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Paris and Berlin prepare alliance to rival Nato
EFL
EUROPE’S self-inflicted wounds over Iraq will be on display tomorrow, when the leaders of France and Germany — dubbed the “Axis of Weasels” in America — start to try to lay the groundwork for a European Union military alliance that would compete with Nato.
WUSS - Weasels United for Socialist Security
At a meeting in Brussels with the Prime Ministers of Belgium and Luxembourg, President Chirac and Gerhard Schröder, the German Chancellor, want to clear the way for a common European defence system that would start with a core of volunteer states.
As opposed to the usual EU-type coercion
Although the Germans have qualms about a confrontation with Nato, the French are not hiding their aim to achieve their long-standing goal of unhitching the United States from European defence. This has become more pressing with the reported plans of the US to punish France for its stand on the war in Iraq by excluding it from Nato decision-making.
"We're going down and we want you to volunteer to go down with us"
Last night, however, Tony Blair gave warning to M Chirac against placing Europe as a rival to the United States, calling such a move “destabilising”. In an interview with the Financial Times, he said: “I am not really interested in talk about punishing countries, but I think there is an issue that we have to resolve here between America and Europe and within Europe about Old Europe’s attitutde towards the transatlantic alliance. I don’t want Old Europe setting itself up in opposition to America. I think it will be dangerous and destabilising.”
There are three choices available: alliance, neutrality, or opposition. France has professed the first, and done the third. She's trying to entice Germany into doing the same...
The mechanism for founding what would be a unified EU military force was tabled last week without much fanfare by the chiefs of the convention that is drafting a new EU constitution. The arrangement, akin to the foundation of monetary union, would be far more ambitious than the existing European security and defence policy that was launched by Britain and France in 1998. That policy, which includes a rapid reaction force, is limited to humanitarian, peacekeeping and crisis management in co-operation with Nato.
And to recover damaging records, files from countries they illegally supported
Although Guy Verhofstadt, the Belgian Poodle Prime Minister, proposed the mini-summit months ago, London and other EU capitals view the Brussels initiative as akin to provocation by the four most active opponents of American policy over Iraq.
Another provocation accusation? why don't you learn to respect your elders and shut up
Despite denials from Paris and Berlin, the session looks like a manoeuvre by French-led “old Europe” against the pro-Atlantic axis, led by Britain and Spain and featuring new EU states, which Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, called “new Europe”.
Heh heh Rumsfeld can turn a phrase huh?
Britain, which has the EU’s most powerful Armed Forces, was not invited. Nor were the leaders of the EU’s other main pro-Atlantic states — Spain, Italy and the Netherlands.
Hmmm I wonder why that is?
Geoff Hoon, the Defence Secretary, said that the Brussels meeting “risks sending a message of division about the the creation of a defence policy separate from Nato”. Britain was adamant that the EU’s present security arrangement had nothing to do with a common defence, which was the domain of Nato, Mr Hoon told a French newspaper.
NATO's dead - there's no reason for it anymore
Posted by: Frank G 2003-04-28
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=13580