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(回答先: ＮＡＴＯのイラク派兵、ドイツとフランスは消極姿勢 投稿者 どさんこ 日時 2004 年 2 月 08 日 23:56:34)
U.S. Justifies War, Germany Says 'We Were Right'
Sat Feb 7,11:37 AM ET Add Top Stories -
Reuters to My Yahoo!
By John Chalmers
MUNICH, Germany (Reuters) - Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld launched a spirited justification of the Iraq war on Saturday, responding to Germany's insistence that the invasion was wrong and events had proved it right.
But both sides took a conciliatory stance at a security conference in the German city of Munich, with German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer opening the door -- albeit reluctantly -- for NATO to take a stabilisation role in Iraq.
There was none of the open acrimony between the two men that electrified last year's Munich conference, which came just weeks before Washington unleashed a campaign to topple Saddam Hussein
Fischer did not refer to Washington's failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq since the conflict, but said Berlin now felt vindicated in its opposition to the war.
"Germany feels that events have proven the position it took at the time to be right," he said. "We were not and are still not convinced of the reasons for war."
Rumsfeld argued, however, that a nation of 25 million people living "in fear of a dictator" had been liberated.
"The broad coalition -- and families and friends of those who gave their lives -- have been reinforced in their conviction to remove the regime of Saddam Hussein as they have found dozens of mass graves filled with tens of thousands of innocent, men, women and children that were butchered by the regime," he said.
GERMANY WON'T BLOCK NATO IN IRAQ
He, too, made no mention of the suspected weapons that were cited as a justification for military action, but said that even as statues of Saddam were being felled in Baghdad "the Iraqi regime continued to hide and destroy evidence."
Rumsfeld insisted it was Saddam who had chosen war through his "deception and defiance" instead of taking steps now being taken by Libya to give up weapons of mass destruction.
He was echoed by British Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon, who said that since the war there had been more progress on counter- proliferation than for a decade in North Korea (news - web sites), Iran and Libya.
The United States and several other allies are keen for the 19-nation NATO alliance to take command of a Polish-led force of some 9,000 troops in south-central Iraq after sovereignty is returned to the people of the country on July 1.
But they are not pressing hard for fear of rekindling tensions over the war, and diplomats say a decision will almost certainly be delayed until NATO's Istanbul summit in June.
France, a fierce opponent of the war, has made it clear that it would seek a new resolution -- or at least formal backing -- from the U.N. Security Council to launch such an operation.
Fischer said his government would "not stand in the way of a consensus, even if we don't send German troops to Iraq," but he made clear that Berlin had misgivings.
"The risk of failure -- and the possibly very serious and potentially fatal consequences for the alliance -- must be taken into consideration," he said. "Honesty demands of me that I do not conceal my deep skepticism."
NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, who said last month that he would not like to see NATO in Iraq without German troops, chided Fischer for what he saw as defeatism.
"You can't say 'I'm skeptical'," he told the conference. "You cannot do that unless you say we can afford to lose."
But Fischer said NATO, many of whose nations say their armed forces are stretched by missions across the globe, was right to make its peacekeeping operation in Afghanistan (news - web sites) the priority and should not be leaping into another difficult task.
Widening democracy in the Middle East, he said, was a more important question than whether or not NATO goes into Iraq.
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