the Australian government signed a 25-year pact with the US on cooperating in the missile shield programme.
The two interceptor sites being built in Alaska and California are primarily to insure against potential ballistic missile attack on the US by North Korea. The possible European site is being widely seen as a shield against missiles from the Middle East, notably Syria or Iran.
But many believe that any such facility in Poland would be concerned mainly and in the long term with Russia. Such concerns appear to be reflected in Polish government thinking.
While the Poles were still waiting for specific proposals from the Americans, said Mr Majewski, they were also insisting that any Polish participation had to be squared first with Moscow for fear of creating military tension in the region.
“The Americans are working quite hard on this,” he said. “They need to clear the path with the Russians and reach a consensus before we will move ahead.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1260037,00.html

Bush Defends Reasons for War
The president, following a Senate report critical of intelligence, says the U.S. is safer and that perceived threats will keep being targeted.
By Maura Reynolds
Times Staff Writer

July 13, 2004

OAK RIDGE, Tenn. — President Bush insisted Monday that his decision to wage war against Iraq was justified because it had removed a threat to the nation’s security, and said the United States would continue to confront terrorism even when the dangers had not fully developed.

Speaking at a U.S. nuclear weapons laboratory, Bush made his most elaborate comments on Iraq since the release Friday of a scathing bipartisan report by the Senate Intelligence Committee, which said the United States had gone to war on the basis of flawed intelligence.

The report, which quickly became fodder for new criticisms of the administration by Bush’s election opponents, said warnings about Iraq’s illicit weapons were largely unfounded. It said the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies had made a series of sweeping errors that, among other things, led to incorrect conclusions that Iraq had stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons and was rebuilding its nuclear weapons program.

But Bush continued to raise the prospect that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, had he not been forced from power, would have posed a grave threat.

“Although we have not found stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, we were right to go into Iraq,” the president said in an address at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. “We removed a declared enemy of America who had the capability of producing weapons of mass murder and could have passed that capability to terrorists bent on acquiring them.”

Eight times during the 32-minute speech, Bush said America was safer because of his efforts to attack terrorists and control nuclear bomb-making technology.

The president also suggested that the United States remained committed to its policy of preemptive attacks — though he did not use those words — against terrorists and the nations that harbored them. “America is also taking a new approach in the world,” he said. “We’re determined to challenge new threats, not ignore them or simply wait for future tragedy.”

Later he added: “America must remember the lessons of Sept. 11. We must confront serious dangers before they fully materialize.”

The Senate committee report has prompted broad criticisms of U.S. intelligence services, particularly the CIA. Many considered it a key reason for the departure of longtime CIA Director George J. Tenet, who announced his resignation before the findings became public and who left office Sunday.

But in visiting Oak Ridge, a top-secret nuclear weapons manufacturing and storage facility, Bush sought to underscore what he said were successes by the intelligence community.

Calling them “sobering evidence of a great danger,” the president viewed centrifuges and other equipment released by Libya after it agreed to give up its nuclear weapons program late last year. He said Libya abandoned its nuclear ambitions only after the CIA helped break up a network of nuclear plans and equipment suppliers operated by a Pakistani scientist, A.Q. Khan.

“Breaking this proliferation network was possible because of the outstanding work done by the CIA,” Bush said. “Dedicated intelligence officers were tireless in obtaining vital information, sometimes at great personal risk. Our intelligence services do an essential job for America.”

Bush also spoke directly about the Senate report, using language more muted than have CIA critics. “The Senate Intelligence Committee has identified some shortcomings in our intelligence capabilities,” he said. “The committee’s report will help us in the work of reform.”

Bush said the nation needed more intelligence agents around the world and better coordination among agencies. He did not discuss whom he might choose to replace Tenant.

Bush spoke in front of a backdrop reading “Protecting America,” in line with his central campaign theme that America is “safer, stronger, better” than before he took office.

Polls show that support for the president’s decision to go to war against Iraq has waned significantly since last year. Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry hopes to capitalize on the increased lack of support.

The Massachusetts senator and other Democrats say that countries with more advanced weapons capabilities, such as North Korea and Iran, posed a greater threat to the U.S. than did Iraq, and that the danger of terrorism has increased, not decreased, since the war began.

On a campaign stop in Boston, Kerry responded to the speech by arguing that during Bush’s presidency, a U.S. program to secure nuclear materials from other nations has stored fewer materials, especially those originating in the former Soviet Union, than it did before the Sept. 11 attacks.

“The facts speak for themselves,” Kerry added. “North Korea is more dangerous today than it was when this administration came into power. I have proposed a major new initiative to reduce the threat of nuclear terrorism — to reduce nuclear materials falling into the hands of our terrorists.”

Kerry also promised to appoint a national director of intelligence “who will change our ability to be able to gather intelligence that is real, to be accountable, and to make America safe.”

“That’s what Americans want,” Kerry said. “Real results, not speeches.”

Kerry has argued that Bush’s policies have eroded the goodwill of U.S. allies. In an apparent answer to that critique, Bush on Monday highlighted the cooperation of other countries in his anti-terrorism and anti-proliferation policies.

He said 60 nations were taking part in counter-proliferation programs he had promoted, and that 40 nations were aiding in Afghanistan and 30 in Iraq.

Democrats argue that Libya’s decision to relinquish its nuclear weapons capability was set in motion by diplomacy begun in the 1990s by European allies, especially Great Britain.

Bush acknowledged that diplomacy played a central role in Libya’s decision, but also said his own policies were critical. In the past, Bush has argued that the decision to wage war on Iraq last spring sent an unmistakable message to Libya about the consequences of seeking weapons of mass destruction.

“Every potential adversary now knows that terrorism and proliferation carry serious consequences, and that the wise course is to abandon those pursuits,” Bush said Monday.

The president’s departure from McGhee Tyson Air National Guard Base in Knoxville was complicated slightly by a mechanical problem with the plane he used to fly to Tennessee. White House spokesman Scott McClellan said a routine check of the aircraft — a 747 version of Air Force One — discovered that a flap on the left wing had come off its track.

As a precaution, the president returned to Washington on a 757 version of Air Force One.

McClellan said the flap problem was not considered serious and that the 747 was expected to return to Andrews Air Force Base later in the day.

It was the second time this month that a mechanical problem grounded one of the aircraft that carry the “Air Force One” designation when the president is aboard. On July 4, a problem with an engine on the left wing led to a last-minute substitution of an aircraft.

Times staff writer Maria L. La Ganga in Boston contributed to this report.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-bush13jul13,1,4439600,print.story

EDITORIAL
Kerry-Edwards Stonewall

July 13, 2004

If not murder, John F. Kerry and John Edwards have accused President Bush of something close to criminally negligent homicide in Iraq. “They were wrong and soldiers died because they were wrong,” Kerry said of the Bush administration over the weekend.

This is strong language, but not unjustified. Last week’s Senate Intelligence Committee report adds to the pile of studies and reportage that has undermined the key reasons Bush gave for going to war: Saddam Hussein’s imperial designs, links between Iraq and Al Qaeda, weapons of mass destruction and so on.

The trouble is, both Sens. Kerry and Edwards voted yes on the resolution authorizing the war in Iraq. And now they refuse to say whether they would have supported the resolution if they had known what they know today. Both say they can’t be bothered with “hypothetical questions.”

But whether it is a hypothetical question depends on how you phrase it. Do they regret these votes? Were their votes a mistake? These are not hypothetical questions. And they are questions the Democratic candidates for president and vice president cannot duck if they wish to attack Bush on Iraq in such morally charged language.

After all, the issue raised by the Senate Intelligence Committee report is not whether the Bush administration bungled the prosecution of the war, or whether there should have been greater international cooperation, or whether the challenges of occupying and rebuilding the country were grossly underestimated. When Kerry says “they were wrong,” he is referring to the administration’s basic case for going to war. Kerry supported that decision. So did Edwards. Were they wrong? If they won’t answer that question, they have no moral standing to criticize Bush.

Reluctance to answer the question is understandable. If they say they stand by their pro-war votes, this makes nonsense of their criticisms of Bush. If they say they were misled or duped by the administration, they look dopey and weak. Many of their Democratic Senate colleagues were skeptical of the administration’s evidence even at the time. If Kerry and Edwards tell the probable truth — that they were deeply dubious about the war but afraid to vote no in the post-9/11 atmosphere and be tarred as lily-livered liberals — they would win raves from editorial writers for their frankness and courage. And they could stop dreaming of oval offices.

Kerry and Edwards are in a bind. But it is a bind of their own making. The great pity will be if this bind leads the Democratic candidates to back off from their harsh, and largely justified, criticism of Bush. The Democrats could lose a valuable issue, and possibly even the election, because the Democratic candidates were too clever for their own good.

In the past, Kerry has dodged the question of his pro-war vote by saying that he intended to give Bush negotiating leverage and to encourage multilateral action, not to endorse a unilateral American invasion of Iraq. Unfortunately, what he may have intended is not what he voted for. Furthermore, a vote in favor of the war resolution was unavoidably a statement that the various complaints against Hussein did justify going to war against him, if all else failed, whatever caveats and escape hatches were in any individual senator’s head.

Kerry and Edwards would like to fudge the issue by conflating it with questions about how the war was prosecuted. Or they say that what matters is where we go from here. It is true that “what now?” is the important policy question. But that doesn’t make it the only question. How we got here affects how we get out. And even if it had no practical relevance to our future Iraq policy, hearing how Kerry and Edwards explain their votes to authorize a war they now regard as disastrous would be helpful in assessing their character and judgment.

Their continued refusal to explain would be even more helpful, unfortunately.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-kerry13jul13,1,576445,print.story

