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Czech troops to remain in Iraq

Analysts say Schwarzenberg's call to exit a political move

By Kimberly Ashton
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
October 17th, 2007 issue

Czech troops will likely stay in Iraq after December, despite Foreign Minister Karel Schwarzenberg’s recent call for their withdrawal, analysts say.
Schwarzenberg’s call, which came one day before his Green Party colleagues met in Brno and reiterated their own concerns regarding Iraq, is effectively toothless while at the same time political.
“He is trying to balance on the edge,” says Jiří Schneider, program director at the Prague Security Studies Institute. “The Green Party was never enthusiastic about our presence in Iraq, so it’s nothing new.” Indeed, the Greens’ new resolution states that the party wants only “the extension of the Czech armed forces’ mission in Iraq that will be under NATO command” to remain on the ground.
The Czech Republic now has five soldiers under NATO command, says Jiří Beneš, spokesman at the Foreign Ministry.
Schwarzenberg lacks the authority to pull the 100 or so Czech soldiers from Iraq and the government has already proposed to parliament that they stay on for another year.
By calling for their withdrawal, he is able to appease his Green supporters while not really challenging the troops’ presence in Iraq, or straying too much from his charge as foreign minister, Schneider says.
“It’s absolutely only domestic policy. It has nothing to do with making any quick, rushed decision,” he says.
Interviewed on Czech Television Oct. 7, Schwarzenberg declined to say when he wants the troops home, only that the Czech Republic would need to discuss such an action with its allies.
Coalition of the unwilling?
Were the Czechs to do so, they might find a busy line when phoning Washington. Of late, the 38 countries that joined the United States in the 2003 invasion have been not so willing to retain or increase their commitments in Iraq.
The United State’s strongest partner in Iraq, the United Kingdom, has been slowly bringing its troops home, perhaps in response to strong anti-Iraq War pressure at home.
What were once 40,000 British troops in Iraq now has dwindled to 5,000.  And on Oct. 8 British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said that half of those will be home by spring.
The British withdrawal could result in less need for Czech troops, since they mostly guard the British base in Basra, says James J. Townsend Jr., the director of the Program on International Security at the Atlantic Council in Washington, D.C.
Townsend was the director of NATO policy at the U.S. mission to NATO until 2003. Prior to that, he worked for the Pentagon, specializing in Eastern European policy.
“Basra is not as hot as the Sunni Triangle,” Townsend says. “The situation is a bit more stable [in Basra] so the facts on the ground will probably allow the Czech Republic to redeploy Czechs [elsewhere].”
Still, Townsend says, it’s not surprising if the Czech Republic is debating whether to stay in Iraq.
“The Czechs have been there for a long time and deployments like that are expensive. For sure, the Czechs have been stretched,” he says.
Since late 2003, the nation has deployed more than 1,600 military personnel to Iraq, according to the Multi-National Force website (www.mnf-iraq.com). Today, about 100 Czech soldiers are there to guard Basra and train security forces.  Were they to leave, it’s questionable what impact, if any, their departure would have considering that the U.S. force in Iraq numbers 168,000.
But Townsend says that the coalition troops, though small in number, are important to the mission in Iraq.
“[The U.S.] is so stretched in Iraq that having the coalition there is very important … they are doing missions that the U.S. would otherwise do,” he says. “At the end of the day, the coalition forces do matter and if they were extended then I’m sure there would be a sigh of relief [from Americans and Iraqis],” he says.
Iraq, he says, is “not a U.S. concern. It’s an international concern.”
The Czech contribution to efforts in Iraq extends beyond troop levels. This year alone, the foreign ministry earmarked 4.5 million Kč [$230,000] for reconstruction projects in Iraq, according to Czech News Agency (ČTK). And from 2004 to 2006, the country spent nearly 50 million Kc on such projects, ČTK reports.
Iraqi officials recognize this contribution and have made several high-profile visits to Prague in recent months. Iraq’s Foreign Minister Hoshyar Mahmud Zebari visited in mid-September to ask for continued Czech help in training security forces, while an Iraqi parliamentary delegation visited the city in early October.

Kimberly Ashton can be reached at kashton@praguepost.com


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