“Our expectation is that NATO will see its way to do that this summer, a mission in Iraq,” said Nicholas Burns, the U.S. ambassador to NATO July 8, according to an Associated Press dispatch.

“There’s no question that our leaders have already made the decision, that there’s going to be a NATO mission in Iraq,” he emphasized.

The military delegation, he said, was expected to report back to NATO headquarters with a range of possible options for carrying out the training. The mission is headed by two U.S. officers, Gen. James Jones, NATO’s supreme commander, and Adm. Gregory Johnson, commander of the joint force command in Naples, Italy.

At the NATO summit held June 28-29 in Istanbul, Turkey, Washington won only vague backing for its proposal that NATO train and equip the Iraqi military. Paris and Berlin opposed deploying NATO troops on the ground in Iraq, insisting that individual governments do the training in their countries. They argued for training Iraqi officers outside Iraq, proposing Italy and Germany. But Washington took the stance that Paris and Berlin had opted out of a NATO agreement, and began organizing accordingly.

“We are not going to fly battalions of Iraqi soldiers out of the country. We are not going to be distracted by French rhetoric,” said an unnamed senior U.S. official quoted in the July 3 issue of the Financial Times, published in London.

At the Istanbul summit, U.S. officials made more progress in winning agreement to expand the size and scope of the NATO occupation force in Afghanistan. The 26 government leaders agreed to expand the force under its command from 6,500 to 10,000 troops, and to deploy forces outside Kabul to the northern region, supposedly to provide security for elections scheduled for September.

In a July 1 interview with two military reporters, from the Pentagon Channel and the American Forces Press Service, U.S. defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld noted that at the Istanbul summit all 26 NATO members except Paris had agreed to the U.S. proposal to deploy the NATO Response Force (NRF) to Afghanistan.

“We’re going to have to find a way to deal with that,” Rumsfeld asserted in the interview. “There are several options, but ultimately, the NATO countries will, in fact, provide assistance for the elections in Afghanistan.”

According to a senior U.S. official cited by the British news agency Reuters, Rumsfeld suggested that instead of making the decision in the North Atlantic Council, a body composed of all 26 members of NATO, the military alliance might use its Defense Planning Committee, on which Paris has no seat because it is not part of NATO’s integrated military structure, to authorize an NRF deployment.“A cutting-edge multinational force with warships, fighter planes and eventually over 20,000 troops, it [the NRF] will be lethal, agile and ready to be deployed to hotspots within five days,” a Reuters dispatch noted.In the July 1 interview, Rumsfeld said sending the NATO Response Force to Afghanistan would free up U.S. forces there to beef up the so-called Provincial Reconstruction Teams, occupation forces deployed in different parts of the country. He said it would also allow U.S. troops to do “heavy lifting” along the Afghan-Pakistan border, that is, launching assaults on pro-Taliban and al-Qaeda forces in the area.  
 
 
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