European Press Sees Scared GIs, No Iraq-Al Qaeda Link
EuroTalk
Pacific News Service, News Briefs, Paolo Pontoniere, Posted: Feb 18, 2003
Reading the European press -- La Stampa of Italy, Le Figaro of France and others -- presents a sharp counterpoint to the U.S. media's lead-up to war in Iraq. From a less than hearty portrait of young U.S. combatants to a little-noted British intelligence put-down of the purported Baghdad-Osama link, writes PNS commentator Paolo Pontoniere, European media see through a different lens.
- GI Joe Not Gung Ho
- British Intelligence Dismisses Existence of Iraq-al Qaeda Link
- Europe Wants Refugee Fingerprint
GI Joe Not Gung Ho
Europeans find it peculiar that while the United States amasses hundreds of thousands of troops in countries bordering Iraq, its media reveal to citizens back home very little about the morale of these soldiers. European journalists chronicling the military buildup in the region offer a dramatically different view from the gung-ho portrayal that American media paint every time a new ship leaves its moorings and sails toward the Middle East.
While not doubting that American GIs would not hesitate to put their lives on the line in order to unseat Saddam if called upon to do so, European media reveal that U.S. troops on the ground appear to be confused about the reasons that brought them to the region. They wonder what is expected from them. Europeans also report that their state of preparedness for waging war is a matter of concern among some troops. And they often note how very young the GIs are -- the average of new Army recruits is 20.7. While the young combatants do not fear the first phase of the invasion, which they expect to be short, European reports say the ordinary American soldiers are extremely concerned about the second stage of the campaign -- the phase during which they may be called on to pursue the Iraqi enemy in house-to-house and person-to-person combat.
Radio Netherland reports that the U.S. military leadership considers 70 percent an acceptable number of casualties in this second stage, news that does little to comfort the GIs who will do the actual fighting. In interview after interview, they tell European reporters this isn't the kind of thought they like to entertain while looking at the enormous expanse of desert facing them in the direction of Iraq.
To aggravate the morale problem, some soldiers' tours of duty in the region have been extended indefinitely, and some National Guardsmen have been recalled to active duty. In both cases, financial and emotional hardships arise. Many GIs report marital problems as a result of their extended stays, and some National Guardsmen are losing stateside jobs. European reporters point to the importance of factoring these human variables into the U.S. war equation because they could deeply affect America's plans for a prolonged occupation of Iraq.
British Intelligence Dismisses Existence of Iraq-al Qaeda Link
According to the London newspapers The Guardian and The Independent, senior U.K. intelligence officers emphatically have denied the existence of a purported link between Baghdad and al Qaeda. According to the intelligence report, even though Iraq made an initial overture toward al Qaeda, a relationship failed to materialize because of various ideological differences, and because of profound mutual mistrust. British media broke the story as U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell was stating the exact opposite in his recent U.N. Security Council speech. The papers reported that British and American intelligence operatives are complaining about how overbearing political influences are shaping their work.
Europe Wants Refugee Fingerprints
Giving in to pressure from the continent's anti-immigrant forces, the European Commission last week introduced a new fingerprint database system called Eurodac throughout the European Union. Aimed at controlling what some Europeans perceive as a deluge of asylum seekers flooding their continent, the measure has been denounced as a dangerous erosion of immigrants' civil rights by human rights organizations. The Eurodac system will create a fingerprint record of every person 14 years or older seeking refuge in any of the 15 countries of the European Union.
In theory, Eurodac should help authorities weed out those who apply for asylum in more than one country, estimated at about 20 percent of the 400,000 people seeking refuge annually in European countries. In practical terms, it will restrict the ability of new arrivals to reach the communities to which they are connected by way of family or other ties.
Established under a 1997 Treaty of Amsterdam, which mandates that refugees should obtain asylum from the country through which they first enter EU territory, Eurodac's introduction almost certainly guarantees that future asylum seekers will be restricted to southern Europe, such as Italy, Spain and Greece, on whose shores they generally arrive first.
In a Europe where people coming from Islamic countries make up the bulk of immigrants and asylum seekers, this measure will make it much more difficult for Muslims to move from the south to the north of the continent, where their communities are more populous and better established.
ProAsyl, a German group that advocates for immigrant rights, believes the new fingerprinting will lead to immigrant quotas targeted primarily at Islamic countries, which already have more than 24 million citizens living in Europe.
Sources: BBC, Deutsche Welle, Kathimerini, El Pais, Il Manifesto, La Repubblica, La Stampa, L'Espresso, Le Figaro, Liberation, Radio Netherlands, The Independent, The Guardian.
Pontoniere (pmpurpont@aol.com) is the U.S. correspondent for Focus, Italy's leading monthly magazine.
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