NATO?? I thought there was unilateral agreements that if one is attaked
the other members will help.

WTF happened to Spain, Germany, and France?


"Charles Farley" <CircularErrorZero@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:a12aa624.0411112045.50e3abb7@posting.google.com...

The New York Times
November 11, 2004

Europe Must Adapt to U.S. View on Terror, NATO Chief Says

By WARREN HOGE

The head of NATO said today that there was a critical "perception gap"
between Europe and the United States on the subject of global terror
and that Europeans must move closer to the American view of the
seriousness of the threat.

"Your country focused very much on the fight against terror while in
Europe we focused to a lesser extent on the consequences for the
world," Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, NATO's secretary general, said in an
interview. "We looked at it from different angles, and that for me is
one of the reasons you saw such frictions in the trans-Atlantic
relationship."

As a result, he said, Europe was lagging behind the United States in
merging external and internal security to combat terrorism, and Europe
had to catch up.

"If the gap is to be bridged, it has to be done from the European side
and not from the United States," he said, adding that the conflict in
Iraq, the issue that helped divide the alliance, now provided an
opportunity for uniting it.

"Where allies very much agree and must agree is the fact that whatever
ways they have looked at the war in Iraq and the run-up to it and the
split we saw, we cannot afford to see Iraq go up in flames," he said.
"It is everyone's obligation that we get Iraq right."

NATO has been asked by the Iraqi government to train its security
forces, and Mr. de Hoop Scheffer said that 10 of the 19 member states
were contributing to that training, both within Iraq and in places
outside Iraq, the preference of France, Germany and Spain -- like
Jordan and European military schools. He said he hoped to have the
program fully operational by the end of the year.

The experience of Iraq had taught him two lessons as a European and an
Atlanticist, he said.

"The first is that if Europe sees its integration process as one
directed against the United States, it will not work because the
result will be a split in Europe, and that is an ambition that no
European should have," he said.

"The second is that if you want to have a trans-Atlantic dialogue
between grownups, I know that any president and any American
administration is willing to listen to the European voice as long as
it is one European voice. If it is five different voices, they will
not take the trouble to listen and they will wonder what is Europe."

NATO has 9,000 troops.


http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/11/international/europe/11cnd-nato.html