Powell Attempts to Mend Europe Ties

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell moved to improve the United States’ troubled relations with its European allies Wednesday, urging them to look beyond the differences that have divided the Atlantic alliance since last year’s invasion of Iraq and join with America to resolve global problems.

“Whatever our differences about the past and about Iraq, we are now looking forward,” Powell said in a speech to the Transatlantic Center, a Brussels think tank dedicated to boosting European-American understanding. “We’re reaching out to Europe, and we hope Europe will reach out to us.”

His comments were the latest step in a Bush administration effort to rebuild bridges to nations that rushed to the side of the United States after the Sept. 11 attacks but were later alienated by what they saw as a highhanded rush to war in Iraq.

Powell’s remarks also emphasized a new desire to work with Europeans through multinational groups, including the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the European Union and the Group of 8 leading industrial nations.

President Bush announced shortly after his reelection last month that the first foreign trip of his second term would be to Europe in February. Powell said Wednesday that Bush would “come here looking to the future.”

Ties with NATO’s two largest European members, France and Germany, have been among those most strained by the Iraq war.

The diplomatic effort is driven largely by necessity. With its armed forces severely stretched by deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan and its political image tarnished in much of the Muslim world, the United States needs new help from old allies, both military and diplomatic, to maintain commitments and pursue new initiatives.

Powell said Wednesday that it was in the interests of Europeans to work more closely with the Americans, even in Iraq.

“The war happened; we now have to defeat an insurgency and give the Iraqi people a chance to decide how they wish to be led through an election,” Powell said. “It is in no one’s interest, either in North America or in Europe, for Iraq to fail in this effort and to return to the days of tyranny of a Saddam Hussein-type figure.”

At a meeting today of foreign ministers in the 26-nation Atlantic alliance, Powell is expected to press European governments to boost their contributions to a 9,000-member NATO force in Afghanistan and make new commitments to one of two NATO programs for training Iraqi military officers in Baghdad. A senior U.S. official said he expected as many as five new alliance countries to pledge military personnel for the Iraqi programs.

The same official, however, acknowledged that some European members remained so opposed to U.S. involvement in Iraq that they refused even to let staffers from their countries assigned to NATO headquarters units have anything to do with the programs.