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Poland Says Iraq Mission Strains Budget
WARSAW, Poland (AP) - Poland's new defense minister on Friday suggested that additional U.S. aid would be a crucial factor in determining whether to continue playing an active role in the war on terror. A day before heading to Washington, Defense Minister Radek Sikorski said meetings with top U.S. military officials would help Poland reach a decision within the next few weeks whether to keep its 1,500 soldiers in central Iraq or stick to the last government's plan to bring them home next month.Sikorski, however, said the war on terror has strained the resources of this country of 39 million, which is still emerging from communism and is struggling to deal with the burdens of being a NATO member. "We've invested a lot of energy - both blood and treasure and government attention, and political capital - in the mission and we certainly want to end it with success," Sikorski said. "By success, I mean handing over our sector of responsibility to a democratically elected Iraqi government ... and I think they are actually pretty close to success." He said the Iraq mission has cost Poland $600 million - 10 percent of the country's annual defense budget - money that could have gone to modernizing the military, as NATO requires. He indicated that Poland could use U.S. help as it modernizes, but would not say whether an extension of Poland's mission in Iraq was directly contingent upon it. "Whereas our army has increased its readiness and we are proud to have participated in an operation to help to stabilize Iraq, to bring democracy in Iraq, we could have modernized our forces faster with those funds," Sikorski told The Associated Press.
Posted by: Steve White 2005-12-03 |
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| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=136484 |