http://worldnetdaily.com/frame/direct.asp?SITE=www.vny.com/cf/News/upidetail.cfm?QID=164478

WASHINGTON, March 2 (UPI) -- Slowly, quietly and almost by stealth, the Bush administration has just scored a major foreign policy success. The European opposition to Bush's plan to go ahead with a controversial and multi-billion dollar missile defense system has collapsed.

German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, whose government had until this week been one of the coldest critics of the program, has now accepted it and proposed the Germany should take part in the technology -- and even with the funding - of an alliance missile defense system.

Schroeder's remarks, in the course of an interview on N24 TV in Berlin, followed immediately after the visit to Washington and Camp David by British Prime Minister Tony Blair. In the British tradition of steadfast support for its U.S. ally and the Atlantic Alliance, Blair accepted the need to work on both offensive and defensive systems against post-Cold War threats.

"I understand and share the concern of the president and the American administration about weapons of mass destruction and nuclear proliferation. And I think it is very important in that context that we discuss all the ways that we can deal with this threat, which is a real threat and a present threat, both in relation to offensive and defensive systems," Blair said in the joint press conference with President George W. Bush after their Camp David weekend.

Although he faces a general election this year, Blair had a far easier task than Schroeder in lining up behind the U.S. decision. Decades of intimacy in intelligence and nuclear cooperation between the United States and Britain, along with a broadly pro-American British public, meant Blair faces little domestic political damage. But for Schroeder, whose coalition government depends on Green support in a country with a large pacifist movement, the costs could be severe.

The British and German leaders, who stay in close touch as the United States' two key allies in Europe, discussed the results of Blair's visit by phone shortly after he returned to Downing Street. Blair stressed that the U.S. decision had already been taken; the Bush administration was determined to go ahead. But Blair noted that there was still no decision on what kind of system to develop, no agreement on the main technology to pursue, and that any deployment was some years away. As a result, there was time for the European allies, and possibly even the Russians, to participate in the U.S. deliberations.

As a result of that talk with Blair, Chancellor Schroeder began cautiously in announcing what amounted to a U-turn in German policy. It was, after all, a sharp departure from the earlier statements of Germany's foreign and defense ministers, who had echoed Russian and French fears that the U.S. system could destabilize the strategic security system that had lasted since 1972, when the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty was signed.

"With regard to the planned national missile defense system (NMD), it would be necessary first of all to discuss specific needs," Schroeder began. "What threat scenarios are seen and how should we respond to them -- with a purely national defense system or with a system that also includes Europe and does not exclude Russia?" Schroeder said. "Only then a decision should be made on building the system and how to build it."

Two other European countries remain important on the NMD issue. The first is Denmark, for geographical reasons. The NMD system will need state-of-the-art radars, and the two probable sites are at Britain's Fylingdales and in Greenland, a self-governing territory under Danish sovereignty. There could be political difficulties over the site, but with British and German support the Danes will probably agree.

That leaves France, whose conservative President Jacques Chirac and socialist government led by Lionel Jospin are agreed on few things -- except to oppose NMD as a dangerously destabilizing new venture in military technology. France's foreign minister Hubert Vedrine has been outspoken on the need for other countries to balance America's "hyper-power," and has promoted the idea of Russia, China and Europe collectively urging the United States to drop the NMD idea.

France now looks isolated within Europe. Bush already looks like the convincing leader of the Atlantic Alliance, having steadfastly pushed his idea and persuaded his two main allies to back him. All that is needed now is the technology -- 18 years after President Ronald Reagan first evoked it -- to take anti-missile defenses from the drawing board into reality.