ISTANBUL, 27 June 2004 — NATO nations settled a dispute over how to respond to a call from Iraq’s incoming government for troop training yesterday, averting a public row two days before the opening of an alliance summit in Istanbul.
Diplomats said a positive response to Prime Minister Iyad Allawi’s request was hammered out in Brussels on Friday after three rounds of tense negotiation that echoed last year’s bust-up over the US-led war to topple Saddam Hussein.
It was adopted yesterday after none of the 26 allies raised objections to the text before a 1000 GMT deadline.
“It’s sorted out, there are no more problems,” one diplomat said, referring to French reservations which had forced NATO envoys to go back to the negotiating table on Friday evening.
US Senator Richard Lugar warned NATO at a conference in Istanbul that its reputation would stand or fall on its commitment to act in Iraq, which he described as “the central theater in the war on terrorism.”
“If the new, sovereign Iraqi government were to ask NATO to come in, the alliance could refuse only at its own peril,” the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee said.
“Will it step up to its role as the defense arm of the Transatlantic community or step off the world stage and risk becoming irrelevant?” Washington had hoped as recently as April that NATO could take command of a multinational stabilization force currently led by Poland in central-south Iraq.
US President George W. Bush is eager to share the burden in Iraq and is under pressure in an election year to obtain more international support for Baghdad, whose interim government is due to be sworn in when the US-led occupation ends on June 30.
But he has lowered his ambitions for NATO support, partly because many European allies are militarily overstretched but mainly because France, Germany and other opponents of last year’s invasion oppose an overt alliance role.
Diplomats said troop training in the violence-plagued country was the “lowest common denominator” that Washington and its closest allies could hope for. Nevertheless, talks on even this role became bogged down on Friday as the United States and Britain pushed for a detailed and enthusiastic response to Allawi, while France and Germany favored a vaguely worded — but still positive — reply.
There were differences over whether NATO should train Iraqi officers inside the country under a NATO flag, or limit its role to training outside Iraq and acting as a clearing house for national efforts. There were also disputes over whether to open the door to a more far-reaching NATO military involvement later. Diplomats said the agreed statement was vaguely worded and most details of NATO’s training task would be negotiated later.
Officials insisted that the envoys’ talks were cordial, with none of the acrimony that plunged NATO into a crisis before the war when France and Germany blocked allied military assistance to Iraq’s neighbor Turkey. Still, the wrangling exposed persistent transatlantic tensions over last year’s conflict.
Lugar recognized that the US decision to topple Saddam had been deeply unpopular in much of Europe, and that in many people’s minds helping to build the peace is seen as implicitly endorsing the war. “That dispute must be consigned swiftly to history,” he said. “Just as we all have an interest in Iraq’s success, we all would pay a steep price for its failure.”
