IRAQ Bush takes quest for NATO help to tense Turkey
He won European support for his plan to send security trainers to Iraq.
COMBINED DISPATCHES
ANKARA, Turkey -- President Bush arrived in Turkey late Saturday to seek international help in Iraq, hours after Islamic extremists there kidnapped and threatened to behead three Turkish citizens.
In a videotape aired by the Al-Jazeera television network, masked extremists said they would carry out their death threat in 72 hours unless Turkish companies pulled out of Iraq. The kidnapping cast a pall over Bush's mission to Turkey to seek NATO's help in training Iraqi security forces.
Bush is widely unpopular in Turkey, and his arrival Saturday in Ankara was preceded by a series of protests and bomb blasts, including one Thursday that injured three people outside the Ankara hotel where he will stay. Another blast that day on an Istanbul bus killed four people and injured 14.
On Saturday, Turkish police fired tear gas as more than 150 left-wing demonstrators hurled rocks and used sticks to try and break down a police barricade during a protest ahead of Bush's arrival.
Turkish officials said they were trying to get more information about the kidnappers, and U.S. officials traveling with Bush had no immediate reaction to the developments in Iraq. The three captives were shown holding what appeared to be Turkish passports.
The kidnapping is sure to complicate Bush's attempts to smooth over differences with Turkey over the Iraq war. Relations were strained in the build-up to war when Turkey refused to let U.S. troops use the country as a launching pad for the invasion. The war remains unpopular in Turkey, a mostly Muslim nation.
"Despite the fact that the U.S. created the threat of Islamic terrorism by its own hand, now it is obliged to eliminate it," one commentator wrote in the Hurriyet newspaper Saturday, in a column that echoed other editorial judgments.
EU support
Bush came to Turkey from Ireland, where he won the European Union's support for his plan to send NATO trainers to Iraq. NATO members led by Germany and France have ruled out the possibility of NATO troops in Iraq.
After meeting with EU leaders at Dromoland Castle near Shannon, Ireland, Bush said "the bitter differences of the war are over" with European allies.
But he also acknowledged at a news conference with U.S. and foreign journalists that America's image has suffered abroad. Polls in Europe show widespread opposition to the Iraq war and pervasive disdain for Bush.
Despite those differences, the European Union joined Bush in urging NATO to help train Iraqi security forces so that they can replace U.S. occupation troops in Iraq.
"NATO has the capability and I believe the responsibility to help the Iraqi people defeat the terrorist threat that's facing their country," President Bush said at a joint press conference with EU leaders in Ireland.
The EU leaders offered to help in Iraq by assisting with democratic elections and looking for ways to ease the new government's foreign debt.
Other action
In other declarations and statements issued at the close of the brief summit, the United States and EU agreed to:
UBetter combat terrorism by sharing data on lost and stolen passports, work more closely on hunting down terrorist' financing networks and increasing cooperation between law enforcement agencies on both sides of the Atlantic.
UExpand cooperation to prevent the spread of weapons of mass destruction and their delivery systems.
UBack continued peace talks to end 20 years of civil conflict in southern Sudan, and advance efforts being made by the United Nations to bring peace to all Sudan and address humanitarian and human rights crises in Darfur in western Sudan.
On the economic side, the United States and the EU signed an agreement Saturday to make the EU's planned satellite navigation system compatible with the existing U.S. Global Positioning System.
The scene in Ireland
The lingering tensions over the Iraq war were all too apparent outside the grounds of the 370-acre estate, where protesters shut down a major road leading to the castle. Bush had to delay his press conference when buses carrying White House reporters got stuck in the traffic backup.
Other large anti-war demonstrations were held in Dublin, Galway and Shannon.
"Listen, I care about the image of our country," Bush said when asked about his unpopularity in Europe. "I don't like it when the values of our country are misunderstood."
At the same time, he shrugged off his personal unpopularity in Europe.
"I must confess that the first polls I worry about are those that are going to take place in early November this year," he said, referring to the presidential election. "My job is to do my job. I'm going to do it the way I think is necessary. I'm going to set a vision. I will lead and we'll just let the chips fall where they may."
In separate meetings with Bush, Irish President Mary McAleese and Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern both raised concerns about the prison abuse scandal in Iraq and the treatment of terror suspects at the U.S. detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
European leaders object to Bush's view that the terror suspects are not protected by Geneva Conventions governing the treatment of wartime captives.
Ahern, who also serves as president of the European Union, sought to soften the criticism at his joint press conference with Bush and Romano Prodi of Italy, the president of the European Commission, the EU's executive arm.
"These things unfortunately happened, and of course we wish they didn't. But they do," Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern said. "What's important is how they're dealt with."
Bush and the EU leaders met under extraordinarily tight security that kept the protesters miles away.
The only noise at their outdoor news conference in the shadow of the 16th century castle came from mooing cows and a duck that landed in a pond directly behind Bush and his hosts.
American and European officials have good reason to want to put aside past differences. An estimated $2 billion in trade and investment crosses the Atlantic daily. The 25 nations in the European Union represent about 455 million people.