no surprise there. Since they have deemed themselves the world police, its time to take all of our troops home immediately.
To me, it seems like it would do the exact opposite. Instead of individual countries sending what they want, they'll have countries throwing wrenches into the EU sending anything? At least, that was my first thought on the matter.
Should be. However, I heard through a coded message from one of my fellow travelers in the radical Islamo/commie/fascist movement that they will soon be boarding black helicopters and heading this way.
<object width="512" height="296"><param name="movie" value="http://www.hulu.com/embed/c1hZFvpKDtZltYI_2wskaQ"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><embed src="http://www.hulu.com/embed/c1hZFvpKDtZltYI_2wskaQ" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowFullScreen="true" width="512" height="296"></embed></object>
Why would you think this a bad thing? A 60,000-man force capable of sharing the burden, rather than a piecemeal assortment of forces, only helps the US as far as security goes. You have a problem in that you kneejerk so hard that your foot ends up in your mouth.
Sam, you just want to put US troop under their command and have UN black helicopters flying over Manhattan and Houston.
Can we stop with the world police paranoia? Anytime there is even a mention of an organized (key word organized) multi-nation long term military force, people just scream world police. The honest intention is exactly what is stated. NATO is dominated by the US and yet historically (excluding Afghanistan) most NATO operations involved Europe and European conflicts. The fact is that a few European nations (mainly France which has over time shifted support away from NATO) want to dictate multi-national coalitions on its on terms rather than operating through a US led effort. Also, their argument is akin to the argument with the international criminal court. Before the ICC, all criminal tribunals were ad-hoc tribunals set up by UN mandates for specific issues. And it gets annoying having to set up these tribunals over and over again rather than having a central full time tribunal for war crimes. A permanent force is just much easier to organize and respond to international crisis. Think about how much easier and faster an integrated European force could have intervened in the Balkans as opposed to all the nonsense that went with getting NATO to organize a force and the politics of who offers how many troops. This is simply Britain and France wanting to divorce itself from NATO. Unfortunately for them the vast majority of NATO would rather have a US dominated alliance as opposed to a French one. The US is the stabilizing influence in the power politics of Eastern and Western Europe. The only thing that even raised a possibility of this was the fact that Europe as a whole disagreed with a lot of American foreign policy but enthusiasm for this should die with renewed efforts for diplomacy by the Obama administration.