ENTRETIEN
Zbigniew Brzezinski passe au crible la diplomatie de Jacques Chirac
LE MONDE | 12.07.04 | 13h46
A l’occasion des trente ans du Centre d’analyse et de prévision du Quai d’Orsay, l’ancien conseiller de Jimmy Carter, qui fait autorité en matière de politique étrangère, revient sur les relations entre la France et les Etats-Unis et sur la politique du président de la République.
Washington de notre correspondant
Ancien conseiller du président Jimmy Carter pour la sécurité nationale, Zbigniew Brzezinski est l’un des dirigeants du Centre d’études stratégiques et internationales (CSIS), grand institut politique de Washington. Il est, aussi, professeur de relations internationales à l’université John Hopkins. Né en Pologne, âgé de 76 ans, M. Brzezinski fait autorité, à Washington, sur les questions de politique étrangère. Démocrate, il s’oppose aux néoconservateurs, courant républicain influent dans le gouvernement de George Bush. La version française de son dernier livre, Le Vrai Choix, sous-titré L’Amérique et le reste du monde, vient de paraître aux éditions Odile Jacob.
La politique étrangère de Jacques Chirac se caractérise-t-elle par de fortes orientations, et lesquelles ?
La France est une nation très fière, dotée d’une conscience historique profonde et de grandes ambitions nationales. Chirac reflète ces caractéristiques, avec une détermination considérable, sinon avec une subtilité excessive. Fondamentalement, la France aimerait un monde dans lequel sa parole aurait un écho global, à travers une projection européenne. La plupart des Français comprennent que, réduite à elle-même, la France est, essentiellement, une puissance moyenne. Mais, si la puissance potentielle de l’Europe peut être mise en œuvre, alors la France accédera au rôle mondial auquel, clairement, elle aspire, et je pense que Chirac reflète cette vision.
Que reste-t-il, selon vous, de l’héritage de De Gaulle ?
On doit reconnaître deux aspects très propres à de Gaulle dans la façon dont il a façonné la politique française. Le premier est son adhésion personnelle, intense, aiguë, à l’idée de la France comme puissance mondiale. Le second est son ressentiment devant le déclin de l’influence de la France et l’essor de l’influence anglo-américaine. Il me semble que ces deux impulsions ne sont plus aussi fortes aujourd’hui.
Du point de vue de cet héritage gaullien, voyez-vous une différence entre Mitterrand et Chirac ?
Probablement plus dans le style que dans la substance. Mais, dans les relations interpersonnelles, le style, quelquefois, devient la substance. Le genre d’animosité qui a émergé, dans les relations franco-américaines, au cours des trois dernières années, est aussi, dans une certaine mesure, lié aux personnalités, et cela - je regrette de devoir l’ajouter - des deux côtés de l’Atlantique.
Chirac a fait plusieurs tentatives, depuis 1995, pour normaliser la relation entre la France et les Etats-Unis, particulièrement dans le cadre de l’OTAN. Ont-elles été perçues en Amérique ? Pourquoi ont-elles échoué ?
Il faut tenir compte du ressentiment légué par ce qui s’est passé quand l’OTAN a été expulsée de France -en 1966-, par la rhétorique employée alors. On ne mesure peut-être pas tout à fait, à Paris, les cicatrices laissées par cet épisode.
Au-delà de cette donnée, on discerne, vu d’ici, deux schémas de comportement différents, du côté français, au sujet de l’OTAN. D’un côté, il y a les forces armées françaises, qui sont considérées par nous et, particulièrement, par nos militaires, comme de premier ordre, très professionnelles, de très bons camarades de combat, des soldats vraiment bons, des gens sur lesquels on peut compter. Les militaires français sont vus comme très conscients de l’utilité de l’OTAN.
D’un autre côté, il y a ce qu’on pourrait appeler la mentalité “Quai d’Orsay” ou, peut-être, “Elysée”, qui consiste à faire obstacle, presque automatiquement, à toute initiative venant des Etats-Unis. C’est presque un réflexe conditionnel, qui affecte le climat politique, notamment les délibérations de l’OTAN.
Comment comprenez-vous le fait que la France ait accepté l’engagement de l’OTAN en Afghanistan - et s’y soit engagée elle-même -, mais refusé que l’Organisation atlantique soit présente en Irak ?
Je pense que la distinction entre l’Afghanistan et l’Irak correspond au désaccord fondamental entre la France et les Etats-Unis sur la façon de réagir au 11 Septembre (2001). Aller en Afghanistan, c’était aller à la source des attentats, dans un contexte de solidarité. Aller en Irak, c’était, de fait, étendre l’amplitude territoriale de la guerre contre le terrorisme, avec, probablement, des conséquences négatives et sur la base d’une décision américaine unilatérale.
Pensez-vous que Chirac est allé trop loin quand la France a agi, en mars 2003, pour empêcher les Etats-Unis d’obtenir une majorité, au Conseil de sécurité de l’ONU, en faveur de l’emploi de la force contre Saddam Hussein ?
C’était une grave erreur de calcul politique. J’ai critiqué l’unilatéralisme de Bush et plaidé pour davantage de patience et d’internationalisme dans le traitement du problème irakien. Mais j’ai pensé, aussi, qu’au moment critique il était vain et contre-productif, pour la France, d’annoncer qu’elle opposerait son veto à une résolution du Conseil de sécurité, à laquelle l’Amérique tenait beaucoup. C’était une attitude excessivement antagonistique.
Chirac a-t-il réussi à placer la France en position de défenseur des victimes de la mondialisation, face à une Amérique qui se bornerait à en profiter de façon égoïste ?
Je pense que si la perception des Etats-Unis est négative, dans les pays pauvres, et si la France y est mieux considérée, ce n’est pas tant à cause de la façon dont Chirac a dirigé la politique française qu’à cause d’une réaction mondialement négative aux politiques menées par Bush depuis le 11 Septembre. L’Irak et, plus généralement, le Proche-Orient se sont ajoutés au rejet du protocole de Kyoto, à celui de la Cour pénale internationale, etc. Par ricochet, cela sert l’image de ceux qui critiquent l’Amérique, parmi lesquels la France est au premier rang.
Que pensez-vous de l’idée d’un monde “multipolaire”? Est-ce un nom de code pour l’anti-américanisme ?
C’est le nom de code de l’affrontement politique pour l’influence. Cela se ramène à deux propositions. Aux yeux des Américains, les Européens devraient partager davantage les efforts entrepris pour créer de la stabilité dans le monde. Aux yeux des Européens, les Américains devraient partager davantage la prise de décision. En réalité, nous avons besoin de partager le fardeau et les décisions.
Bill Clinton dit : “Nous devons faire en sorte que le monde de demain, dans lequel l’Amérique ne jouira plus d’une supériorité écrasante, soit aussi confortable, pour nous, que celui d’aujourd’hui.” Etes-vous d’accord ?
C’est ce que nous pensons, pour la plupart, nous qui ne sommes pas d’accord avec Bush. Quelle sera la hiérarchie probable de la puissance en 2025 ? Il me paraît honnête de dire que, tout au sommet, il y aura toujours les Etats-Unis. Pas très loin derrière, il y aura l’Europe, si elle progresse sur la voie de son unification politique et si elle acquiert un certain degré de capacité militaire. A la troisième place, il y aura la Chine, le Japon à la quatrième et, à la cinquième, l’Inde.
Ce sera un dispositif beaucoup plus complexe que celui d’aujourd’hui, avec une seule superpuissance mondiale et un énorme écart entre le numéro 1 et le numéro 2. L’Europe n’existe pas, et je dirais, avec beaucoup d’hésitation, que le numéro 2, du point de vue de l’influence et du rôle mondial, est toujours, probablement, la Grande-Bretagne. Au troisième rang, je mettrais l’Allemagne, surtout quand elle agit de concert avec la France.
Propos recueillis par Patrick Jarreau
• ARTICLE PARU DANS L’EDITION DU 13.07.04

http://www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0@2-3222,36-372329,0.html

William Pfaff: Europe should take its own Mideast stand
William Pfaff IHT Monday, July 12, 2004
Last week six senior NATO officials flew from Naples to Baghdad in response to the request from Iraq’s interim prime minister, Iyad Allawi, that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization help his country. The delegation’s principal meetings, however, were actually with an American general, David Petraeus, head of the U.S. mission training Iraqi security forces.

The mission was authorized by the NATO summit in Istanbul in early July, when President George W. Bush demanded that the allies support the new Iraq government. There was only grudging and partial consent by the allies, the objectors led by the French. The reasons for this disagreement need examination.

It rested on crucial differences of opinion on the future of the expanded NATO alliance, on Iraq’s future and on the emerging foreign policy and strategic position of the European Union itself, now that the EU has a strategic identity that is supposed to be complementary but is also potentially a rival to that of NATO.

At its simplest, the disagreement is also provoked by hostility to Bush administration policies. Currently, the key difference is between American and European approaches to the Middle East. The proclaimed American program - now on hold, because of the Iraq insurgency - is to replace “axis of evil” governments in the Middle East with U.S.-sponsored Muslim democracies. The Europeans can appreciate the ambition, but they doubt its feasibility, appropriateness and the methods the United States is using. They are, in principle, opposed to destructive actions rationalized by the ideological and utopian confidence that destruction will produce constructive results. Iraq gives them no reason to change this opinion.

They particularly doubt a U.S. policy that gives virtually unqualified support to the Sharon government in the Israeli-Palestine conflict, a position apparently shared by the Democratic presidential challenger, John Kerry. This position is not endorsed by any of the European members of NATO, who are nominally committed to the “Quartet” policy, now seemingly abandoned by Washington. America’s diplomatic priority for months has been to get NATO involved in Iraq, since this would identify the alliance and the European allies with American policy. The U.S. request to NATO is to help Washington “democratize” Iraq and “defeat terrorism.”

Originally Washington wanted NATO combat troops in Iraq to ease the pressure on U.S. forces, but that proved impossible. Now it wants - although it may not get - NATO training for the Iraq interim government’s security forces. It wants enough NATO involvement to lift from the United States the onus of unilateral invasion and occupation of Iraq, and sole responsibility for the currently chaotic consequences for Iraq.

A year ago, the effort to identify the intervention as conducted by “coalition forces” was meant to associate the international community with U.S. policy. But participation by the faithful Blair government, and by European forces from NATO - Poland, Italy and Spain - was not enough to offset popular hostility in Europe to an invasion conducted without a U.N. Security Council mandate. In no European NATO country has there ever been majority popular approval of the U.S. occupation of Iraq.

There have been various degrees of government approval from Britain, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Poland, Denmark and the Netherlands, based on trans-Atlantic loyalties. Spain since has withdrawn, and most of the others, including the Poles, now have serious reservations about what is going on. Few want to double their stake in Iraq by means of a new NATO commitment.

Today the insurrection is all but out of hand, and Washington is in something of a panic. It wants companions in misery, even if it no longer can see where events will take it after the planned Iraqi national vote next January - or even if the interim government will last long enough to hold that election.

Beyond Iraq, the most important factor in the situation now is the reaction in Islamic and developing-country opinion to what the Bush administration has done. A further commitment by NATO to America’s support could turn this into a conviction that the struggle Washington began is really “the West against the rest,” and that would be a disaster.

The United States itself needs to be rescued from this crisis. Possibly a new U.S. administration can do it. That is what most Europeans are counting on, but they are placing what could prove misplaced confidence in John Kerry - and even in his election.

The European allies have an obligation to themselves, to the Muslim world and indeed to their ally the United States to stop the present slide toward what would amount to a war of societies. To do that it is essential that they do not give more support to current U.S. policies concerning Iraq and Israel-Palestine, and that they maintain an independent approach to the Islamic world. They must demonstrate that western political civilization is plural and open, not a monolith.

Tribune Media Services International

http://www.iht.com/bin/print.php?file=528857.html

Les intellectuels américains sont desespérés et se tournent vers leurs “vieux amis”.
Pensant proposer des concessions acceptables, s’il était jamais en leur pouvoir d’influer sur le cours des choses, ils lancent l’idée d’un “new-deal” transatlantique.
Il est dommage de constater que ceux qui sont censés être des spécialistes de l’Europe ne réalisent pas que celle-ci considère au mieux l’Amérique comme le vecteur d’une dangereuse idéologie, et au pire, comme un corps malade, une cause perdue. Cet appel ne sera donc entendu que par les patriotes du grand-large ou les adeptes des correspondances Mars-Vénus.

On serait cependant tenté de répondre à ce bon monsieur P.H Gordon, qu’un des seuls gestes significatifs que lui et ses amis scribouillards pourraient faire, serait de mettre sous observation le réseau de “madrassas” américaines réfléchissantes et communiquantes qui pourrissent les relations Europe-Etats-Unis ... on n’ose plus dire transatlantiques.

On notera quand même avec amusement l’emploi désormais rituel du terme “american leadership” par ce spécialiste qui propose un “new deal” plus juste et plus modeste.

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Letter to Europe

Prospect, July 2004

Philip H. Gordon, Director, Center on the United States and Europe

(Introduction:)

Dear Friends. How did it come to this? I cannot remember a time when the gulf between Europeans and Americans was so wide. For the past couple of years, I have argued that the Iraq crisis was a sort of “perfect storm” unlikely to be repeated, and that many of the recent tensions resulted from the personalities and shortcomings of key actors on both sides. The transatlantic alliance has overcome many crises before, and given our common interests and values and the enormous challenges we face, I have beenconfident that we could also overcome this latest spat.

Now I just don’t know any more. After a series of increasingly depressing trips to Europe, even my optimism is being tested. I do know this: if we don’t find a new way to deal with each other soon, the damage to the most successful alliance in history could become permanent. We could be in the process of creating a new world order in which the very concept of the “west” will no longer exist.

