– No Respite for NATO
– The Day NATO Came Unstuck
– NATO – An Alliance in Search of Itself
– Who Needs NATO?
 

No respite for NATO
The Japan Times

Leaders of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization expected their two-day summit in Istanbul to highlight a renewed sense of unity. Coming on the heels of one of the most bitter splits in the alliance's history, anything less would raise serious doubts about the organization's future. And yet they failed. Rather than demonstrating resolve and a sense of shared purpose, this week's meeting will be remembered for the failure of NATO members to agree on Iraq's future or to make a real commitment to aid Afghanistan, despite pleas from that country's leadership. NATO's credibility, if not its survival, could be at stake.
 

The Istanbul meeting was supposed to be another step in a healing process. It was held during the same month as D-Day celebrations, which commemorated historic sacrifices made on Europe's behalf 60 years ago; a United Nations Security Council vote that facilitated the handover of power in Iraq (the handover itself occurred during the NATO meeting); and a G-8 summit that showed NATO leaders understood the need for reconciliation. The NATO summit was designed to provide tangible proof that the alliance was ready to contribute to solving international problems. Instead, it appeared to exacerbate them.
 

Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai addressed the meeting, pleading for more troops to help stabilize his country before elections in September. Currently, international troops operate primarily around Kabul, the capital. Security in other regions is deteriorating, and it is increasingly unclear whether Mr. Karzai's government can be said to control most of the country.
 

NATO members agreed in October to send 3,500 more troops to supplement the 6,500 already there, but the dispatch has been delayed. The U.S. had proposed that NATO's new rapid reaction force be sent, but several countries objected, arguing that the unit was designed for emergencies, not peacekeeping. It is unclear whether there is a direct connection with NATO's inaction, but the Afghan government has just announced that the election will be postponed because of concerns about security.
 

As for Iraq, NATO leaders would not agree to a NATO deployment. They did concur on training the Iraqi Army, with qualifications: Training would be carried out by individual members, not under the auspices of the alliance. Sixteen of the 26 NATO countries are already in Iraq as part of the U.S.-led coalition, but several of the remaining governments are adamantly opposed to any official NATO presence in Iraq.
 

Divisions within NATO were personified -- as in the past -- by the positions struck by U.S. President George W. Bush and French President Jacques Chirac. Mr. Bush proposed, Mr. Chirac opposed. When it came to Iraq, Mr. Chirac was blunt, declaring himself entirely hostile to any NATO presence in Iraq, saying the idea was "dangerous, counterproductive and would be misunderstood by the Iraqis." Mr. Chirac was most pointed in objecting to the use of the rapid reaction force in Afghanistan.
 

Mr. Chirac went on the offensive on another front, too: He dismissed Mr. Bush's call for the European Union to open its doors to Turkey. Mr. Bush argued for the admission of Ankara to show that the West was inclusive; it would, he said, demonstrate that the EU was not the "exclusive club of one religion." Mr. Chirac told the president to mind his own business, calling the statement interference in Europe's internal affairs.
 

The plain differences between the two leaders and their seeming indifference to the appearance of a public split are reportedly doing great damage to both men, their claims to leadership and the institutions they hope to lead. Afghanistan is the first major test of NATO's ability to respond to an out-of-area contingency -- its first opportunity to show its relevance in a post Cold War world -- and it is failing.
 

The inability -- or worse, the refusal -- to take action in the face of a personal, impassioned cry for help from the president of Afghanistan is damning. The reluctance to assist Iraq, despite U.N. cover, is similarly dangerously shortsighted.
 

Mr. Chirac, along with other NATO leaders, disagreed with the U.S. and its coalition partners over how to deal with former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. Those differences, while bitter, were based on principles; it was fair and reasonable to disagree. It is hard to understand what principle Mr. Chirac is appealing to now, given the paramount importance of creating peace and stability in Iraq and Afghanistan.
 

The French leader should feel vindicated by the Bush administration's return to the U.N. to help Iraq recover and rebuild. Instead, he seems determined to distance himself from the U.S. That strategy is dangerous. It guarantees that there will be no solution to important international problems. And, as NATO learned this week, it will weaken, if not fatally undermine, the institutions that depend on Franco-U.S. cooperation.

The Japan Times: July 3, 2004

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The day NATO came unstuck
By Bronwen Maddox  – July 05, 2004
 

LAST week's NATO summit in Istanbul saw the end of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as a serious military alliance.

On the steep hills above the Bosphorus Sea, 26 world leaders gathered, protected from huge anti-war demonstrations by tens of thousands of police.

The two-day summit was NATO's largest, with Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia having joined in March.

Yet if NATO has grown by more than a third this year, its power has shrunk. In military might, it seems able to muster only a glorified police force, if that. For all the effort of the summit, it managed to squeeze out only a tiny band of soldiers to help quell the violence in Afghanistan. That was the only test NATO had to pass last week and it failed.

