Outbreak of Iraqi Violence Pressures Allies

This month’s upsurge in violence in Iraq is putting intense pressure on America’s chief allies in the war, with political leaders who have sided with the Bush administration facing stinging criticism from opposition parties, newspapers and street demonstrators.

But for the most part, leaders of allied countries are hanging tough and talking back to their detractors, arguing that there is nothing to be gained and much to lose from retreating at such a crucial time.

Iraq “is a battle we have to fight, a struggle we have to win,” British Prime Minister Tony Blair declared Sunday in defense of his decision to send forces to Iraq.

“Were we to fail, which we will not, it is more than ‘the power of America’ that would be defeated,” Blair wrote in the Observer newspaper Sunday. “The hope of freedom and religious tolerance in Iraq would be snuffed out. Dictators would rejoice; fanatics and terrorists would be triumphant. Every nascent strand of moderate Arab opinion ... would be set back in bitter disappointment.”

Blair’s commentary came against the backdrop of increasingly gloomy assessments of the state of the war in Iraq, where coalition forces find themselves in a two-front battle involving radical elements of both Sunni and Shiite branches of Islam.

The coalition death toll in the first 11 days of April shot up to about 60, including one Ukrainian and one Salvadoran. Since the war began nearly 13 months ago, the alliance has lost more than 100 non-American soldiers, 59 of them British, according to unofficial estimates.

Abductions of foreigners in Iraq have also surged, raising the stakes for coalition partners.

About 35 countries have offered some type of military assistance in Iraq, but for most the contribution is largely symbolic. Only a handful of nations have been willing to send as many as 1,000 soldiers; Britain has committed 11,000. By contrast, the U.S. aims to keep 120,000 troops in place, and the number is currently closer to 130,000 as new troops rotate in.

Even the contributions of staunch allies appear to be at risk as the military situation deteriorates. British Foreign Minister Jack Straw candidly told a BBC radio audience last week that “the lid of the pressure cooker has come off.” Blair’s Labor Party has always been divided about the war, with former Labor ministers Robin Cook and Clare Short now among the government’s sharpest critics.

“There is a growing feeling here of ‘What the hell are we doing in there and how are we going to get out?’ ” British member of parliament Eric Illsley, a Labor backbencher, told the Sunday Telegraph.

The chief editor of Poland’s mass-circulation Fakt newspaper sounded a similar note, saying it looked as if Poland’s 2,500 troops in Iraq were being used to quell popular dissent rather than liberate the country.

In Japan, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi faced his third straight day of antiwar demonstrations Sunday as the country waited to hear whether three Japanese civilians taken hostage last week would be released unharmed. Japan has about 550 soldiers in Iraq performing humanitarian work.

Yet Koizumi insisted that Japan would not submit to the kidnappers’ ultimatum: Withdraw from Iraq or watch as the hostages are executed.

Until the hostages were taken, Japanese public support for Koizumi’s deployment of troops, the first such mission since World War II, was strong. Now, Japan’s traditional anti-military sentiment appears to have been revived, as seen in the daily protests outside Koizumi’s residence as well as in stepped-up demands by the small opposition Socialist Party to pull Japanese troops from Iraq.

Like Blair and Koizumi, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi strongly reaffirmed Italy’s participation in the U.S.-led coalition over the weekend, paying a surprise visit Saturday to the nearly 3,000 Italian troops stationed in Nasiriya. He said it was “unthinkable” to abandon Iraq now. Doing so would cave in to terrorists, he said.

“It wouldn’t stop the violence, and it would leave the Iraqi people in a bloody civil war,” Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini said.

Nevertheless, support for the mission in Iraq has eroded in Italy. Most Italians assumed their soldiers were working as part of a peacekeeping, humanitarian mission and were shocked when 19 Italians were killed in a suicide bombing last fall.

So far, the most significant threat of withdrawal from the coalition comes from Spain, which has had 1,300 troops in Iraq. The new government due to assume power this week intends to pull out Spanish troops unless the U.N. steps in before June 30, the target date for transferring sovereignty to the Iraqi people. (Honduras, following Spain’s announcement, indicated that it too planned to withdraw its 370 troops.)

Spain’s incoming prime minister, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, scored a surprise election victory last month after campaigning on a promise to bring Spanish troops home. The election was held three days after a string of bombings blamed on Islamic militants ripped through four commuter trains in Madrid, killing nearly 200 people.

Voters blamed the sitting government of Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, a fervent supporter of the Bush administration’s war in Iraq, for placing their country in harm’s way and for attempting to deflect blame for the bombing. Spanish public opinion had opposed the war from the start, and the violence of the last week has only deepened that feeling.

Poland, a loyal American friend in the “new Europe,” remains on board, but hints are that its participation is not as firm as it once was. In a recent interview, Prime Minister Leszek Miller was quoted as saying he expects there to be more and more public and political pressure to pull out of Iraq.

“A country taking part in a coalition cannot say, ‘We are packing up and going,’ ” he said. But he added that the 2,500 Polish soldiers in Iraq represented “the maximum of our possibilities.”

Rzeczpospolita, one of the nation’s most respected newspapers aimed at the country’s governing and political elites, insisted that the war was necessary. “Surrender in the face of terror means only one thing -- more terror,” the paper said.

But Grzegorz Jankowski, the editor of Fakt, took an opposite view. “Poles went to Iraq as peace forces, and not as a penal expedition,” he said. “It is the Americans who are responsible for what is happening there now.... Fighting an Iraqi uprising will be their war -- exclusively theirs.”

In El Salvador, Salvadorans were shaken by the loss of one of their soldiers, 19-year-old Natividad Mendez, whose death in an April 4 ambush in Najaf was the first among the 1,000 Central American troops in Iraq. President Francisco Flores insisted that it would not weaken his “firm determination to maintain the army’s presence in rebuilding and reestablishing peace and democracy in Iraq.” But legislators of the leftist Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, which controls the largest minority in the Salvadoran Congress, said they planned to join other opposition parties to try to force a return of the soldiers, according to newspaper reports.

Extensive coverage of Mendez’s death prompted letters from newspaper readers on both sides. Some have called the U.S.-led mission in Iraq an illegal invasion. Others argued that El Salvador must back its powerful ally because millions of Salvadoran immigrants work in the United States.

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Times staff writers Doyle McManus in Tokyo, Tracy Wilkinson in Rome and Richard Boudreaux in Mexico City and Ela Kasprzycka of The Times’ Warsaw Bureau contributed to this report.