MUNICH, Germany, Feb. 9 (UPI) -- "This conference used to be a small club at which the Western allies came together once a year to discuss how to deal with the Soviet Union, but now it´s become a huge event with big government delegations, including the Russians," Karl Kaiser, a leading German foreign policy commentator, lamented Sunday.
He was speaking in the crowded lobby of a leading Munich hotel on the closing day of the annual Wehrkunde Conference on Security Policy, while defense ministers, security specialists and journalists from the 19 NATO nations and the seven soon-to-be member states milled around waiting for the start of the closing session.
The two days of discussions had left other veteran participants besides Kaiser feeling that perhaps, like NATO itself, the 40-year-old conference needed to discover a new reason for its continued existence.
After last year´s shrill exchanges between U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer over the Bush administration´s obvious determination to attack Saddam Hussein (U.S. troops invaded Iraq less than a month later), the 2004 conference was resoundingly civil.
Rumsfeld made a restrained keynote speech that seemed to many hardly worth crossing the Atlantic to deliver, or the Bavarian Alps to listen to.
Fischer permitted himself the slightest I-told-you-so about Iraq. "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 of the war." But Fischer then went on to call for a joint EU-American initiative in the Middle East that echoed President Bush´s regime change philosophy of bringing democracy to the Arab world. Only Fischer termed it "modernization and stabilization."
The civil tone was agreed in advance, the conference chairman, Horst Teltschik, had told United Press International before the meeting. "The signs are nobody´s interested in confrontation anymore," Teltschik said. Rumsfeld would be on his best behavior -- "and so will Mr. Fischer."
The group was so committed to sweetness and light that when Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov observed in his speech that it was "understandable" that the United States and its allies in Afghanistan were allowing the warlords to produce and export drugs in record quantities as the price for their cooperation, the reaction was the same as if he had been discussing the weather.
The conference has a history of heated debate -- usually trans-Atlantic -- on major defense issues. In the early 1980s, there was the row over U.S. deployment in Europe of medium-range Pershing and Cruise missiles. Another difficult topic, which still surfaces, is the question of cost-burden sharing.
But to seasoned observers, last week´s meeting underscored the need for a new approach, or perhaps even ending the traditional get-together in its present form altogether.
Teltschik had said Friday that he thought the conference would take up the subject of NATO enlargement in advance of the formal admission of the new members at the alliance´s annual summit to be held in Istanbul this summer. In interviews, senior officials from some of the soon-to-be members, which include the former Soviet Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, had expressed much the same hope. But enlargement barely came up in the formal discussions. Instead, the conference focused on how the allies and NATO could combat Islamic fundamentalist terrorism.
The issue is both pressing and dominant, but some generals and defense officials said they were uncomfortable discussing terrorism and terrorist-related security issues. "If this goes on, we´re going to have to start inviting interior ministers and the police to these conferences," remarked a European senior naval officer.
Below the surface, there were still residual resentments and skepticism, and they were certainly not laid to rest by some bizarre moments in the conference. The controversy over weapons of mass destruction in Iraq came up in implications from Rumsfeld and U.S. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) that somehow it was the Atlantic alliance that got it wrong in its pre-war intelligence on what Saddam Hussein did or did not have.
"It wasn´t an American intelligence failure, it was German, it was French, it was British, it was Israeli -- it was all intelligence failures, and we need to find out how it happened," McCain said, in what was widely regarded as the conference´s biggest blooper. A senior Spanish official shrugged, "What is he talking about? We didn´t have any intelligence of our own, and I´m sure neither did the Germans."
Rumsfeld, too, seemed to want to spread the blame for the intelligence failure. "One thing NATO might do would be to do a better job of seeing that the intelligence capabilities of the respective countries are brought together," he said.
A bemused audience also heard Rumsfeld hold up Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi as a model of behavior. Rumsfeld drew an analogy between Saddam Hussein and Gadhafi´s recent decision to scrap Libya´s nuclear weapons program. Saddam Hussein and Gadhafi, Rumsfeld said, presented "two different models of behavior." Gadhafi had chosen "tha path of cooperation." Saddam had chosen "the path of defiance." If Saddam had acted like Gadhafi and agreed to come clean on his weapons stockpile, there would have been no war in Iraq. Today´s rogue state leader can be tomorrow´s good guy.