I am not saying that Europe and America will end up in a military stand-off like that between east and west during the cold war. But if current trends are not reversed, you can be sure we will see growing domestic pressure on both sides for confrontation rather than co-operation. This will lead to the effective end of Nato, and political rivalry in the middle east, Africa and Asia. Europeans would face an America that no longer felt an interest in—and might actively seek to undermine—the united, prosperous Europe that Washington has supported for 60 years. And Americans would find themselves dealing with monumental global challenges not only without the support of their most capable potential partners, but perhaps in the face of their opposition. Britain would finally be forced to choose between two antagonistic camps.

... / ...

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Article complet:
http://www.brookings.edu/views/articles/gordon/20040701.pdf

Finalement, tout compte fait, les insurgés irakiens seraient nettement plus nombreux que ce que l’on disait, et n’auraient pas de liens particuliers avec Al Quaeda. Et il se pourrait bien qu’ils soient extrêmement difficiles à battre…. Mais les militaires américains qui sontsur le terrain semblent avoir bien du mal à faire passer ce constat, tant est puissant le virtualisme en vigueur à Wahington.

Dépèche d’Associated Press reprise par Yahoo!

“AP: Iraq Insurgency Larger Than Thought
Fri Jul 9, 6:54 AM ET
By JIM KRANE, Associated Press Writer
BAGHDAD, Iraq - Contrary to U.S. government claims, the insurgency in Iraq (news - web sites) is led by well-armed Sunnis angry about losing power, not foreign fighters, and is far larger than previously thought, American military officials say.
The officials told The Associated Press the guerrillas can call on loyalists to boost their forces to as high as 20,000 and have enough popular support among nationalist Iraqis angered by the presence of U.S. troops that they cannot be militarily defeated.

That number is far larger than the 5,000 guerrillas previously thought to be at the insurgency’s core. And some insurgents are highly specialized — one Baghdad cell, for instance, has two leaders, one assassin, and two groups of bomb-makers.

Although U.S. military analysts disagree over the exact size, the insurgency is believed to include dozens of regional cells, often led by tribal sheiks and inspired by Sunni Muslim imams.

The developing intelligence picture of the insurgency contrasts with the commonly stated view in the Bush administration that the fighting is fueled by foreign warriors intent on creating an Islamic state.

“We’re not at the forefront of a jihadist war here,” said a U.S. military official in Baghdad, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The military official, who has logged thousands of miles driving around Iraq to meet with insurgents or their representatives, said a skillful Iraqi government could co-opt some of the guerrillas and reconcile with the leaders instead of fighting them.

“I generally like a lot of these guys,” he said. “We know who the key people are in all the different cities, and generally how they operate. The problem is getting actionable information so you can either attack them, arrest them or engage them.”

Even as Iraqi leaders wrangle over the contentious issue of offering a broad amnesty to guerrilla fighters, the new Iraqi military and intelligence corps have begun gathering and sharing information on the insurgents with the U.S. military, providing a sharper picture of a complex insurgency.

“Nobody knows about Iraqis and all the subtleties in culture, appearance, religion and so forth better than Iraqis themselves,” said U.S. Army Lt. Col. Daniel Baggio, a military spokesman at Multinational Corps headquarters in Baghdad. “We’re very optimistic about the Iraqis’ use of their own human intelligence to help root out these insurgents.”

The intelligence boost has allowed American pilots to bomb suspected insurgent safe houses over the past two weeks, with Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi saying Iraqis supplied information for at least one of those airstrikes. But the better view of the insurgency also contradicts much of the popular wisdom about it.

Estimates of the insurgents’ manpower tend to be too low. Last week, a former coalition official said 4,000 to 5,000 Baathists form the core of the insurgency, with other attacks committed by a couple hundred supporters of Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and hundreds of other foreign fighters.

Anthony Cordesman, an Iraq analyst with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the figure of 5,000 insurgents “was never more than a wag and is now clearly ridiculous.”

“Part-timers are difficult to count, but almost all insurgent movements depend on cadres that are part-time and that can blend back into the population,” he said.

U.S. military analysts disagree over the size of the insurgency, with estimates running as high as 20,000 fighters when part-timers are added.

Ahmed Hashim, a professor at the U.S. Naval War College, said the higher numbers squared with his findings in a study of the insurgency completed in Iraq.

One hint that the number is larger is the sheer volume of suspected insurgents — 22,000 — who have cycled through U.S.-run prisons. Most have been released. And in April alone, U.S. forces killed as many as 4,000 people, the military official said, including Sunni insurgents and Shiite militiamen fighting under the banner of a radical cleric.

There has been no letup in attacks. On Thursday, insurgents detonated a car bomb and then attacked a military headquarters in Samarra, a center of resistance in the Sunni Triangle 60 miles north of the capital, killing five U.S. soldiers and one Iraqi guardsman.

Guerrilla leaders come from various corners of Saddam’s Baath Party, including lawyers’ groups, prominent families and especially from his Military Bureau, an internal security arm used to purge enemies. They’ve formed dozens of cells.

U.S. military documents obtained by AP show a guerrilla band mounting attacks in Baghdad that consists of two leaders, four sub-leaders and 30 members, broken down by activity. There is a pair of financiers, two cells of car bomb-builders, an assassin, separate teams launching mortar and rocket attacks, and others handling roadside bombs and ambushes.

Most of the insurgents are fighting for a bigger role in a secular society, not a Taliban-like Islamic state, the military official said. Almost all the guerrillas are Iraqis, even those launching some of the devastating car bombings normally blamed on foreigners — usually al-Zarqawi.

The official said many car bombings bore the “tradecraft” of Saddam’s former secret police and were aimed at intimidating Iraq’s new security services.

Many in the U.S. intelligence community have been making similar points, but have encountered political opposition from the Bush administration, a State Department official in Washington said, also speaking on condition of anonymity.

Civilian analysts generally agreed, saying U.S. and Iraqi officials have long overemphasized the roles of foreign fighters and Muslim extremists.

Such positions support the Bush administration’s view that the insurgency is linked to the war on terror. A closer examination paints most insurgents as secular Iraqis angry at the presence of U.S. and other foreign troops.

“Too much U.S. analysis is fixated on terms like ‘jihadist,’ just as it almost mindlessly tries to tie everything to (Osama) bin Laden,” Cordesman said. “Every public opinion poll in Iraq ... supports the nationalist character of what is happening.”

Many guerrillas are motivated by Islam in the same way religion motivates American soldiers, who also tend to pray more when they’re at war, the U.S. military official said.

He said he met Tuesday with four tribal sheiks from Ramadi who “made very clear” that they had no desire for an Islamic state, even though mosques are used as insurgent sanctuaries and funding centers.

“‘We’re not a bunch of Talibans,’” he paraphrased the sheiks as saying.

At the orders of Gen. John Abizaid, the U.S. commander of Mideast operations, Army analysts looked closely for evidence that Iraq’s insurgency was adopting extreme Islamist goals, the official said. Analysts learned that ridding Iraq of U.S. troops was the motivator for most insurgents, not the formation of an Islamic state.

The officer said Iraq’s insurgents have a big advantage over guerrillas elsewhere: plenty of arms, money, and training. Iraq’s lack of a national identity card system — and guerrillas’ refusal to plan attacks by easily intercepted telephone calls — makes them difficult to track.

“They have learned a great deal over the last year, and with far more continuity than the rotating U.S. forces and Iraqi security forces,” Cordesman said of the guerrillas. “They have learned to react very quickly and in ways our sensors and standard tactics cannot easily deal with.””

Pentagon Outlines Troop Rotation Plan for Iraq

New units, to be deployed over several months, will include more reservists. The Army denies it is being stretched too thin.

By Esther Schrader
Times Staff Writer

July 8, 2004

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon is planning for the “worst-case” scenario in Iraq over the next year, preparing to send in more armored units to battle an unrelenting insurgency, a senior Army official told Congress on Wednesday.

Defense officials laid out a detailed roadmap of how they plan to deploy troops over the next year, replacing 140,000 soldiers and Marines now in Iraq with 135,000 troops being sent from bases in the U.S. and Europe in a third rotation of forces starting in November and lasting four months.

The proportion of reservists in Iraq will increase — from 39% to 42% of U.S. forces — as commanders try to bolster critical specialties where they are short and where civilian contractors can no longer be used because of the dangers. Other gaps will be plugged with the call-up of more than 5,600 recent military retirees.

Meanwhile, commanders are looking for ways to fill thousands of openings in military intelligence operations. Overall, of troops going to Iraq beginning this fall, a majority — 55% — will be serving a second time.

Taken together, the plans presented to members of the House Armed Services Committee portrayed a military scrambling to meet future troop needs for the conflict in Iraq and confronting the recurring criticism that they are trying to do too much with too little.

Gen. Richard A. Cody, the Army’s new deputy chief of staff, and other defense officials testified that the Army did not want or need a permanent troop increase, saying they could make do with the soldiers they have.

Lawmakers continued to question that assessment, with Rep. Ike Skelton of Missouri, the committee’s ranking Democrat, calling the Pentagon’s announcement last week that it is calling up 5,600 members of the Individual Ready Reserve of military retirees a sign that the Pentagon is “wearing our people out.” The troops, Skelton said, “are not pawns on a chessboard. They are our treasure.”

Rep. John Kline (R-Minn.) called the number of reservists fighting in Iraq “just too high,” saying employers of called-up reservists had complained to members of Congress.

But Pentagon officials defended the use of the ready reserve, a pool of roughly 118,000 former soldiers who are not members of a specific reserve unit and do not train regularly, yet who have unexpired obligations to complete their military service. Ready reserve soldiers have not been called up in significant numbers since 1990, amid preparations for the Persian Gulf War.

“The fact that its use is rare does not mean that it is inappropriate,” David S.C. Chu, undersecretary of Defense for personnel and readiness, told the committee.

Chu said that of the 5,674 Individual Ready Reserve members mobilized to deploy to Iraq, he expected about 4,000 would go. He said the Pentagon opted to mobilize more troops than it needs because of the likelihood that some of the former service personnel, who had not been undergoing training since they left the service, would not be prepared for combat.

The military officials acknowledged that the Army had to scramble to “backfill” in some areas where it is short of qualified people.

“Our entire force,” Cody testified, “is doing missions other than what we designed them for.”

The most acute shortages, he said, are in military intelligence units, where Army planners calculate they are short 9,000 specialists to man the Army’s new Reconnaissance, Surveillance and Target Acquisition units, as well as its new unmanned aerial vehicles.

“We’re looking for some relief there,” Cody said.

The increasing dangers of being in Iraq have also made it more difficult for Army planners to hire contract workers to drive trucks and repair vehicles, Cody said, forcing the Army to reach deeper into the pool of reservists and individual ready reservists.

He said the planned troop rotation was a “worst-case plan” that required more work from combat service support troops, such as heavy-equipment drivers and engineering units.

“We had to keep more engineer units over there because of the roads as well as some of the bridges, and we had to keep more truck drivers over there because the level of violence was such you couldn’t get the civilian contractors to do some of that stuff,” Cody said.

That, “quite frankly, is what drove us to have to go back to more transportation units … that we had not planned on; more engineer units the second time that we hadn’t planned on” in the past several months, Cody said.

With the insurgency making duty in Iraq more dangerous for U.S. troops, Pentagon planners have chosen to outfit the force rotating into the conflict with 200 additional tanks, more than 6,000 Humvees specially equipped with armor plating, and dozens more Bradley Fighting Vehicles.

“The divisions going in will be more lethal,” Cody said.

The 3rd Infantry Division, for example, which fought to take Baghdad and is slated to begin returning to Iraq in November, will be outfitted this time with 48 Apache helicopters, up from 18 the first time around, along with 38 Black Hawk and 12 Chinook helicopters.

Also slated to join the fight in Iraq is the 10th Mountain Division’s 2nd Brigade; two Marine expeditionary units; a Marine expeditionary force; the Army’s 1st Brigade of the 25th Infantry Division, outfitted with new Stryker wheeled vehicles; the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment; and several National Guard combat brigades, including the 42nd Infantry Division from New York, the 155th Armored Brigade from Mississippi and the 29th Brigade from Hawaii.

