Artículo de THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN en “The New York Times” del 26.10.2003
BRUSSELS
I've been a long and cranky opponent of NATO expansion, out of fear that it was going to dilute the organization. But now that NATO is expanding to 26 countries, I say: why stop there? Virtually all of NATO's future threats are going to come not from the east and Russia, but from the south — the Middle East and Afghanistan. So if NATO really wants to secure Europe, it can no longer just be in Europe. It needs to help stabilize these other regions. To do that, NATO needs to add three more members: Iraq, Egypt and Israel. Yes, you read that right.
Let's go through the logic, starting with Iraq. If a legitimate government emerges in Iraq, we will quickly face two security challenges there. First, how big an army should Iraq have? As Michael Mandelbaum, the Johns Hopkins foreign affairs expert, notes, "Iraq needs an army that is big enough to deter Iran and yet not so big that it could be used to smother Iraqi democracy and threaten the whole neighborhood, the way Saddam's huge army did."
In short, we want Iraq to have a small army, but to still be an effective counterweight to Iran. The best way to manage that would be to have Iraq join NATO, which would give Baghdad credible deterrent power without having to maintain a large army.
In addition, even if Iraq gets a democratic government, it will be a fragile democracy for a long time. It will need some kind of force in reserve, over the horizon, to serve as a guarantor of Iraqi democracy, so that no party or individual could ever run off with the system again. This force would serve as the guardian of Iraqi democracy the way the Turkish Army does in modern Turkey. The ideal force to do this would be a combined Iraqi-multinational force, like NATO, that would also include an Arab-Muslim component. If Iraq were in NATO, it would be politically so much easier to deploy such a force, which could be stationed in a base out in the desert, but always be in the background just in case.
And that brings us to why NATO should invite in Egypt: manpower. As Lord Robertson, the NATO secretary general, explained to me, all of the NATO European members, plus Canada, have a combined total of 1.4 million soldiers on active duty — but only 55,000 are actually "usable" for missions abroad. The others are either deskbound, untrained for anything other than sitting in one static position in Europe to deter the Soviet Union or lacking in logistical, engineering and command and control support for long-range missions. Also, many Euro-armies are unionized and don't care to work weekends! Since all 55,000 of NATO's usable Euro-Canadian troops are now deployed on peacekeeping missions, absent military restructuring, NATO is pretty well maxed out — and so are we.
Egypt, however, has a huge surplus of military manpower with little to do. Bringing Egyptian soldiers into NATO would give it the Arab-Muslim character it needs, make it much easier for NATO to do peacekeeping in Afghanistan and Iraq and provide resources and status for the Egyptian Army, while tying it into the West. Moreover, the main justification that NATO proponents gave for expanding NATO to the shaky democracies of Eastern Europe was that this would promote democratization and stability there. Where better to promote reform than Iraq and Egypt? Surely they are as important as Latvia.
You would want to bring Israel into NATO because it would make any peace process easier by giving Israelis a deeper sense of security. Also, if Egypt were in NATO, Israel would have to be as well to maintain the balance of power. But lastly, if Israelis and Palestinians can ever, one day, reach a peace accord, they will very likely need a credible multinational force to police it, and the only one I can think of is a U.S.-led NATO force. If Israel and Egypt were both in NATO, NATO peacekeepers would be much more acceptable to the Israeli public and to Palestinians.
No, I haven't lost my marbles. I am just sitting here at NATO headquarters, listening to NATO officials tell me that their future is to the south, but that they have no manpower to go there, then matching that up with the needs and resources of the countries to the south. Do that, and the answer becomes obvious: If you can't bring Muhammad to the mountain, bring the mountain to Muhammad — and to Moses.