Canada Offers to Help Prepare for Iraq Election

Canada is ready and willing to train election officials in Iraq and to help monitor the vote that U.S. authorities want to hold there by the end of January, Prime Minister Paul Martin said Sunday.

“This is an area in which Canada has a great deal of expertise ... and we’re prepared to offer it,” Martin said in an interview on CNN.

So far there’s been no official request for Canadian help in organizing the National Assembly election, scheduled for Jan. 30.

But Martin said Ottawa has “indicated that if we’re asked, we will participate. And we can move very quickly once we’re asked, we’ve done this before.”

Canada is likely to be part of a wider international effort involving several countries.

Despite his support for training and monitoring, Martin rejected the idea of deploying Canadian troops to help U.S. and British soldiers maintain order during the election.

Canadian military personnel are heavily engaged in Afghanistan and could face new peacekeeping demands in the Darfur region of Sudan and in Haiti, he said.

“It would be very hard for us to commit troops into Iraq,” Martin said. “Our troops are stretched very, very thin.”

A shortage of personnel isn’t the only reason for the prime minister’s reluctance to cross the line from civilian training to military aid.

Martin has followed the lead of his predecessor, Jean Chretien, in drawing a distinction between Afghanistan and Iraq. Both men favored armed intervention to oust Afghanistan’s Taliban regime that had provided a safe haven for terrorists, but both opposed the American military action to drive Iraqi President Saddam Hussein from power.