France rules out sending troops to Iraq ( 2003-07-16 08:05) (Agencies)
France's president Tuesday ruled out sending
French troops to Iraq, following India and Germany in rejecting US calls for
help without approval from the United Nations.
Although a few nations are sending troops, near daily guerrilla attacks -
many of them deadly - and growing doubts about the basis for the war are
complicating Washington's search for peacekeepers to replace exhausted American
troops in Iraq.
In Paris, President Jacques Chirac, a leading opponent of the war, told the
Czech president that sending French soldiers to Iraq "cannot be imagined in the
current context."
He cited comments last week by his foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin,
who said a French role was unthinkable without approval by the UN Security
Council.
India also rejected a U.S. request for peacekeepers for Iraq, saying Monday
it would consider such a move only under a U.N. mandate. And German Chancellor
Gerhard Schroeder said last week that his country would consider sending
peacekeepers only if asked by an interim Iraqi government or the United Nations.
"We are very consciously not with troops in Iraq," German Foreign Minister
Joschka Fischer said Tuesday. "The German position about this did not change."
The long tours of duty in Iraq are heightening the strain on both the U.S.
Army and on soldiers' families back home. On Monday, the U.S. military said
thousands of troops from the 3rd Infantry Division, which helped capture
Baghdad, would stay in Iraq indefinitely because of the precarious security
situation.
The Bush administration has scored some success in recruiting other countries
to help patrol Iraq. Poland will contribute 2,300 soldiers to a brigade that
will also include units from Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary and Lithuania.
A second brigade will have 1,640 Ukrainians and the third 1,100 Spanish
troops as well as units from Honduras, the Dominican Republic and El Salvador
and Nicaragua.
And on Tuesday, Croatia said it plans to send in up to 60 peacekeepers. "It
is in our interest to contribute to the strengthening of stability in Iraq ...
and to prove ourselves a serious partner and a future member of NATO, Defense
Ministry official Davor Denkovski said.
However, the decision to keep the 3rd Infantry in Iraq shows the need for
even more troops from countries with well-trained and well-equipped military
forces.
Even with a U.N. mandate, the decision to send soldiers to Iraq would require
considerable political soul-searching for many countries because of widespread
opposition to the war.
The failure to find any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has reinforced
the feeling in Europe and elsewhere that the war should have never been fought.
Recent doubts that Iraq had tried to import uranium from Africa, as President
Bush said in his State of the Union address in January, have revived debate in
Europe over the basis for the war.
That in turn would make it hard for governments to convince their publics of
the need to risk the lives of their own soldiers to help the United States.
"Whatever they may have achieved with their bombs and missiles in Iraq ... is
overshadowed by the suspicion, which is being confirmed ever more, that for the
sake of the war they grotesquely exaggerated the threat posed by Saddam
Hussein," Germany's Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper said.
Germany's Berliner Zeitung newspaper said the governments in Washington and
London "rather than those in Berlin and Paris are today finding it most
difficult to justify their actions" in Iraq.
In a commentary in The Times of India, former Foreign Secretary Salman Haidar
cited public opposition to America's Iraq policy as a main reason for refusing
to send troops, even as India works for better relations with Washington.
"The Iraq war was widely seen as unjust, and there is sympathy for the Iraqi
people with whom we have had age-old ties," Haidar said. "It would be disturbing
to see Indian troops deployed against them," even though Indian forces would
have been sent to the relatively peaceful Kurdish areas, he said.
Even with a U.N. mandate, Germany and France are already deeply committed to
peacekeeping missions elsewhere. Germany has 8,500 troops abroad, mostly in
Afghanistan and the Balkans as well as in the Horn of Africa as part of the war
against terrorism.
France is leading a European Union operation, mandated by the United Nations,
to stabilize the situation in the Congo town of Bunia and has about 4,000 troops
maintaining order in Ivory Coast.