The moment NATO died was when George W.Bush and Tony Blair stepped up to the podium to announce the transfer of sovereignty in Iraq, 48 hours earlier than expected. It was a show-stopping stunt that grabbed the world's attention.

But it entirely upstaged the summit. It was a showy, historic moment, but one in which NATO had played no part. It was a decision taken quickly and secretly by the US and the Iraqi Government – exactly the kind of feat that NATO cannot manage.

The two beaming leaders stood on a platform decorated with NATO insignia. But that was inappropriate: they represented the coalition of the willing, not NATO.

Bush uttered the word NATO once, and Blair diligently uttered a few sentences about NATO, asserting that it would have an important role in training Iraqi security forces.

But that miniature commitment, barely even a token, represents a failure, and a fracture of the alliance. The US had wanted an active contribution in Iraq by NATO troops to take the burden off its own. France and others opposed to the war said no. To add insult to injury, even the training operations that will go ahead may not do so under NATO's formal badge, again because of French opposition.

The most humiliating illustration of NATO's shortcomings was the announcement on Afghanistan: a tiny force of 3500 more troops to join the 6500 already there.

Even so, some will be held in reserve rather than sent right away.

In the closing minutes of the summit, Bush and French President Jacques Chirac clashed bitterly over which NATO troops to send and the row remained unresolved as they left.

NATO members could have agreed on this by telephone, months ago. A deeply frustrated Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, NATO's new Secretary-General, has certainly thought so.

Afghan President Ahmed Karzai, with pointed restraint, said that it would be rude to call this contribution inadequate. But one Afghan minister dismissed it bluntly as too little, too late to bolster security for elections due in September.

The summit was supposed to help heal the rifts that had opened up over the Iraq war, but it almost made them worse.

Chirac hit out at Bush for urging the European Union to accept Turkey, saying that it would be like France telling the US how to deal with Mexico.

Then Blair waded into the row, saying that Britain firmly backed Turkey's accession.

Blair, Bush and Chirac have had nearly a month in each others' company with the D-Day celebrations, the G8 summit, Ronald Reagan's funeral, the US-EU summit in Ireland and then Istanbul.

It is fashionable to argue that these summits help relations simply by bringing leaders face to face; well, as this sequence has shown, don't count on it.

Despite Istanbul's failures, it would be wrong to write off the value of NATO entirely. Many of its members, particularly the newest ones, are delighted to be part of the club, and value the promise of protection if they are ever attacked. That is worth something.

Yet NATO's fading reputation took a heavy hit last week.

A popular quip has been that, if nothing else, NATO could help guard the Olympics. That is no joke; it may be all that is left.

Bronwen Maddox is foreign editor of The Times.

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NATO: an alliance in search of itself
By Klaus-Dieter Frankenberger
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

The situation is paradoxical: NATO recently celebrated its largest round of expansion ever, and it has troops stationed outside the European-Atlantic region, in Afghanistan, for the first time in the organization's history. But the alliance is entrapped in one of its most serious crises ever. Even die-hard supporters have an uneasy feeling when the talk turns to the future of the alliance where Americans and Europeans joined together in the past to successfully put together their security strategies.

Naturally, the NATO partners did not always get along in those heady days of unity when the “Wall“ created by the Soviet threat gave bricks-and-mortar shape to the Western need for a shared strategy. Today, people are appealing for the alliance to avoid becoming alarmist and declaring the organization as a lost cause simply because the members are arguing among themselves.

The appeals may be justified. But they do not mean that it is time to fill out the alliance's death certificate.  
And, yet, this pessimism is characterized by something more than fleeting superficial issues. These issues actually run deep below the surface: doubts and divisions about the meaning, purpose and mission of NATO in the 21st century, and about the assignment of roles within the alliance. The discord over U.S. policies in Iraq was able to become so corrosive because the old reason for being, the defense against the Soviet Union and its allies, no longer exists, and a new, widely accepted strategy that incorporates the new realities and threats in the world has yet to be found.

The symptoms of the crisis can be seen everywhere: The U.S. government views NATO, which is an alliance of more or less sovereign and, in any case, equal members, as an instrument. The image of the tool box from which you can pull the necessary military pliers or hammers depending on the job at hand and political constellation behind it, is fitting. It should be recalled that after the United States was attacked on Sept. 11, 2001, and NATO made its self-defense commitment to the country, the Bush administration preferred to fight the war against terror with a “coalition of the willing“ and to forget about the institutional framework of the old partnership found within the ranks of NATO.

On the other hand, some of the European alliance members paralyzed the organization's decision-making ability and blocked its defense assistance to Turkey in the weeks before the war against Iraq last year. That was without precedent.

