US President George W. Bush ushered seven eastern European allies into NATO on Monday as "full and equal partners," and appealed to the alliance for unity in Iraq and the war on terror after the Madrid bombings.
The entry of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia increased the number of NATO members to 26, but the expansion could slow deployments and has angered Russia by shifting the 55-year-old trans-Atlantic alliance to its borders.
"Today our alliance faces a new enemy, which has brought death to innocent people from New York to Madrid. Terrorists hate everything this alliance stands for. They despise our freedom, they fear our unity, they seek to divide us. They will fail. We will not be divided," Bush said.
PHOTO: AP
Bush, criticized for paying scant attention to alliance-building, said the seven new NATO entrants were already "allies in action" because they aided the US in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"They understand our cause in Afghanistan and Iraq because tyranny for them is still a fresh memory," Bush told the nations' prime ministers at a South Lawn ceremony after they formally handed over their accession documents.
"Today they stand with us as full and equal partners in this great alliance."
In an immediate reflection of the shift eastward of an alliance forged to fight the Cold War, NATO fighter jets headed to the Baltics under a plan to begin regular patrols, Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said. The Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were republics in the former Soviet Union, NATO's Cold War foe, until the Soviet breakup in 1991.
Russia protested the patrols and a parliamentary deputy said Moscow may respond with "corresponding measures."
Despite fears the enlargement could hamper timely deployments because of NATO's need for consensus on military action, Bush said he also supported the ambitions of Albania, Croatia and Macedonia to one day join the alliance. "The door to NATO will remain open," he added.
Bush's appeal for unity follows the deadly Madrid train bombings on March 11. Spain's new leader has pledged to pull his country's 1,300 troops out of Iraq unless the UN is given much greater control there by the end of June.
The new members exulted in joining an organization which ensures military protection to the 26 nations.
"Today, it is a really fantastic day for Slovakia.... I consider this a very big success," Foreign Minister Eduard Kukan told reporters.
Forty percent of NATO will now be former communist states, and Washington has welcomed them as a counterweight to the "old Europe" of France and Germany, who opposed the Iraq war.
A Russian parliamentary deputy dismissed the Washington ceremony as a "show."
Konstantin Kosachev, representative of a Russian parliamentary committee on international affairs, said a NATO plan to patrol Baltic airspace was an "unfriendly" move. Estonia and Latvia border Russia, while Lithuania has a frontier with Moscow's Kaliningrad enclave.
"It can not be ruled out that Russia ought to look at the possibility of taking corresponding measures," he said.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexander Yakovenko said, "The main thing that could improve the state of European security is a fundamental change in the very nature of NATO ... including a joint fight against new and real threats and challenges."
Monday's expansion has brought NATO nearer to the Balkans, the south Caucasus, the Middle East and Central Asia, all potential breeding grounds for the West's post-Sept. 11 enemies: terrorism and the spread of weapons of mass destruction.
But the expansion could hinder NATO's ability to respond quickly to such threats because of its consensus decision-making.
CARTEL ARRESTS: The president said that a US government operation to arrest two cartel members made it jointly responsible for the unrest in the state’s capital Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador on Thursday blamed the US in part for a surge in cartel violence in the northern state of Sinaloa that has left at least 30 people dead in the past week. Two warring factions of the Sinaloa cartel have clashed in the state capital of Culiacan in what appears to be a fight for power after two of its leaders were arrested in the US in late July. Teams of gunmen have shot at each other and the security forces. Meanwhile, dead bodies continued to be found across the city. On one busy street corner, cars drove
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema
‘CICADA VOTERS’: A Fairfax County elections official said about one-third of local voters came to the polls on election day in 2020, while the rest voted by mail or early The Democratic and Republican national conventions are just a memory, the first and perhaps only debate between US Vice President Kamala Harris and former US president Donald Trump is in the bag and election offices are beginning to send out absentee ballots. Now come the voters. Yesterday was the start of early in-person voting for the US presidential election on Nov. 5, starting in Virginia, South Dakota and the home state of Harris’ running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. The first ballots being cast in person were made with just over six weeks left before election day. About a dozen more states will
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited