US General James Jones, NATO's supreme allied commander, said today the refusal of nearly a dozen military allies to participate in the trans-Atlantic alliance's training mission in Iraq was "disturbing". It is important to recognise that once the alliance gets involved in an operation, it is important that all allies support the operation," General Jones said during a luncheon in Washington. "With ... nine or 10 or 11 countries in the alliance who will not send forces into Iraq to participate in the mission, the burden falls then on the remaining 15 or 16 nations or 14 nations to shoulder that burden," he said. "This is disturbing," the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation's top military officer said. "I hope it is a one-time event, because it really will be a limiting factor in the long term in terms of generating forces and successive rotations."
| Why, we'd be forced to conclude that we can't trust some of our allies. |
Last week in Brussels NATO ambassadors adopted an "operation plan" for an Iraq mission foreseeing the dispatch of 200 to 300 military instructors to the embattled country under heavy guard to train about 1000 Iraqi officers a year. For some NATO allies to vote for a mission but then refuse to participate in it "makes it difficult for the operational commanders to be successful", General Jones said. At a news conference, US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld described the situation as a "problem". "It's kind of like if you've got a basketball team and you have five people train together, week after week after week, it comes to be game time, and two of them stick up their hands and say, 'Gee, I don't think I'm going to play this week'," Mr Rumsfeld said. "It would be better if they were on the bench and somebody else had been training for the last period of weeks," he said. Senior US officials said on Saturday Washington was growing increasingly frustrated with the refusal of five NATO members, particularly Germany, to allow their military officers assigned to alliance bases to be deployed in Iraq. Germany, along with fellow anti-war NATO members Belgium, France, Luxembourg and Spain, went along with the decision to set up the Baghdad training mission but have refused to permit their officers stationed at NATO's two operations bases to participate, the officials said.
| Is there a reason why we still have NATO? |
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