What do you Euro-guys think of this? good/bad?
BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Four European Union countries that opposed the U.S.-led war in Iraq agreed on Tuesday to create a multinational force headquarters next year, in what they called a drive to boost European defense integration. The leaders of Belgium, France, Germany and Luxembourg also said they would establish the nucleus of a joint planning and command unit for military missions where NATO was not involved. The United States and NATO criticized the accord among countries recently derided as "old Europe" by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
Much of the four-page statement issued after less than two hours of talks in Brussels appeared to repackage existing EU defense projects or proposals that are already before a Convention drafting a first constitution for the bloc.
These included a European arms procurement and strategic research agency, a solidarity clause in case of terrorist attack and the possibility for smaller groups of EU members to move ahead faster in defense cooperation.
The leaders proposed the creation of a European Security and Defense Union within the EU, open to all member states that wished to cooperate more closely in the military field and be bound by a mutual defense commitment.
They outlined seven concrete measures, most already under way or agreed, including the creation of an EU rapid reaction force, a European strategic air transport command and fleet, a joint nuclear, biological and chemical weapons protection capability and joint training.
However, the statement did include two apparent novelties.
"With a view to improving command and control capabilities available to the European Union as well as to NATO, our four defense ministers will take the necessary steps to establish, not later than 2004, a multinational deployable force headquarters for joint operations," it said.
In a tortuously redrafted clause, the four said: "Interested states will establish a nucleus of a collective capability which, instead of national means, they would make available to the EU for operational planning and command of EU-led operations without recourse to NATO assets and capabilities."
Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt, hosting the meeting three weeks before a tight general election, proclaimed this was the joint "strategic" headquarters he had proposed to install by summer 2004 in Tervuren, outside Brussels.
Chirac and Schroeder were more cautious. The joint statement couched the decision to create a planning staff in the conditional, saying it "could be taken by the end of the year with all the interested states."
Verhofstadt said later the four partners would go ahead in any case, adding that the conditional wording referred to talks on including other interested partners.
On the rapid reaction force, already under construction with the involvement of Britain and other EU states, the four said they would create a "nucleus capability" around a French-German brigade with Belgian commandos and Luxembourg reconnaissance.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair said before the Brussels announcement: "What is important is that nothing is done that in any shape or form undermines the NATO relationship."