*

Troop rotation

Starting in November, 135,000 troops will be sent to Iraq from bases in the United States and Europe, replacing 140,000 soldiers and Marines in Iraq.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-troops8jul08,1,6303323.story?coll=la-headlines-nation

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Army to call up 5,600 IRR Soldiers By Joe Burlas Army News Service July 01, 2004

WASHINGTON—The Army plans to order 5,600 Soldier in the Individual Ready Reserve to active duty for possible deployment with the next Operations Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom rotations.Mailgrams notifying those Soldiers to expect mobilization orders within a week could hit their mailboxes as early as July 6, according to officials who announced the measure in Pentagon press briefing June 30. Those Soldiers called up will have 30 days from the date the orders were issued to take care of personal business before having to report to a mobilization site, officials said. The orders call for 18 months of active duty, but that could be extended for a total of 24 months if needed, they said.The IRR call-up does not impact retired Soldiers, contrary to several civilian media reports on the subject that appeared on television and newspapers June 29 and 30.“We’re dipping into an available manpower pool,” said Robert Smiley, principal assistant for Training, Readiness and Mobilization, Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Manpower and Reserve Affairs. “This is just good personnel management.“The IRR primarily consists of Soldiers who have served their contracted time on active duty or in an Army Reserve Troop Program Unit, but still have a military service obligation to fulfill, said Col. Debra Cook, commander for Human Resources Command – St. Louis, the Reserve’s personnel management center.Congress mandates under Title 10 of the U.S. Code that all services have an IRR.Every Soldier, enlisted or commissioned, has an eight-year military service obligation when he or she joins the Army, Cook said. Often, that commitment is divided between active duty or a TPU assignment and the IRR.“You might have one Soldier sign up for four years on active duty, who then has a four-year IRR commitment, and another Soldier who signs up to serve with a Ready Reserve unit for six years and two years in the IRR—both have IRR commitments to meet their military service obligations,” Cook said. “The enlistment contract spells out exactly what the division is between how long they serve on active duty or a Ready Reserve unit and how long in the IRR.“This is not the first time the Army has used the IRR to fill its manpower needs. During the Gulf War, more than 20,000 IRR Soldiers were mobilized and deployed. Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the Army has called up more than 2,500 IRR Soldiers—the majority through IRR volunteers, though some have been involuntary call-ups.The main purpose of this IRR call-up is to fill personnel shortfalls in a number of Army Reserve and National Guard units that have been tagged to deploy overseas as part of the OIF 3 and OEF 6 rotations planned for late fall, Smiley said. Many of the personnel shortfalls are for Soldiers already assigned to the deploying units who are not deployable due to medical, family or legal issues, he said.The actual mobilization and deployment requirement is for about 4,400 Soldiers, but personnel officials expect to find some of the IRR Soldiers with similar medical, family and legal issues that may keep them from being deployable. Historically speaking, the Army needs to mobilize about 13 IRR Soldiers to get 10 deployable Soldiers, said Raymond Robinson, G1 chief of Operations.The called-up IRR Soldiers will spend about 30 days at a mobilization installation, getting checks to see if they are qualified for deployment, getting individual weapons qualification, conducting Common Task Testing and receiving training in a number of warrior tasks that reflect the realities of today’s operating environment, including how to recognize an improvised explosive devise and reacting to an ambush.Those who do not pass the readiness muster at the mobilization installation for reasons including anything from medical and legal reasons to physical challenges may be disqualified and sent home, Robinson said. Those who pass the muster will be sent on to military occupational specialty schools to get refresher training, normally lasting between two to four weeks. The final stop is joining the deploying unit at least 30 days before deployment for collective training as a unit.While the specific jobs the called-up Soldiers will fill are varied, Cook said the heaviest requirements include truck drivers, mechanics, logistics personnel and administrative specialists.“We will not deploy any Soldier who is not trained or ready,” said Bernard Oliphant, deputy for the Army Operations Center’s Mobilization Division, G3.As of June 22, the IRR contained slightly more than 111,000 Soldiers.
http://www.military.com/NewsContent/0,13319,usa1_070104.00.html?ESRC=dod.nl
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Action Alert: Army to Recall Thousands?

Digging deeper for help in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Army is recalling about 5,600 people. According to an Associated Press article, the Army is recalling to active duty about 5,600 people who recently left the service and still have a reserve obligation. “In a new sign of the strain the insurgency in Iraq has put on the U.S. military, Army officials said last week the involuntary callups will begin in July and run through December. It is the first sizable activation of the Individual Ready Reserve since the 1991 Gulf War, though several hundred people have voluntarily returned to service since the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.” To read the full Associated Press article, click here. Do you agree or disagree with this action? Let you representatives at the DoD know how you feel—your voice matters! Share your view on this issue. Send an email directly to your representatives now through our system. To read past letters to leaders concerning issues in the military, click here. To read more action alerts, click here.
http://www.military.com/MilitaryReport/0,12914,MR_Action_070504,00.html?ESRC=dod.nl
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Army Recalling Thousands Associated Press June 30, 2004

WASHINGTON - Digging deeper for help in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Army is recalling to active duty about 5,600 people who recently left the service and still have a reserve obligation. In a new sign of the strain the insurgency in Iraq has put on the U.S. military, Army officials said Tuesday the involuntary callups will begin in July and run through December. It is the first sizable activation of the Individual Ready Reserve since the 1991 Gulf War, though several hundred people have voluntarily returned to service since the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. Unlike members of the National Guard and Reserve, individual reservists do not perform regularly scheduled training and receive no pay unless they are called up. The Army is targeting its recall at those who recently left the service and thus have the most up-to-date skills. “This was inevitable when it became clear that we would have to maintain significant combat forces in Iraq for a period of years,” said Dan Goure, a military analyst at the Lexington Institute, a think tank. The Army is pinpointing certain skills in short supply, like medical specialists, military police, engineers, transportation specialists and logistics experts. Those selected for recall will be given at least 30 days’ notice to report for training, an Army statement said. Vietnam veteran Chuck Luczynski said in an interview Tuesday that he fears his son, Matt, who is getting out of the Army after four years, will be called back to active duty as part of the individual reserves. The son returned home in March after a one-year tour in Iraq with the 101st Airborne Division, and he’s planning to start a computer programming business. “I think that’s on everybody’s mind right now, that they took their turn and they would hope everybody took a turn so that a few don’t carry the many,” said the elder Luczynski, of Omaha, Neb. The Army is so stretched for manpower that in April it broke a promise to some active-duty units, including the 1st Armored Division, that they would not have to serve more than 12 months in Iraq. It also has extended the tours of other units, including some in Afghanistan. “It is a reflection of the fact that the (active-duty) military is too small for the breadth of challenges we are facing,” Goure said. The men and women recalled from the Individual Ready Reserve will be assigned to Army Reserve and National Guard units that have been or soon will be mobilized for deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan, unless they successfully petition for exemption based on medical or other limitations. Members of Congress were notified Tuesday and a formal Army announced was scheduled for Wednesday. Those in the Individual Ready Reserve are former enlisted soldiers and officers who have some nonactive-duty military service obligation remaining, under terms they signed when they signed on but who chose not to fulfill it in the Guard or Reserve. The Pentagon had hoped to reduce its troop levels in Iraq to about 105,000 this spring, but because of increasingly effective and deadly resistance the level has risen to about 140,000. Military officials have said they may need to stay at that level for at least another year or two, a commitment of forces that could not be maintained by the active force alone. The Army frequently must integrate reservists with its active-duty forces, but it rarely has to reach into the Individual Ready Reserve. The Army has about 117,000 people in this category of reservist; the Navy has 64,000, the Marine Corps 58,000 and the Air Force 37,000. The military has relied heavily on National Guard and Reserve soldiers in Iraq, in part because some essential specialties like military police are found mainly in the reserves rather than the active-duty force and partly because the mission has required more troops than planned. Reserve troops make up at least one-third of the U.S. force in Iraq, and this month they have accounted for nearly half of all troops killed in combat. In January, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld authorized the Army to activate as many as 6,500 people from the Individual Ready Reserve, drawing on presidential authority granted in 2001. Not until May did the Army begin looking in detail at the available pool of people. At that point some Army recruiters caused a controversy when they contacted members of the Individual Ready Reserve and suggested they would wind up in Iraq unless they joined a Reserve or Guard unit. Some complained that they were being coerced to transfer into a Reserve unit.
http://www.military.com/NewsContent/0,13319,FL_army_063004,00.html

——-Message d’origine——-
De : Marjorie Gibson [mailto:

]
Envoyé : mardi 6 juillet 2004 19:29
À : Undisclosed-Recipient:;
Objet : SUBMISSION FROM JOHN CHUCKMAN

