Attack on Iraq creates fissures in E.U.

By Batuk Gathani

BRUSSELS, FEB. 20. While France has taken the lead in expressing dissent against the British-American air strikes against military targets in Baghdad, the German Government has so far maintained a ``tactful silence'' over the issue, amid growing conviction in many Europeans quarters that Iraq is now central to the long-term stability of the West Asian region.

In view of the growing sufferings of the Iraqi masses, European public opinion is slowly but surely changing, and more sections of the European media are calling for an end to the U.N. sanctions on Iraq.

Last week's air strikes on Baghdad have exposed the deep strains within the Western alliance. Except for Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, no country in the Arab world has supported the action against Iraq. Even Saudi Arabia has yet to openly endorse the air strikes.

In major European capitals, there is concern that the U.S. offensive against the Saddam regime would fall short on the objective. In Arab cities masses have come out in support of Mr. Saddam Hussein, whose country is seen as being exposed to ``Anglo-American aggression''.

Iraq today called on Arabs to stage protests to coincide with the visit of the new U.S. Secretary of State, Gen. Colin Powell, to West Asian capitals on Saturday. Gen. Powell will later travel to Brussels to meet officials at the NATO headquarters.

On Monday, France said the U.S. had ``no legal basis for this kind of bombardment'' and asked the Bush administration to ``change its approach'' if it wanted to forge a Western consensus on the strategy to contain crises in West Asia. The other day, the U.S. Secretary of Defence told Europeans that the U.S. response to various challenges to its security rested on four pillars; defence, deterrence, diplomacy and intelligence. An American commentator concludes:

``The U.S. has developed some serious deficiencies in at least two of these areas - defence and intelligence. It has no missile defence and its foreign- intelligence operations have proved to be deficient in the kind of on-the-ground snooping that only field agents can provide.''

The Europeans are obviously concerned and a European official has been quoted as saying that though American officials had talked of a ``policy re-think'', they had suddenly delivered a heavily symbolic military strike. Apart from the strategic aspects of the Euro-American relationship, the 15-nation European Union is one of the largest market for U.S. goods and services, symbolised by $ 130-billion exports to Western Europe.

It is even proposed that the ``trans-Atlantic agenda'' could be the launching pad for creating a North Atlantic Free Trade Area (NAFTA), which would bring together three of the world's largest customers for U.S. goods and services - the E.U., Canada and Mexico. These markets would create a massive free trade area with a combined gross domestic product of $ 10 trillion.

The traditional relationship between a dominant U.S. and the E.U. is fast fading into history as the latter attempts to evolve ``common European foreign and defence policies''.

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Section  : International
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