Chris Wallace of Fox News Sunday brought it up in an interesting chat with Joe Biden and Newt Gingrich.
But my favorite bit occurred when Sen. Biden delivered the standard spiel that in order to take the burden off of American troops, we need to make this an international effort, with the involvement of NATO troops. That led to the following exchange:
WALLACE: Let me bring Newt Gingrich into this.
Mr. Speaker, is that the answer, to have a U.N. high commissioner and to get a NATO military force there?
GINGRICH: Well, let me say, first of all, you're not going to get any NATO force there that doesn't have the Americans doing most of the heavy lifting. It's not possible for the other NATO countries to provide that kind of force.
...WALLACE: Senator Biden?
BIDEN: If I could comment on that very briefly. A U.N. high commissioner would not in any way have a U.S. commander responsible to the high commissioner -- not at all. It would be a NATO command, number one.
Number two, Newt is right, the most that we could get in there initially is 20,000 NATO forces in my discussions with our NATO commanders and with our European friends at the NAC.
Sen. Biden then explained that NATO could take over some relatively tranquil sectors, such as the border patrol or the Kurdish area. Which prompted:
GINGRICH: Now, my only comment about Senator Biden's proposal was, he just named all the primarily nonviolent parts of Iraq as the areas that the NATO forces would take over, which would put the Americans even more intensely in places like Fallujah.
No deus ex machina plot twists here, as we have noted before.
The French should be sent to the Sunni triangle; they did such a bang up job in Algeria, right;
Chirac should know, according to Timmerman's Betrayal of America; he seems to the French version of Kerry vis a vis Algeria (I know that
sounds redundant)Is General Morillon still available; he was French commdr. in the Sarajevo
sector in Bosnia; where fmr partisans of Massoud
and Hekmatyar were active
Posted by: narciso | April 05, 2004 at 12:26 PM
The (worsening) inability of our "allies" to play much of a role in the more demanding situations we face -- even if they desperately wanted to -- should be the first point raised every time these mindless mantras of "internationalizing" are mouthed. If such a thing as journalism existed, it would be. The typical discussion of these topics today is so dumb and detached from reality, anyone with a background in the subject can only marvel and worry.
Posted by: IceCold | April 06, 2004 at 02:20 AM
Mark Steyn was scathing on that point:
...When scholars come to write the final chapter in the history of the European continent, the six-decade US security guarantee will be seen as, on the whole, a mistake. Not for America, but the Continentals.
The so-called "free world" was, for most of its members, a free ride. Absolving wealthy nations of the need to maintain credible armies softens them: they decay, almost inevitably, into a semi-non-aligned status....
Posted by: TM | April 06, 2004 at 03:24 AM