July 6, 2004
A DEAFENING SILENCE OF MEANING
John Chuckman
Recently, John Kerry and his wife held a barbecue at the Pennsylvania White House. Never heard of the Pennsylvania White House? It’s actually the homestead of Kerry’s wife, a white-columned mansion on a tailored estate outside Pittsburgh built from the proceeds of a billion cans of spaghetti and bottles of ketchup. Kerry wants everyone to know he’s an ordinary guy so he’s holding barbecues these days instead of crystal-and-candlelight dinners. People who normally never would get past the front gate have now been allowed on the rolled greens to chomp hot dogs.
Those attending a down-home get-together recently were greeted with hay bales designed by a team of Neiman-Marcus window dressers; a custom-made silk flag, gigantic enough to use for hang-gliding, flapped over the mansion in breezes generated by rented Hollywood wind machines; a band subtly suggested the Marines Corps Band playing “Hail to the Chief”; and, as if in homage to Ronald Reagan, a rented soldier home from occupation-duty in Iraq led the crowd through a heart-rending Pledge of Allegiance. They may well have served jelly beans along with the tapioca pudding, but reports don’t tell us.
The new class of visitors to the estate was not allowed to enjoy the hot dogs without receiving a dose of inspiration from the campaign trail, almost the way poor men at a Salvation Army shelter get scripture between bites of doughnut. Kerry enjoined guests to leave the hallowed grounds “with the spirit in an uplifting sense that we’re going to change this country.” Yes, those were his very words, much as we might have received from that other source of constant inspiration, the President himself, down in Crawford, Texas, over some smoldering cows and cold root beer.
Guests apparently left with puzzled faces over what they were being asked, but they merely joined the swelling ranks of puzzled Americans who have attended Kerry’s rallies and speeches.
Kerry likes to say, “This is the most important election of our lifetime,” and his guests heard it again over dollops of tapioca in Dixie Cups. It’s his best line when he doesn’t muff it, although he never explains why the claim should be true. Its threadbare, re-tread quality begins to suggest Richard Nixon’s “It’s time for a change!” a line that got him elected in 1968 so he could vastly expand the pointless killing and destruction in Vietnam.
Everyone understands, though, that Kerry’s slogan is about “anyone but Bush,” exactly the kind of substitute for thinking that gave the world Bush in the first place. Anybody-but-Bush is about the only positive adjective you can apply to the candidacy of John Kerry.
If you want to read some indigestible stuff, finish whatever it is you’re eating and then go to John Kerry’s Town Hall Meeting Internet site. Other than a few slabs of party boilerplate, there is nothing there, absolutely nothing, to inspire Americans and others in the world about the future. On many of the site’s “on the issues” topics, when you go to subtopics, you find nothing of substance. The headlines themselves are the most encouraging words, and they do not even fairly describe what is contained under them. In several cases, there are statements that are positively depressing.
Here is Kerry’s summary statement on Iraq:
Winning the Peace in Iraq…A Strategy for Success
To establish security and move forward with the transition to Iraqi sovereignty, the President must show true leadership in going to the major powers to secure their support of Lakhdar Brahimi’s mission, the establishment of a high commissioner for governance and reconstruction, and the creation of a NATO mission for Iraq. These steps are critical to creating a stable Iraq with a representative government and secure in its borders. Meeting this objective is in the interests of NATO member states, Iraq’s neighbors and all members of the international community. True leadership means sharing authority and responsibility for Iraq with others who have an interest in Iraq’s success. Sharing responsibility is the only way to gain new military and financial commitments, allowing America to truly share the burden and the risk.
This is Kerry-speak for saying that NATO allies should pay part of the human and material cost for America’s mess in Iraq. Why? In case, Kerry hadn’t noticed, Bush has been trying to accomplish this very thing for some time, applying a good deal of nasty pressure to allies, but Iraq, as Bush was pointedly told recently by Europeans, has nothing whatever to do with NATO’s mandate.
I suspect the phrase “true leadership,” apart from being a totally unwarranted advertising claim about the Senator’s dreary career, means Kerry sees himself playing good cop in the old good cop-bad cop routine used by police to break down suspects, but friends and allies aren’t usually regarded as suspects.
Consider the words, “winning the peace.” At first glance, they suggest heroic purpose like that of World War Two, providing a gloss of worthiness to the utter human and material waste of Iraq. The words were undoubtedly selected also to suggest for some Americans, the Planet-of-the-Apes crowd, slogans like “winning in Vietnam.” The word “peace”
was selected with entirely another group of Americans in mind, mostly wishful thinkers and harmless dreamers.
If putting together the words “winning”
and “peace”
suggests to you George Orwell’s “war is peace,” you are not alone, particularly when you consider that Iraq already had peace and was a genuine threat to no one before the United States smashed it.
Tucked under the topic on Iraq at Kerry’s site is an item “Protecting Our Military Families in Times of War: A Military Family Bill of Rights.” Here’s an advertising pitch for tossing a tiny packet of sugar at each military voter, recalling, at one and the same time, scenes in World War Two films where GIs toss sticks of gum to hungry refugees and microphone reminders to shoppers for today’s special at Wal-Mart - all with a suitably sentimental nod to all the Jimmy Stewarts serving at spots like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo’s human dog cages. Well, a packet of sugar is better than nothing, because God knows Kerry’s view of foreign policy promises a future with plenty of the same duty.
We could analyze the rest of the stuff on Kerry’s site - all of it trying to make it appear he has something new to say and all of it about as helpful and clear as the fine print on a prescription-drug brochure - but it just isn’t worth the effort. I’ll only note further that Kerry had a featured item there about China, accusing Bush of letting Americans down about China. Please, Senator, say that we are not being promised another years-long chorus of American hectoring and carping about a proud but poor people working hard to earn their place in sun. Good God, what hypocrisy that was under Clinton.
It is important to remember that George Bush, while a top contender for title of Biggest Flop in American History, is largely a spent force. It is difficult to see what else he could possibly do to damage the planet. Once, not very long ago, his presidential Brain Trust, the neo-con Nazis, advocated mopping up Syria, Iran, and other places whose names they couldn’t even pronounce as soon as they finished up in Iraq. Well, things are not going to finish up any time soon in Iraq. America has spent herself silly trying to stabilize Iraq after de-stabilizing it.
There is a distasteful quality about Bush that people all over the world instinctively feel, and Bush’s efforts, we may all be thankful, will continue being hindered by that perception. Kerry has the advantage of being utterly boring instead of distasteful, but his ideas about the world are remarkably similar to Bush’s. If Americans elect Kerry, they will get a fresh, new Bush who may actually be able to leverage some of the world’s recent weariness and desperate desire for change to carry right on with more destructive stupidity.

U.S. Response to Insurgency Called a Failure
Some top Bush officials and military experts say the Pentagon has no coherent strategy. Little change is expected with Iraq’s new sovereignty.
By Mark Mazzetti
Times Staff Writer

July 6, 2004

WASHINGTON — Almost a year after acknowledging they were facing a well-armed guerrilla war in Iraq, the Pentagon and commanders in the Middle East are being criticized by some top Bush administration officials, military officers and defense experts who accuse the military of failing to develop a coherent, winning strategy against the insurgency.

Inadequate intelligence, poor assessments of enemy strength, testy relations with U.S. civilian authorities in Baghdad and an inconsistent application of force remain key problems many observers say the military must address before U.S. and Iraqi forces can quell the insurgents.

“It’s disappointing that we haven’t been able to have better insight into the command and control of the insurgents,” said one senior official of the now-dissolved Coalition Provisional Authority, recently returned from Baghdad and speaking on condition of anonymity. “And you’ve got to have that if you’re going to have effective military operations.”

It was July 16, 2003, when Army Gen. John Abizaid stood at a Pentagon podium during his first news conference as head of U.S. Central Command and declared — after weeks of Pentagon denials — that U.S. troops were fighting a “classic guerrilla-type war” in Iraq.

Now, after a year of violence and hundreds of U.S. combat deaths, some officials and experts are frustrated that a more effective counterinsurgency plan has not materialized and that the hand-over of power to an interim Iraqi government last week was unlikely to significantly improve the security situation.

“We’re going to have the same cast of characters in Washington and the same commander [Abizaid] in the field,” said Andrew Krepinevich of the Center of Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington, an expert on counterinsurgency warfare. “What gives you a sense of confidence we’re going to become a lot more competent at something we haven’t shown a great deal of competence at doing for a year?”

Some top American officials bristle at the criticism and say the U.S.-led coalition’s plan has been consistent from the beginning: to bring security to Iraq in preparation for an eventual hand-over to Iraqi forces.

“Our strategy is not complicated. It is to train Iraqis as quickly as we possibly can and as efficiently as we possibly can, and to set the conditions so they can take charge of their own security,” said a senior official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

And, the administration argues, U.S. forces handed a strategic defeat in April to both Shiite and Sunni Muslim insurgents, forcing them to lower their sights. Rather than confronting U.S. forces, those insurgents have turned to bombing Iraqi infrastructure and attempting to assassinate leaders of the new Iraqi government.

“They now cannot defeat us on the battlefield, so they are changing their tactics,” the official said.

Yet one of the biggest problems for U.S. military and intelligence officials remains the paucity of hard intelligence about the structure of the insurgency.

For example, when Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was asked recently during Senate testimony whether the Iraqi insurgency was being coordinated from a central hub, he responded: “The intelligence community, as far as I know, will not ... give you an answer, because they can’t give me an answer.”

Military experts point out that a counterinsurgency is the most difficult type of war to wage. With the exception of the successful British effort in Malaya in the 1950s, history is littered with examples of unsuccessful counterinsurgency strategies carried out by great powers. As the French learned in Algeria in the 1950s, the United States in Vietnam a decade later and the British in Northern Ireland, the most difficult part of any such operation is to separate the insurgents from the civilians from whom they draw strength. This, some top Pentagon officials say, has been one of the U.S. military’s difficulties in Iraq.

“The hope that the Iraqi people, upon having Saddam [Hussein] deposed, would step forward enthusiastically and embrace this new opportunity, turned out to be more optimistic than it should have been,” Marine Gen. Peter Pace, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently told Congress.

“That, I think, has led to the opportunity for the terrorists then to be able to operate without fear of being exposed by the population.”

The three-week desert war during the spring of 2003, ending in the collapse of Hussein’s regime, vindicated the idea that a small U.S. ground force, combined with billions of dollars worth of military technology, could make quick work of a larger, yet hollow, enemy army. It was a conventional war that the U.S. military had trained and been equipped for since emerging from the jungles of Vietnam three decades ago; a strategy executed with success during Operation Desert Storm in 1991.

What came afterward was far more difficult, and U.S. commanders over the last year have used what critics call a trial-and-error strategy against the insurgency, with varying degrees of success.

Immediately after the fall of Baghdad, U.S. commanders set their sights on capturing the biggest stars in the Baath Party constellation, creating the notorious deck of cards depicting the most wanted people from Hussein’s regime. Brigades of the Army’s 4th Infantry Division carried out raids throughout the so-called Sunni Triangle in search of Hussein loyalists such as Izzat Ibrahim, vice chairman of the Baath Party’s Revolutionary Command Council.

The raids netted some important figures. Yet U.S. officials now concede that focusing too much on the top regime members did not have the expected impact on the insurgency.

“I think there was probably too great a willingness to believe that once we got the 55 people on the blacklist, the rest of those killers would stop fighting,” Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz told Congress recently.

Defenders of American counterinsurgency efforts argue that the violence in Iraq over the last year is part of a calculated plan by members of Hussein’s former regime, not the result of missteps by the U.S.-led occupation authority.

“It is the military and intelligence and secret police that never surrendered. And they are continuing the fight,” said the senior administration official.

After a string of bombings last summer — most significantly, the destruction of the United Nations compound in August — U.S. commanders adopted a get-tough approach in central Iraq. Troops used barbed wire to encircle entire villages, including Al Auja, where Hussein was born. In November, the U.S. launched bombing raids on suspected insurgent hide-outs in Baghdad.

Ground troops scored successes during the period, developing better intelligence about the Baathist insurgents. The 4th Infantry Division drew up complex family trees of suspected party loyalists, ultimately leading to Hussein’s capture in December.

With the new year, the Marines began developing a “velvet glove” strategy for their imminent deployment to the Sunni Triangle — in contrast to the more confrontational approach of the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division, which had responsibility for that area until March. Relying on the Marine Corps “Small Wars Manual,” the 1st Marine Division planned to carry out more foot patrols in cities such as Fallouja and send Marine platoons into villages to live for extended periods. They also planned to shun the use of aerial bombardment or artillery.

But that strategy went by the boards with the killing and mutilation of four American contractors, which precipitated a Marine assault on Fallouja in April. That offensive was cut short after U.S. officials in Baghdad and Washington decided the bloody campaign was having a negative impact on the larger American effort in Iraq. The Marines pulled back, marking another swerve in the counterinsurgency effort.

“We were winning, but we didn’t get a win. It’s a hard pill to swallow,” complained one Marine operations officer who recently returned from Iraq, speaking on condition of anonymity. “Now, nobody knows what’s going on inside the city.”

In many cases, U.S. troops have been able to adapt on the ground over the past year. The Army’s 101st Airborne, which fought to Baghdad, then assumed responsibility for Kurdish territories after the war, is praised by Pentagon officials for bringing Kurdish leaders into the U.S. fold and keeping the level of violence in northern Iraq to a minimum.

More recently, the Army’s 1st Armored Division is credited with successfully putting down revolts by Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada Sadr’s militia in Najaf and other southern towns with a comparatively limited use of force.

“It was a strategic defeat for Sadr,” said the senior administration official. The commander of the 1st Armored, Maj. Gen. Martin Dempsey, “put that mob action down quickly and decisively,” the official said.

Some top U.S. commanders express optimism that as the U.S. military continues to adjust to the difficult warfare conditions in Iraq, the counterinsurgency efforts will produce more positive results.

“I think we’re in good shape going forward,” said Maj. Gen. Charles H. Swannack Jr., commander of the 82nd Airborne Division. “It will all come out well if we stay the course.”

At the same time, many experts point out that counterinsurgency work is as much a political mission as it is a military one, requiring a comprehensive strategy involving civilian officials planning reconstruction projects and elections and military officers gathering intelligence and carrying out raids against suspected insurgents.

In Iraq, some top military officials say, the relationship between the U.S. military and the Coalition Provisional Authority was often tense, making such close coordination difficult.

“CPA representatives would not get out in the field to get on-the-spot input for assessment,” Swannack said.

Maj. Gen. James N. Mattis, who commands the 1st Marine Division in Al Anbar province in western Iraq, has argued for months with U.S. civilians in Baghdad over the pace of reconstruction and the status of U.S. forces after the hand-over of power, Marine sources say. “He did not pull any punches in his communications” to Baghdad, said one Marine operations officer, speaking on condition of anonymity.

