Mission: Desirable

The announcement came out of the blue. Iraq exited the headlines in the Czech Republic a long time ago, and except for the current upheaval on the Turkish border, it’s not heavily covered in the foreign affairs sections either. Then all of a sudden the foreign affairs minister declared in early October that he wants to withdraw Czech troops from the unstable country.

However, the majority of the public has already forgotten they are even there. What have the Czechs been actually doing in Iraq, and what’s awaiting them? The future of [Czech] participation in one of the battles against terrorism is something ministry planners have been working on for several months now. And they keep promising that the miniature Czech mission in this war is definitely not seeing its end; on the contrary: local top-class specialists will finally be assigned missions fit for them.

Not even we have enough

Every predecessor of current Czech diplomacy chief [Karel Schwarzenberg] tried to persuade the electorate that the presence of hundreds of [Czech] soldiers in Iraq is necessary and discussion was not an option. First of all, to help get rid of Saddam’s regime, and then to help the Iraqi people create democratic institutions and stabilise a country scourged by internal conflicts. When searching for an answer to why Karel Schwarzenberg has…