Today, that opposition is continuing as Germany and France once again are rejecting a NATO role in Iraq. But these countries fail to realize that they cannot constantly demand that the United States return to the NATO fold and then declare ahead of time that NATO bears no responsibility for a situation that has been given the highest military priority by several members of the alliance, and not just by the United States. In other words: Why does the alliance actually exist?

The traditional answer, which the new NATO members would prefer to give, is for defense. But maintaining armed forces whose sole mission is to defend national borders is an expensive insurance policy designed to cover the most unlikely scenario. It is an anachronism.

The answer that NATO's new secretary general, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, provides - to project stability and security - is correct but somehow irritating. After all, previous attempts to export security and stability have produced mixed results at best. It remains to be seen whether NATO's intervention in Kosovo, for example, will be successful in the long term. And the NATO mission in Afghanistan is mired in a mass of credibility problems: Alliance partners are failing to keep their promises about providing troops and equipment. And the willingness to make a commitment to other alliance missions is not exactly strong, even though the “objective need“ for NATO deployments will grow as the years pass.

This alliance, which proved itself magnificently as an essential Atlantic partnership in the past, does have a future under certain conditions - if the (North) Americans and Europeans invest in it, if they put their trust in it, if they reach a common understanding about the threats and risks that we are facing, and if alliance solidarity actually means something to them.

And only then.
Jul. 2

FAZ.net is a leading German newspaper out of Frankfurt.  Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
Note: story no longer posted

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Who Needs NATO?
Bush struggles to drum up European support for the new Iraq.
By Ed Finn
Posted Thursday, July 1, 2004

A hectic NATO summit in Istanbul, Turkey, early this week threatened to open new rifts between the United States and its European allies. In his fourth meeting with EU leaders in a month, President Bush lobbied for NATO instructors to help train Iraqi security forces, while France and Germany balked. Many Europeans wonder what role NATO should play in global politics as its ranks expand and the United States struggles to get commitments from unwilling EU allies. These tensions were overshadowed in American papers by the surprise handover of power to Iraq, but the summit was heavily covered in Europe.

The conference itself was a scene of chaos: Tens of thousands of protestors hurled small bombs and Molotov cocktails at more than 24,000 Turkish police as war planes patrolled the skies above Istanbul. Bombings leading up to the summit only increased anxiety levels, leading one widely published Turkish columnist to bid the NATO leaders farewell with the headline, "Thank god, they left safe and sound."

The action on the inside was only slightly less intense, with Jacques Chirac refusing to allow NATO troops or insignia on the ground in Iraq. The French president was visibly angry during meetings on Monday after Bush announced the early handover. According to a Le Monde report, "Chirac barely disguised his irritation on Monday each time a journalist used the name of the American president … to the point of forgetting every reminder of historic Franco-American ties."

While Chirac and Bush seemed to drift apart once again, British Prime Minister Tony Blair stood strongly by his American ally. Though other governments, including France, seemed to be surprised by the handover news, the Guardian reported that Bush and Blair "had synchronized their watches and nodded at each other at the moment of transfer in Baghdad." Blair still faces criticism at home for his close alignment with Bush, particularly over four British citizens detained at Guantanamo Bay whom the United States has refused to release into British custody. One enraged Scottish politician was quoted in the Scotsman asking, "How can the Prime Minister pursue a shoulder-to-shoulder relationship with George Bush when he seems to spend most of his time on his knees?"

Even Turkey came out of the summit with mixed signals, despite receiving Bush's public endorsement in its bid for EU membership. In his closing speech, Bush also forgave the Turks for not allowing coalition troops to their country as a route of attack to Iraq. "Democracy," Bush said, "does not involve automatic agreement with other democracies. Free governments have a reputation for independence, which Turkey has certainly earned." The Turks wisely took this all with a grain of salt. One op-ed writer in the Turkish Daily News noted that NATO leaders are "leaving behind a nation bewildered with praise of all kinds." The piece went on to suggest that if Bush really thinks Turkey is so great, he should help them get into the EU and solve the Cyprus issue. Meanwhile, the status of the Kurds in Iraq (a far more serious problem for the Turks) went almost unmentioned.

The larger questions of NATO's role in the world attracted more attention in European papers covering the summit. An editorial in the London Daily Telegraph noted that "fashionable anti-Americanism" threatens to destroy the special relationship between the United States and Europe—America offers an umbrella of military security, and Europe "provides grateful but not uncritical political support for the defense of freedom." Making the point more bluntly, a writer in Germany's Süddeutsche Zeitung suggested that the NATO conference was awkward for some very simple reasons. "Many EU governments are wary of telling their people what is in store: more money for international troop deployments, more danger far from home and more deaths. The new transatlantic unity is a fairy tale." (Translation courtesy of the Guardian.)
 

Ed Finn is a writer in New York.    1 July

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