U.S. military officials hope dissolution of the CPA and creation of an embassy in Baghdad will help mend fences and engender the cooperation that, experts say, is critical for the counterinsurgency effort.

Although the Army recently has been incorporating counterinsurgency work into its training of young soldiers, experts say that for decades after Vietnam, the Army focused almost entirely on fighting large tank battles in the desert, not armed militias in Third World cities.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, however, when the doctrine of overwhelming force against an enemy became less relevant, the Army found it needed to change course, and quickly. Back it went into the counterinsurgency business.

Said analyst Krepinevich: “It’s like telling General Motors to stop building cars, and then 25 years later telling them you want them to build a car.”

Times staff writers John Hendren and Doyle McManus contributed to this report.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-counterinsurgency6jul06.story

Pour la version STOVL, vous remarquerez qu’elle est censée arriver en 2012 au mieux alors que le porte-avions britannique arrivera en 2013. Pensez donc au confort actuel dans lequel doivent baigner nos amis anglais, puisque l’architecture du porte avions dépend bien de la version de l’avion qui sera in fine embarqué.

Public debate on Turkey to come
01.07.2004 - 09:01 CET | By Honor Mahony EUOBSERVER / THE HAGUE - The Dutch EU Presidency has pledged to be fair on the question of whether Ankara is ready to start EU membership negotiations amid concerns that the EU may not be ready for Turkey.

“The Netherlands feels a responsibility to make sure that our decision is well-reasoned and rock-solid”, said Dutch prime minister Jan Peter Balkenende on the eve of the Dutch EU Presidency.

While the European Commission will decide in the autumn whether Ankara has met the political criteria for joining the 25-nation block, Mr Balkenende says this is just one of two types of debate that will take place.

The Dutch leader said that discussion on the political criteria is “technical”.

The second discussion amongst the European public is likely to centre around whether “an Islamic country belongs to Europe”.

However, the Dutch are insisting that this debate, as well as whether the EU is actually ready for a country the size of Turkey, should not be additional criteria.

“We need fair play … the rules of the game are clear”, said Mr Balkenende referring to the fact that if the European Commission decides that Ankara is ready, it will then be up to leaders in December to actually decide, on the basis of the report, to open negotiations without delay.

Late debate
With French leadership ambivalent on Turkish EU membership, the opposition Christian Democrats in Germany actively opposing it and the Austrians also making negative sounds, the Dutch do feel that a debate will come - it is just later than it should have been.

Referring to 1999, when EU leaders actually decided to give Turkey candidate status, Dutch Europe minister Atzo Nicolaï said, “that was the time for debate”.

He added, “I think the leaders knew what they decided but the public didn’t know”.

However, it is too late for the “principle debate” of whether Turkey should join the EU, he concluded.

“We have to realise Turkey has to be ready and the European Union has to be ready”.

Mr Nicolaï also conceded that there is a risk that the planned Dutch referendum on the Constitution, which is set to happen in the same timeframe as a decision on Turkey, may be linked to the issue.

“That is always a risk”, he said.

http://www.euobserver.com/?aid=16787&rk=1
—-

Realism on possibility of Turkey meeting EU criteria

24.06.2004 - 10:22 CET | By Mark Beunderman
EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - EU and Turkish politicians and experts seem increasingly prepared to admit that it will be impossible for Turkey to meet the EU’s political criteria before the end of the year.

During a debate organised yesterday (23 June) by the European Policy Centre and Turkish NGO, the ARI Movement, it emerged that within both EU political and research circles, as well as from the Turkish side, the belief in full Turkish compliance with EU democracy and human rights criteria is lacking.

Formally, the fulfilment of the EU’s democracy and human rights standards is a precondition for Ankara to start accession talks with the EU.

EU leaders will decide in December whether or not to start formal accession negotiations on the basis of a crucial report by the European Commission to be released in October.

However, many believe the process has gone far and it would be counterproductive to reject Turkey now.

Dutch foreign minister Bernard Bot underlined the importance of the political criteria yesterday stating that the political criteria “are the sole measuring stick that should be applied” to Turkey.

Getting the green light anyway?
But Murat Mercan, Turkey’s representative at the Council of Europe said, during the debate, “don’t expect us to solve all our problems before December” but went on to stress the “incredible” reforms achieved by his country.

Selcan Yilmaz, a board member of the ARI movement, a civil society group, stated: “The countries which acceded to the EU on 1 May did not comply fully with EU standards either. They acceded nevertheless”.

But the Dutch Green MEP, Joost Lagendijk, urged the Turks to be even more open about this scenario.

“It will be impossible for Turkey to comply 100% with the EU’s political criteria. That will not happen before the end of the year. Turkish politicians should drop their claim that Turkey will fully comply”.

Civil-military relations
Similarly, the German researcher Heinz Kramer, working for the prestigious Berlin thinktank Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik, said that in the field of civil-military relations particularly, Turkey still had a long way to go.

“The way the military intervened in the recent debate on university reform shows that Turkey is still far from having reached EU standards when it comes to civil-military relations”.

But he pleaded for a “non-static approach” with regard to the EU’s political criteria - meaning that accession talks should be opened as soon as possible even if the criteria were not fully met.

“Turkey has made tremendous progress in political reforms in the last few years, which has significantly affected the political and social reality on the ground. If the EU does not give the green light for accession talks in December, this will produce serious backlashes for pro-reform forces in the country.”

No holiday for the Turks
“Small political circles in Turkey believe that the EU uses double standards towards us. As much as I disagree with these voices, they could be strengthened if we were treated unfairly”, said Ms Yilmaz.

However, the Turks will keep working hard to keep the reform process going, said Mr Mercan: “There will be no holiday for us this summer until - probably - we will get a date.”

http://www.euobserver.com/?sid=15&aid=16724
—-

Turkey’s accession to the EU: the final countdown

By Murat Mercan Heinz Kramer Selcan Yilmaz Date: 25-06-2004 Keywords: International Relations and Security   Turkey   EU enlargement   Wider Europe  
A Dialogue on “Turkey’s Accession to the EU: The Final Countdown” was held by the EPC in collaboration with the ARI Movement. Muran Mercan, Member of the Turkish Parliament and Vice-President of the AK Party gave an opening presentation and Dr Heinz Kramer, Director of the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik and Selcan Yilmaz, Board Member of the ARI Movement participated in the following panel discussion. The event was chaired by EPC Founding Chairman, Stanley Crossick. A question and answer session followed. This is not an official record of the proceedings, and specific remarks are not necessarily attributable.Opening the Dialogue, Turkish MP Murat Mercan, Vice-President of the governing Justice and Development Party (AK), and chairman of the Turkish delegation to the Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly, said his country had done a lot to meet the political accession criteria, especially in the areas of democratisation and human rights. There had been “incredible” constitutional changes – the introduction of a national security court, the abolition of the death penalty, the removal of all military representatives from higher education organisations and a free press. He acknowledged concerns about implementation, but despite shortcomings, Turkey had a strong fundamental commitment to tackling its problems, especially human rights violations. The question was whether Turkey had sufficiently met the Copenhagen Criteria.“I think we are entitled to be credited for what we have done. We deserve the goodwill and trust of the European community for the things we have done so far.”Turkey’s accession was an historic opportunity for Europeans to create a “world of values,” Christian or otherwise, rather than risking a “clash of civilizations.”Mr Mercan said: “If we can create a world where a value-based Union is possible, then there is always hope for others to be included in this club. That is why it is very strategic for all of us. Only then can we give hope to people living in the Middle East.” The decision over the acceptance or rejection of Turkey by the EU would be “a litmus test for whole world.”Chairman Stanley Crossick said that the question of religion had to be grasped and discussed openly: was Islam by its nature compatible with the EU and, if Turkey joined, how would the rights and obligations for all EU citizens be redefined?However, it was wrong to talk about Islam as if it is one uniform religion with a uniform set of beliefs and practices, although the involvement of Islam in daily life was evidently greater than in Christianity, even at Islam’s secular end he said.Panel DiscussionHe invited the panel to tackle the issue of whether Turkey had done enough to meet the Copenhagen Criteria, and whether Turkey’s membership would be an asset or a threat to the rest of the EU.Dr Heinz Kramer made a clear distinction: the issue of Turkey’s EU membership was not a debate about Islam joining Europe: it was a debate about a country joining the European Union. He did not think seeing the issue as an ideological question was helpful. Turkey was not attempting to achieve some “political Islam” by seeking to join a non-Islamic EU.Expectations were becoming more and more divergent; support was growing in Turkey but waning in the EU, where the public was concerned about the consequences of the latest enlargement, the ambiguities of the recently-agreed constitution, and the “disastrous” euro-elections results. But it would be a bad omen if Turkey was only half-heartedly backed by the EU-25 in December, even if there was a positive decision.Has Turkey fulfilled the Copenhagen Criteria?It was a “mixed picture” said Dr Kramer. There had been tremendous progress, with a large amount of constitutional and legal reform affecting the political and social reality in Turkey. Politics in Turkey was changing, from an “ossified” system to one of a modern European liberal democracy.On the other hand, Turkey had not yet sufficiently met the criteria: military involvement in civilian life was still far from being in compliance with EU standards; the Kurdish problem was still far from resolved satisfactorily, with political, economic and social shortcomings in the Southeast particularly; legal reforms had not yet been implemented across the country; and there was no “broad-based ownership” of the reforms promised by the state and society. In simple terms, said Dr Kramer, more political effort was needed.That said, the EU had to support what was being done by giving the green light for the opening of accession negotiations – indeed, Turkey required the “anchor” of the EU’s support precisely to be able to successfully conclude its far-reaching reforms. Ever since Turkey was named an official candidate country at the Helsinki summit in December 1999, EU-Turkey relations had developed “a dynamic which would forbid any other decision.”Dr Kramer pointed out that the fate of the AK party was “indexed to the fate of accession.” Failure to agree to start accession talks in December would create “a serious political and economic backlash.” He dismissed the notion of Turkish accession as a threat to the EU: “That would be against political logic: the Union would not take a member it felt threatened by.”Turkish membership not the “end” of the EU, but the “biggest step”Selcan Yilmaz described the reforms going on in Turkey as the most significant since the country was founded. From the abolition of the death penalty to press freedom, rights of assembly, ethnic minority rights, and the ending of the state security courts, political and social life was being virtually reshaped. Responding to general complaints on the lack of implementation of the promised changes, she insisted “significant” progress had been made – some of the new EU countries which joined on 1 May this year still had not implemented all the necessary reforms for accession. She agreed with Dr Kramer that postponing a decision on opening negotiations would only weaken the drive for reform.Some had said Turkey was already too big, with a huge Muslim population and very different values from those of the EU. But Ms Yilmaz said the relevant EU values were democracy, human rights and respect for minorities. Religious and cultural values, she said, were not part of European integration. Turkish membership would enrich the EU culturally: “It would not be end of the European Union, but the biggest step.”The following discussion with the audience raised questions concerning integration, civil military relations in Turkey and the Kurdish situation. ConclusionStanley Crossick concluded on the day’s discussion by pointing out that, since signing the Association Agreement, the EU had a legal and moral commitment - provided that the criteria were “objectively” satisfied. “We live in an unstable world and whatever problems Turkish accession might bring, they would be far less than the problems of destabilisation in Turkey and beyond without accession.” It would take ten years to complete negotiations, which should be sufficient to ensure EU consolidation, satisfying the political criteria and convincing public opinion.

http://www.theepc.net/en/default.asp?TYP=ER&LV=427&PG=ER/EN/detail&l=&AI=427

L’éditorial du “Monde”

