Posted on 02/11/2003 1:33:11 AM PST by gaucho
Washington is planning to cut and downgrade its network of military bases in Germany and to transfer some its European military assets to the new pro-American Nato allies of eastern Europe, according to diplomats and officials on both sides of the Atlantic.
Although no final decision has been taken, the plan to scale down the military presence in Germany, the mainstay of US forces in Europe since the second world war, marks a major strategic shift which is being welcomed by the insecure post-communist countries of central Europe.
While such a decision is seen as too important to have been provoked by the worsening dispute between Washington and Berlin over Iraq, the momentum for moving out of Germany is also being increased by the US-German estrangement.
A senior Czech official, who attended the weekend security conference in Munich at which the Americans and the Germans engaged in an unprecedented public slanging match, said that senior US officials were talking about the bases in Germany "right into the middle of the night".
"It's a very difficult situation," he added. "But if it leads to the Americans withdrawing from Germany, we and the Poles will welcome them. We need Nato."
The Pentagon ordered all non-essential investment in the sprawling US bases in Germany frozen last month, funds amounting to tens of millions of pounds, according to a German MP who said he saw the secret instructions from Washington to US military commanders in Germany.
"All avoidable US investments in Germany have been stopped on the orders of the Pentagon," the Christian Democrat MP, Michael Billen, told the newspaper Welt am Sonntag. His Rhineland-Palatinate constituency in south-west Germany includes major US air bases, venues that have grown into American communities over the past half century.
Mr Billen said that US officials had told him that the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, wanted the spending frozen since it was not clear whether the US forces' strength of around 100,000 would remain on that scale.
Polish newspapers reported recently from Washington that the US was to shift bases from Germany to Poland, the biggest, most important and most pro-American of the new Nato members, and a key country in Mr Rumsfeld's "new Europe". The Polish reports were denied in Washington, but when he was asked about the issue in Rome last week, Mr Rumsfeld said: "We are reviewing our bases ... the centre of gravity is shifting in the [Nato] alliance. The interest and the enthusiasm that the countries that had lived under repressive regimes previously [have for Nato] is a good thing for Nato."
The new commander of Nato forces in Europe, US Marines General James Jones, told senior US congressmen and senators in Brussels last Friday that the large US garrisons in Germany could be radically transformed by the need for more flexible and mobile rapid response structures that may halve the number of US troops in Germany and see new bases opened from Poland to Romania, according to US press reports yesterday.
"German officials are right to worry that US forces now headed from Germany to the Persian Gulf may not, after the war and occupation, return to their old bases," the influential conservative commentator William Safire wrote in the New York Times yesterday.
The US bases in Germany are under German military and police guard because of their vulnerability to terrorist attacks. They are also becoming targets for the protests and demonstrations of the German anti-war movement.
In contrast to western Europe, the governments of eastern Europe are queueing up to offer military assets, resources, and staff for the US war effort against Iraq. Romania and Bulgaria are the latest to make bases available to the US air force. The first US aircraft are expected in Bulgaria today.
Good, glad to hear it.
I think the Germans have set some kind of world speed record in going from tyranny to freedom to ingratitude, and heading back down the road to tyranny again, in a little over 20 years time. Unbeleivable. The next news story will be that 2 new countries are joining the United Nations: The Islamic Republics of France and Germany.
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