The Poles Remain

Poland's new, relatively conservative government will keep its troops in Iraq for another year:

Poland's government says it has taken the "very difficult decision" to extend its military deployment in Iraq until the end of 2006.

The new conservative government's decision reverses the previous leftist administration's plan to pull troops out in early 2006.

Poland, a staunch ally of the US, has about 1,500 troops stationed in Iraq.

It is the fifth biggest foreign contingent in Iraq, after the US, Britain, South Korea and Italy.

The move partly reflects the slow drift in Polish politics, from the leftist bloc that paralyzed it for much of the Nineties to a more rightward (by European standards) tilt today, and partly shows Poland's desire to be taken seriously as a political, military and economic force in Europe. Polish jokes aside (and jokes about Polish sloth and military incompetence were largely German inventions, Poland being to Germany what Iowa is to Minnesota). The Polish military has become, by many standards, among the best in NATO.

Contingents from other nations - Ukraine and Bulgaria this past week - have reached the ends of their commitments and left, while others like Japan and South Korea have drawn their forces down.

Source: the BBC

Why care?

Because in 1992, a year after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, the potemkin organization by which the USSR controlled Eastern Europe, Tom Brokaw declared at the end of a story about the new Polish democracy's economic teething pains "It seems that Poland's experiment with free enterprise has been a failure".

This, of course, nine years before they claimed that our invasion of Afghanistan could not succeed, 11 years before they declared that a US liberation of Iraq would cost 50,000 American lives and lead to Stalingrad-style fighting that would level Baghdad, and 13 years before they declared that Democracy was impossible in Iraq (but, to be fair, it wasn't long after they'd declared that Nicaragua was hunky-dory, but that democracy could never come to El Salvador).

I've joked that the Minnesota Vikings' fortunes are inversely related to Tom Barnard's attitude about them. So, it would seem, for nations; their odds of succeeding are inversely proportionate to the American Media's opinion of them.

Posted by Mitch at December 28, 2005 06:41 AM | TrackBack