SPLENDIE ISOLEMENT

LE MONDE | 30.06.04 | 14h09 •  MIS A JOUR LE 30.06.04 | 16h05

Depuis quinze mois et le début de l’intervention américano-britannique en Irak, Jacques Chirac a une équation diplomatique difficile à résoudre : maintenir son opposition à la guerre sans passer pour un nostalgique honteux de Saddam Hussein - ce que les Américains ont insinué à plusieurs reprises - et sans manquer à ses devoirs d’allié. La situation en Irak a apporté des arguments au président de la République. L’absence d’armes de destruction massive a montré que l’intervention militaire était inutile pour désarmer Saddam. Les violences et les rébellions ont conforté la thèse française selon laquelle l’ingérence militaire de puissances occidentales dans un pays arabe nourrirait le terrorisme au lieu de l’étouffer.
Parmi ses pairs de l’Alliance Atlantique et de l’Union européenne, Jacques Chirac n’est pas le seul à le penser. Le problème pour la diplomatie française est qu’il est bien souvent le seul à le dire. Au sommet de l’OTAN qui s’est achevé mardi 29 juin à Istanbul, la France a été isolée dans son refus de céder aux demandes américaines et dans sa critique sans fard des prises de position publiques de George W. Bush. Que, devant les journalistes, le président de la République ait affirmé le contraire ne change rien à cette réalité.
Jacques Chirac a quelques raisons d’être irrité. George W. Bush n’a-t-il pas inauguré sa visite à Istanbul en faisant la leçon aux Européens quant à l’entrée de la Turquie dans l’UE ? Un “terrain” sur lequel il n’a rien à faire, a répliqué le président français, qui a ensuite profité de chaque occasion pour manifester sa différence avec la politique américaine, sur l’Irak, l’Afghanistan, le conflit israélo-palestinien…
La France peut tirer quelques satisfactions d’avoir poussé la Maison Blanche à renoncer à ses propositions les plus extrêmes concernant l’implication de l’OTAN en Irak ou le projet de Grand Moyen-Orient. Elle n’en a pas moins été obligée d’accepter, dans toutes les récentes réunions internationales, l’ordre du jour proposé par George W. Bush. Forts de leur statut de seule superpuissance, soutenus par un nombre croissant d’alliés avec les élargissements successifs de l’OTAN et de l’Union européenne, les Etats-Unis poussent leur avantage.
En Irak leur préoccupation est double : donner une légitimité internationale à leur intervention et relever une partie de leurs troupes par des forces de l’OTAN. La France a cédé sur le premier point en votant les récentes résolutions de l’ONU. Elle résiste sur le second sans pouvoir bloquer un engrenage susceptible de conduire, tôt ou tard, à une présence de l’organisation atlantique à Bagdad.
C’est un combat d’arrière-garde qui illustre le dilemme de Jacques Chirac : ne pas s’opposer à la reconstruction d’un Irak “souverain” sans pour autant se renier. C’est aussi une position d’attente qui est censée permettre de coopérer avec John Kerry, s’il gagne l’élection présidentielle, mais n’empêchera pas de vivre avec George W. Bush, s’il est réélu.
• ARTICLE PARU DANS L’EDITION DU 01.07.04

depuis www2.chinadaily.com.cn
***

NATO a dupe for Washington
Su Huimin
2004-06-28 06:22

On the surface it appears the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has been penetrating Central Asia in recent years. However, the real “penetrator” is not NATO but rather the United States.

A geographic corridor linking Asia and Europe, Central Asia and Caucasia is the region’s main thoroughfare. This demonstrates clearly the strategic importance of the area.

More importantly, Central Asia and Caucasia occupy the “soft underbelly” of the former Soviet Union, the main Cold War rival of the US, and they border the Middle East, Washington’s key strategic target, and neighbouring the emerging China and India.

Strategically, Washington’s all-out penetration into this region conforms to its four goals.

First, pushing forward into the area under the “NATO” banner the US can lead Europe by the nose and force its European allies to go beyond Europe and expand their service to US global interests.

Second, the US can extend its political influence and military presence into the territory of the former Soviet Union and establish military bases at the frontier of Russia so as to further reduce Russia’s strategic space.

Third, it can contain Russia from the west and southwest to prevent Russia from staging a comeback some day to challenge the hegemonic status of the US.

Fourth, it can gain a toehold in the hinterland of Asia, which can both ensure US domination of the area and expand its influence to the Middle East, South Asia and the western border of China.

It is apparent that penetration into Central Asia and Caucasia is part of the US global strategy.

In fact, regardless of dismembering the former Yugoslavia on the excuse of “ethnic problems,” occupying Afghanistan in the name of hunting down terrorist Osama bin Laden, and waging war against Iraq on the groundless pretext that Saddam was stockpiling “weapons of mass destruction,” the real purpose behind the US actions is to seize the key belt from the Balkans to the Middle East, Central Asia and Caucasia. By taking advantage of its status as the world’s only superpower, America is plotting to lay the foundation for absolute hegemonic status in the 21st century.

Grabbing strategic resources, in particular oil and gas resources, is another reason for the US to covet this area. According to a German publication, 70 per cent of the world’s oil and gas resources is concentrated at the belt from West Siberia to the Middle East via the Caspian Sea. The most vigorous economies in the world, namely, the US, Europe Union, East Asia and Southeast Asia have differing degrees of dependency on the Gulf resources.

In 2001, the US imported 2.78 million barrels of crude oil every day from the Gulf region, which was 23.9 per cent of its daily import. Europe imported 3.35 million barrels every day, which was 30.7 per cent of its daily import. East Asia and Southeast Asia imported 11.31 million barrels of crude oil from that region every day, which was 72.6 per cent of its daily import.

Hence, if the US controls the oil and gas resources of this region, it controls the “energy gate” of Europe and in particular East Asia and Southeast Asia, which means that the US controls the “nervous centralis” of the world economy.

History has proved that many bloody wars have broken out in the Middle East for seizing the oil resources. There also exists such a danger that the oil and gas resources of Central Asia could become a factor igniting conflicts or triggering struggle between superpowers.

NATO’s activities in Central Asia and its neighbouring area are being carried out to help push the US agenda. So far, with the name of “peaceful partnership” initiated by the US, NATO has established contacts with Central Asian nations.

According to the interpretation of the NATO, the purpose of promoting “peaceful partnership” is to strengthen the political relations between member nations and provide them a platform for participating in the NATO’s political and military activities, which, in fact, is the attempt by the US to win over periphery alliances and expand its sphere of influence.

The US, through the eastward expansion of NATO, has gradually pushed its military front from the Baltic Sea to Central and Eastern Europe and then to the region near the heart of Russia. In the region of the Balkans and Southern Europe, Russia’s ex-allies have already come under the banner of the US. Recently, even Finland, which claims neutralism as its principle, indicated its intention to join NATO.

In this way, from the north to the south, the US has already tightly contained Russia. Caucasia and the eight Central Asian nations used to be a part of the former Soviet Union and is now the “backyard” of Russia, into which the US had no chance to penetrate before.

However, in the recent years, under the banner of “combating terrorism,” the US has greatly enhanced its political, economic and, in particular, military presence in that area, which is obviously a war of competition against Russia. Georgia can be viewed as a reflection of the competition between the US and Russia in that area.

Prior to the 1990s, Georgia was in fact a part of Russia. Nevertheless, the Americans have exerted increasing influence in this country. According to the US-Georgia Military Agreement reached in March 2003, the Americans can enter Georgia even without a visa or any travel documents and the US army can use Georgia’s military facilities according to their own needs.

There are two different opinions in Russia with regard to the US presence in Georgia. One of them regards that the US has no intention of remaining in Georgia for long and that Central Asia will join NATO as the traditional sphere of influence of Russia so that it will play a role as a “petite partner” in Central Asia as Russia plays in the new world structure.

The other opinion considers that Russia should be wary of the US. They realize that by attempting to transform former Soviet republics into “unsinkable aircraft carriers,” the US presence in Central Asia could have great impact upon Russia.

(China Daily 06/28/2004 page6)

An Army of One?
In the war on terrorism, alliances are not an obstacle to victory. They’re the key to it. By Gen. Wesley Clark September 2002

