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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (74046)	2/14/2003 8:18:28 PM
From: greenspirit	Respond to of 281500

I enjoyed this article, it describes an interesting twist to the "old Europe" remark by Rumsfeld. NATO's 'Old Europe': Rumsfeld Wasn't Kidding! Friday, Feb. 14, 2003 3:45 p.m. EST newsmax.com When Donald Rumsfeld referred to France, Germany and Belgium as "Old Europe," he wasn't joking around. In a front-page story in the Wall Street Journal, reporter Philip Shishkin details why U.S. soldiers wouldn't want some of the members of the NATO fighting force to participate in an attack on Iraq: They're old, soft and ill-equipped. The article specified one Belgian soldier, a 47-year-old hairdresser, who spends his time on an amateur singing career featuring Elvis and Tom Jones tunes. He said that when the military sent him on a field exercise, he was "amazed by the fellow soldiers lumbering around him," reports the Journal. "All the people are so old," he said. Why? Because many of these soldiers have guaranteed jobs until retirement, plus benefits. The U.S. spends 36 percent of its defense budget on pay and benefits. By contrast, most European NATO member states spend an average of nearly 65 percent of their defense appropriations on salaries and benefits. The Journal further reports that while U.S. spending on personnel has decreased by 6 percent since the early '80s, it has risen by nearly the same amount in Europe. "We could do with fewer troops, but better troops; better trained, better equipped, more mobile," NATO Secretary General George Robertson said last month at the World Economic Forum. "The problem in Europe is that there are far too many people in uniform, and too few of them able to go into action at the speeds that conflicts presently demand." Exactly what Shishkin postulates. And he doesn't stop there. He goes right on to pinpoint a reason why the three countries that are against military conflict with Iraq might be balking. He writes: Belgium employs hundreds of military barbers, musicians and other personnel who aren't likely to be called into battle. Yet Belgium doesn't have the money to replace aging helicopters or conduct regular combat-training exercises. Germany drafts 120,000 people every year but can't afford to buy all the transport planes it wants. German soldiers who went to Afghanistan as peacekeepers crowded into an aging, leased Ukrainian carrier that had to stop to refuel. France, despite the fact that it increased spending this year, was lagging in military-procurement funding from '97 to '02, leaving its forces wanting in such key areas as refueling aircraft and missiles. To top it off: Europe has 11 troop-transport planes, compared with 250 in the U.S., and most European members of NATO don't have any modern precision-guided munitions at all. Well, no wonder these countries can't support an attack on Iraq. They literally can't support an attack on Iraq! U.S. Gen. Joseph Ralston, the former NATO supreme allied commander for Europe, calls European militaries "outdated and redundant, fat." Other problems facing the European NATO members are 1) the fact that they can't run up deficits to finance military capabilities, 2) the position of most Europeans that the military should not be anyone's priority, and 3) the unionization of the military in Europe. There is no such animal here in the U.S., but Shishkin writes that these unions have huge power in Europe. The Belgian soldiers are already eligible for six weeks of vacation a year, and they still protested for more benefits last year, which they received, by the way. "We must be honest with ourselves," says Warrant Officer Emmanuel Jacob, secretary-general of Belgium's Centrale Generale du Personnel Militaire. "Either we have a smaller number of people who are well-trained and equipped or we continue to defend a bigger army and it won't work in the future." The median age of the Belgian soldier is 40. In the U.S. it's 28. Granted, in some part the excess of troops was encouraged by NATO agreement during the '70s and '80s that soldiers were needed to fend off a Soviet invasion. But during the meeting of Euro defense bigs in Warsaw last summer, before any talk of Iraq started, Rumsfeld told the European countries that unless they start spending more on advanced weaponry, secure communications, more mobile, special-ops units and long-haul planes, the U.S. won't call on them for backing when it goes to war. "The phone just won't ring," the Secretary of Defense told them. Apparently, where Iraq is concerned, "Old Europe" took its phone off the hook before we even had a chance to dial.

To: LindyBill who wrote (74046)	2/14/2003 8:28:05 PM
From: greenspirit	Respond to of 281500

I love the way the editors ended this piece. I've highlighted the section. Wither Nato? by the Editors tnr.com Post date 02.13.03 \| Issue date 02.24.03 Tout se complique. The strident obstructionism of France and Germany, and their attempt to lead an insurrection within NATO against the use of Western force against Saddam Hussein, even to the point of violating the treaty commitments of the alliance to the security of its own members (in this case, Turkey)--this is a genuinely momentous turn of events that should not be understood merely as a comedy of national character. The petulance of these European states seems farcical, but in fact it is the expression of a profound historical transformation. It is not clear that the Europeans are entirely cognizant of this transformation, but it is essential, if the United States is to manage its global responsibilities effectively, that Americans be cognizant of it. For it is not the strategic impertinence of Europe that we are beholding, it is the strategic obsolescence of Europe. Dissolve now to the mists of time, that is, to 1945. World War II, which left the fate of Europe in the hands of the United States and the Soviet Union, seemed to have pushed Europe away from the world-historical center to the world-historical periphery. For the next four decades, however, the marginality of Europe, its decline into relative powerlessness and ardent nostalgia, was obscured by the harsh suspense of the cold war. The division of Europe kept the continent at the front lines of the most significant global fact of the age: the contest, philosophical and political, between the United States and the Soviet Union. And so the Western European countries retained their importance as the countries of NATO, just as the Eastern European countries retained their importance (but so, so unhappily) as the countries of the Warsaw Pact. Throughout the cold war, the European sensation of being smack in the middle of the most dangerous and decisive conflict on earth was not at all illusion. When that conflict ended, the self-importance of Europe finally became an illusion, a psycho-strategic disorder. The kicking and screaming of France and Germany in recent weeks is the direct consequence of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the termination of the cold war. In these new circumstances, Europe is rather lacking in strategic ontology. Indeed, Europe has gladly acquiesced in its withdrawal from grand historical action, exchanging the burdens of military power for the blandishments of a continent-wide embourgeoisement, for what Robert Kagan has rightly called a "post-historical paradise." A European way of life was preferred to a European presence in the world. In this sense, the European Union represents the antithesis of NATO, and the retort to it. Meanwhile, new powers and new threats, new allies and new enemies, were emerging in regions very far away from the Louvre. There was one place, though, where time stood still. That place was Turtle Bay. The United Nations continued for half a century to confer special authority upon the states that possessed special authority at its founding. The "permanent membership" status of France on the Security Council is not so much an outrage as an anachronism. Maintaining the diplomacy of the 1940s in perpetuity is rather like maintaining the technology of the 1940s in perpetuity; but the United Nations does not still use rotary telephones. The protest of Jacques Chirac against the contemporary world order is the protest of a rotary telephone. (The notion that his protest is based on principle is too ridiculous to consider.) He is teaching his country and his continent to deny reality, which is never a wise teaching. No, not his entire continent. There are some European states, some NATO members, who understand the justice of the American campaign and the necessity of American leadership. If Americans are from Mars, some Europeans are from Vilnius. And Spain and Italy have demonstrated that even old Europeans know how to exist in the present. But then there is Belgium, which roars that the weapons inspectors in Iraq must be given more time. There was once a great French poet whose cherished term for mediocrity was l'esprit Belge. This week l'esprit Belge is running wild in geopolitics. Never mind. The bruised ego of Europe is less dangerous to the world than the hidden arsenal of Saddam Hussein. And our cultural affinity for Europe has outlived our strategic affinity for Europe. The American sense of the world is right and clear: nation-building in Kabul and Baghdad, vacation-building in Paris and Berlin. The world really has changed.