How about gain and loss of Polish military mission in Iraq

How about gain and loss of Polish military mission in Iraq.

Polish troops stationed in Iraq turned over their central-south command to the United States on Sunday, or October 4th. In accordance with a troop pullout timetable defined at the end of 2007, Poland's five-year-plus military presence in Iraq will come to an end, when the remaining 600 Polish troops leave for home as scheduled in late October.

With regard to the Polish military mission in Iraq, Polish Defense Minister Bogdan Klich, who had made a special trip to Iraq to attend the troop withdrawal ceremony, said he held that "the completion of our mission" in Iraq had scored noticeable successes in the political and military realms but failed to attain benefits economically.

The U.S. launched its Iraq war in March 2003 in defiance of opposition from the international community and in violation of basic international norms. One main excuse for war was that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, but no evidences for such weapons were ever found after the toppling of the Saddam (Hussein) regime.

When explaining reasons for his approval of troop dispatch to Iraq, former Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski conceded three "never thought-offs". He never thought that he was "misled" with the information on weapons of mass destruction; he never thought that Iraq's security situation would continue to deteriorate with the collapse of the Saddam power; and he never thought that armed attacks by local rebel organizations and al-Qaeda would escalate as Poland had previously intended to implement the postwar peacekeeping and rebuilding missions in Iraq.

Most political analysts, nevertheless, deem that Poland has not fully achieved the objectives in the political, military and economic fields it had set forth before the Iraq war.

Since the U.S. had few supporters among traditional allies when launching the war to oust Saddam Hussein, Poland maintained that its involvement in the US-led Iraq war could raise its position as a (new) U.S. ally and uplift its own international status accordingly. It joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) upon the collapse of the Warsaw Pact in the early 1990s. While pitching in to topple Saddam Hussein to enhance its strategic cooperation with the U.S., it also stepped up or aggravated its differences with the anti-war EU member states.

Meanwhile, global opinions widely acknowledge, Poland's national image could get impaired in the Arab world with its military engagement in Iraq. Moreover, several new EU member states bordering on Poland came into visa exemption agreements with the U.S. but it insisted on not granting Polish citizens the visa exemption treatment, and this disconcerted the politicians who had defended for the troop dispatch and made them extremely awkward.

In the wake of the Iraq war, Poland commanded a 6,000-strong multination force in Iraq, which comprised troops from 24 nations, including 1,300 Spanish soldiers in central-south zone. From 2003 till today, Poland has sent in turn 10 batches of defending and stationing troops, involving a total of 10,000 soldiers, who, through their actual combat and peacekeeping missions, have upgraded their training, equipment-installing, commanding, medical treatment and telecommunications standards, and also gained experience in multinational military coordination. Of course, the Polish armed forces paid some prices too. Twenty-two Polish soldiers lost their lives under the Iraqi sky in the past five years.

However, a five-year mission did not reap any economic interests in return, and Polish companies have not received any due or preferable considerations. In the past five years, the Polish Defense Ministry covered a total cost of some 500 million US dollars for the nation's military presence in Iraq; and no agreement was inked with Iraq on a debt of more than 800 million dollars the latter had owed to Poland prior to the war. Furthermore, bilateral trade volume between the two nations shrinked to merely around 70 million dollars after the Poland's troop dispatch to Iraq from 200 million dollars in the 1980s.

What is particularly worth mentioning is that the Polish government has been subjected to antiwar pressures from both at home and overseas in the past five-odd years, and that those stand for an urgent, immediate troop withdrawal make up a vast majority of the Poles, and many of them fear that their country would possibly become one target of numerous terrorist groups in Iraq. In summing up both gains and losses of the mission in Iraq over the past five years, local critics say, it is difficult to put a satisfactory full stop to the Polish military mission of a maximal scale ever since the end of the second world war over six decades ago.

By People's Daily Online, and its author is PD resident reporter in Poland Jin Zhao