A few days after September 11, I happened to be walking the halls of the Pentagon, the scene of so many contentious meetings during my years as commander of NATO forces in Europe, and ran into an old acquaintance, now a senior official. We chatted briefly about TV coverage of the crisis and the impending operations in Afghanistan. At his invitation, I began to share some thoughts about how we had waged the Kosovo war by working within NATO—but he cut me off. “We read your book,” he scoffed. “And no one is going to tell us where we can or can’t bomb.” That was exactly how the United States proceeded. Of course, the campaign in Afghanistan, as it unfolded, wasn’t an all-American show. The United States sought and won help from an array of countries: basing rights in Central Asian states and in Pakistan; some shared intelligence from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and other Muslim states; diplomatic backing from Russia and China; air and naval support from France; naval refueling from Japan; special forces from the United Kingdom, and so on. But unlike the Kosovo campaign, where NATO provided a structured consultation and consensus-shaping process, allied support in this war took the form of a “floating” or “flexible” coalition. Countries supported the United States in the manner and to the extent they felt possible, but without any pretenses of sharing in major decisions. European leaders sought to be more involved. At the Europeans’ urging, NATO even declared—invoking, for the first time, Article V of its founding treaty—that the attack on the United States represented an attack on every member. But even so, Washington bypassed and essentially marginalized the alliance. The United Nations was similarly sidelined. The first weeks of the Afghanistan campaign against the Taliban went well—an outcome that didn’t surprise anyone who has had the honor to exercise command over these magnificent outfits. But the early successes seem to have reinforced the conviction of some within the U.S. government that the continuing war against terrorism is best waged outside the structures of international institutions—that American leadership must be “unfettered.” This is a fundamental misjudgment. The longer this war goes on—and by all accounts, it will go on for years—the more our success will depend on the willing cooperation and active participation of our allies to root out terrorist cells in Europe and Asia, to cut off funding and support of terrorists and to deal with Saddam Hussein and other threats. We are far more likely to gain the support we need by working through international institutions than outside of them. We’ve got a problem here: Because the Bush administration has thus far refused to engage our allies through NATO, we are fighting the war on terrorism with one hand tied behind our back. All Together Now That day at the Pentagon, the senior official and I never had the opportunity to complete the discussion. But it was clear that he had totally misread the lessons of the Kosovo campaign. NATO wasn’t an obstacle to victory in Kosovo; it was the reason for our victory. For 78 days in the spring of 1999, the alliance battled to halt the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo’s Albanians being carried out by the predominantly Serb troops and government of then-President Slobodan Milosevic. It was the first actual war NATO had fought in its 50-year history. Like the U.S. war in Afghanistan, it was predominantly an air campaign (though the threat of a ground attack, I believe, proved decisive). America provided the leadership, the target nominations, and almost all of the precision strikes. Still, it was very much a NATO war. Allied countries flew some 60 percent of the sorties. Because it was a NATO campaign, each bomb dropped represented a target that had been approved, at least in theory, by each of the alliance’s 19 governments. Much of my time as allied commander was spent with various European defense officials, walking them through proposed targets and the reasoning behind them. Sometimes there were disagreements and occasionally we had to modify those lists to take into account the different countries’ political concerns and military judgements. For all of us involved—the president, secretaries of state and defense, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and me—it was a time-consuming and sometimes frustrating process. But in the end, this was the decisive process for success, because whatever we lost in theoretical military effectiveness we gained manyfold in actual strategic impact by having every NATO nation on board. NATO itself acted as a consensus engine for its members. Because it acts on the basis of such broad agreement, every decision is an opportunity for members to dissent—therefore, every decision generates pressure to agree. Greece, for example, never opposed a NATO action, though its electorate strongly opposed the war and the Greek government tried in other ways to maintain an acceptable “distance” from NATO military actions. This process evokes leadership from the stronger states and pulls the others along. Of course, this wasn’t a pleasant experience for any of the participants. For U.S. leaders during the war, it meant continuing dialogue, frictions, and occasional hard exchanges with some allies to get them on board. For some European leaders, the experience must have been the reverse: a continuing pressure from the United States to approve actions—to strike targets—that would generate domestic criticism at home. There was no escaping the fact that this was every government’s war, that they were intrinsically part of the operation, and each was, ultimately, liable to be held accountable by its voters for the outcome. In the darkest days before the NATO 50th anniversary summit in late April in Washington, British Prime Minister Tony Blair came to our headquarters in Belgium on very short notice. To be honest, it wasn’t altogether clear why he was coming. But as he and I sat alone in my office, it quickly became apparent. “Are we going to win?” he asked me. “Will we win with an air campaign alone? Will you get ground troops if you need them?” Blair made it very clear that the future of every government in Western Europe, including his own, depended on a successful outcome of the war. Therefore, he was going to do everything it took to succeed. No stopping halfway. No halfheartedness. That was the real lesson of the Kosovo campaign at the highest level: NATO worked. It held political leaders accountable to their electorates. It made an American-dominated effort essentially their effort. It made an American-led success their success. And, because an American-led failure would have been their failure, these leaders became determined to prevail. NATO not only generated consensus, it also generated an incredible capacity to alter public perceptions, enabling countries with even minimal capacities to participate collectively in the war. As one minister of defense told me afterwards, “Before Kosovo, you couldn’t use the word ‘war’ in my country. War meant defeat, destruction, death, and occupation. Now it is different. We have won one!” Squeezing Slobodan Milosevic was hoping the alliance would crack and the bombing campaign would fall apart. Instead, NATO’s determination increased over time and the bombing intensified. He was hoping that neighboring countries, such as Bulgaria and Romania, would not cooperate with the West, and indeed, large majorities of their citizens initially opposed the war. But the power of NATO extended even to these countries, which at that point were non-members. We simply made clear to their leaders that if they wanted to be considered for eventual membership in NATO—and they did, very much—then they’d have to help us against Milosevic, which they did, quickly. Faced with this remarkable unity of effort and determination, even the Russians, who strongly sympathized with the Serbs, also abandoned Milosevic in the end. Other international institutions helped us tighten the noose. The United States acted under the authority of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1199, passed in the autumn of 1998, and authorizing all available means to deal with the humanitarian crisis in Kosovo—language which helped give our military intervention international legal and moral authority. The threat against Milosevic of war criminal charges was additional leverage. When the International Criminal Tribunal indicted Milosevic for war crimes on May 25, 1999, the resolve of our European allies notably stiffened—a fact that today’s domestic opponents of the international court should keep in mind. In the end, NATO achieved every one of its aims. With the air war intensifying, a ground invasion being prepared, and no other country to turn to for help, Milosevic in early June pulled his troops, police, and weaponry out of Kosovo. A NATO-led international peacekeeping force entered to establish order. Nearly a million Kosovars returned to their homes. Weakened by his defeat, Milosevic lost an election he had tried to rig in his favor. When he still refused to cede power, a student-led uprising did the job for him. Milosevic is now behind bars at The Hague and is being tried as a war criminal. Though Serbia and Kosovo are still struggling with the aftermath of ethnic conflict and autocratic leadership, they are now governed by democratically elected leaders eager for good relations with the West. All this was achieved at a remarkably slight cost, minimal destruction on the ground, no NATO casualties, and relatively few civilian deaths despite the use of some 23,000 bombs and missiles. What caused this outcome was not just the weapons of war. Forces far beyond the bombs and bullets were at work: the weight of international diplomacy; the impact of international law; and the “consensus-engine” of NATO, which kept all the Allies in the fight. The lesson of Kosovo is that international institutions and alliances are really another form of power. They have their limitations and can require a lot of maintenance. But used effectively, they can be strategically decisive. Bin Laden, War Criminal The Kosovo campaign suggests alternatives in waging and winning the struggle against terrorism: greater reliance on diplomacy and law and relatively less on the military alone. Soon after September 11, without surrendering our right of self defense, we should have helped the United Nations create an International Criminal Tribunal on International Terrorism. We could have taken advantage of the outpourings of shock, grief, and sympathy to forge a legal definition of terrorism and obtain the indictment of Osama bin Laden and the Taliban as war criminals charged with crimes against humanity. Had we done so, I believe we would have had greater legitimacy and won stronger support in the Islamic world. We could have used the increased legitimacy to raise pressure on Saudi Arabia and other Arab states to cut off fully the moral, religious, intellectual, and financial support to terrorism. We could have used such legitimacy to strengthen the international coalition against Saddam Hussein. Or to encourage our European allies and others to condemn more strongly the use of terror against Israel and bring peace to that region. Reliance on a compelling U.N. indictment might have given us the edge in legitimacy throughout much of the Islamic world that no amount of “strategic information” and spin control can provide. On a purely practical level, we might have avoided the embarrassing arguments during the encirclement of Kandahar in early December 2001, when the appointed Afghan leader wanted to offer the Taliban leader amnesty, asking what law he had broken, while the United States insisted that none should be granted. We might have avoided the continuing difficulties of maintaining hundreds of prisoners in a legal no-man’s land at Guantanamo Bay, which has undercut U.S. legitimacy in the eyes of much of the world. Instead of cutting NATO out, we should have prosecuted the Afghan campaign with NATO, as we did in Kosovo. Of course, it would have been difficult to involve our allies early on, when we ourselves didn’t know what we wanted to do, or how to achieve it. The dialogue and discussions would have been vexing. But in the end, we could have kept NATO involved without surrendering to others the design of the campaign. We could have simply phased the operation and turned over what had begun as a U.S.-only effort to a NATO mission, under U.S. leadership. Even winning European approval of the air campaign need not have proved troublesome. The most serious difficulties we had in garnering European support for the Kosovo air campaign concerned bombing the so-called “dual-use” targets: bridges, power stations, TV towers, and government buildings in Belgrade. The United States believed such attacks were crucial to breaking Milosevic’s ability to wage war. The Europeans, deeply concerned about potential civilian casualties, preferred to hit Yugoslav military targets in Kosovo. In the end, we bombed both. But a similar disagreement in Afghanistan between the United States and Europeans would have been highly unlikely, for the simple reason that the American bombing campaign focused exclusively on military targets. The United States concentrated its firepower on Taliban and al Qaeda troops, hideouts, and weapons stores—precisely the kinds of targets the Europeans were most likely to have approved. Sleepers in Seattle NATO involvement would probably not have hastened our victory in Afghanistan. But had the Afghan campaign been waged with NATO, I believe we would have been in a stronger position to stay the course in Afghanistan and prosecute the coming stages of the war. As the president himself has warned, the struggle against terror requires far more than exclusively military actions. Indeed, as time goes on, the most important aspect of the war may be in law enforcement and judicial activities. Much of the terrorist network draws support and resources from within countries friendly or allied with us. Terrorists residing in Western Europe planned the September 11 attack, and the greatest concentration of their “sleeper cells” outside the Middle East is probably in Europe. Yet this is a threat that the American military can do little to combat. What we really need is closer alignment of our police and judicial activities with our friends and allies: greater cooperation in joint police investigations, sharing of evidence, harmonious evidentiary standards and procedures, as well as common definitions of crimes associated with terrorism. Through greater legal, judicial, and police coordination, we need to make the international environment more seamless for us than it is for the international terrorists we seek. U.S. officials inevitably say that they are getting “good cooperation” from their European counterparts. They say the same, however, about countries like Saudi Arabia, where we know cooperation is minimal at best. Even with the limited information publicly available, it’s clear that the police and judicial measures taken to detect, identify, track, detain, interrogate, arrest, charge, convict, and punish terrorists and their accomplices within friendly countries have thus far been less than fully successful. Since last fall, European governments have arrested, then released, numerous suspected terrorists whom the U.S. government would undoubtedly have preferred to see kept behind bars. In April, for instance, Spanish police arrested a Syrian-born al Qaeda suspect, but let him go, citing a lack of evidence. Yet, at the time of his arrest, he had in his possession hours of videotape of the World Trade Center from every conceivable angle, plus similar surveillance images of other planned al Qaeda targets such as Disney World. Fortunately, the Spanish police rearrested the man in July. But that same month, British courts released an Egyptian wanted in the United States for allegedly aiding a top terrorist leader. The full cooperation we seek is unlikely without an overall consensus-building mechanism, like NATO, to drive the process. It is hard enough getting the CIA and FBI to share information, even when both answer (in theory) to the president and Congress. Imagine how difficult it is to get cooperation among various U.S. agencies and their counterparts working bilaterally with 20 different European countries, when each agency is competing with others. The longer the war goes on, the more we are going to need cooperation and support from other nations—not just troops and ships and airplanes, but whole-hearted governmental collaboration. Instead, we seem to be getting less as time goes on. After September 11, the United States gave the United Nations a list of groups and individuals suspected of funding terrorists. European governments responded by freezing their assets. In the spring, the U.S. government provided an updated list with new names. This time, most European governments ignored the list, according to The Wall Street Journal, citing concern that the United States was providing insufficient recourse for those who claim they are innocent. Last fall, all of Europe understood that the attacks of September 11 had been planned on European soil, that European targets were on the terrorists’ lists, and that Europeans by the hundreds died in the World Trade Center. German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder braved a no-confidence vote to win approval for German combat troops to be made available for Afghanistan. Even the French, long openly resentful of American power, expressed solidarity with us. Today, that support is being replaced by growing popular anger at the United States. Instead of focusing on the threat of terrorism, Europeans are focusing on the dangers of American hegemony. Their leaders are free to play to these fears because, without NATO involvement, the war is not seen as theirs, but ours. Not a single European election hinges on the success of the war on terrorism. As a consequence, European elected officials simply don’t have a personal stake in the outcome. Some Americans seem to take a certain delight in Europe’s outrage. But the fact is that this outrage is undermining our ability to carry out the next stages of the war, including, perhaps, toppling Saddam Hussein. We don’t necessarily need Europe’s full military support for a war against Saddam. But we need its diplomatic support now and its assistance in the aftermath. Without this support, others will have an excuse for not cooperating. This has already begun to happen. King Abdullah of Jordan recently explained to The Washington Post why his country, which borders Iraq, could not be used as a staging area for a U.S. invasion force: “If it seems America wants to hit Baghdad, that’s not what Jordanians think, or the British, [or] the French . . . ” Right Makes Might It’s still not too late to enlist NATO in the fight against terrorism—to handle peacekeeping duties in an increasingly chaotic Afghanistan, to deepen its involvement in the fight against the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and to host the harmonization of judicial and law-enforcement activities. If there is to be a military operation against Iraq, then certainly NATO participation should be sought. Involving NATO more directly and deeply would give European leaders a personal political stake in the war. In particular, bringing NATO into an expanded peacekeeping mission in Afghanistan would go a long way toward convincing the Europeans that the United States is serious about stability in post-war Iraq or other post-conflict situations. That NATO framework can be expanded at the military level to encompass countries that do not belong to NATO, just as we did in Bosnia and Kosovo. In the twilight of World War II we recognized the need for allies. We understood the need to prevent conflict, not just fight it, and we affirmed the idea that we must banish from the world what President Harry Truman, addressing the founding of the United Nations, called “the fundamental philosophy of our enemies, namely, that ‘might makes right.’” Truman went on to say that we must “prove by our acts that right makes might.” Since September 11, America has been in a similar position: the most powerful nation in the world, but facing a deadly enemy. The United States has the opportunity to use the power of the international institutions it established to triumph over terrorists who threaten not just the United States, but the world. What a tragedy it will be if we walk away from our own efforts, and from 60 years of post-World War II experience, to tackle the problem of terror without using fully the instruments of international law and persuasion that we ourselves created. Gen. Wesley Clark, U.S.A. (Ret.), Supreme Allied Commander, Europe, from 1997-2000, is the author of Waging Modern War, available in paperback from Public Affairs.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2001/0209.clark.html