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....to Romania;
Dr. Mordrid
Romanians Eager for Long-Awaited Arrival of the Yanks
By Kevin Sullivan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, February 6, 2006; Page A10
MIHAIL KOGALNICEANU, Romania -- Camelia Mohorea stood outside the Vascov Nonstop shop with a big bottle of beer and a huge sack of pig feed, waiting for a ride home and daydreaming about American soldiers. "If the Americans come, they will give us a better life," said the 43-year-old woman, puffing a cigarette as cart-pulling horses clomped by, hauling hay.
U.S. soldiers have been the talk of this poor little town since last month, when U.S. and Romanian officials announced that the Romanian air force base here would soon host the first permanent U.S. military presence in a former Warsaw Pact country. From the presidential palace in Bucharest, 130 miles west of here, to the humble pig and chicken farms of this Black Sea hamlet, the announcement has been greeted with undisguised delight.
"The dramatic wish of Romanians at the end of the Second World War was to be occupied by the Americans and not by the Russians," President Traian Basescu, a cheerful former oil tanker captain, said in an interview.
Echoing a widely held sentiment here, Basescu said that while Romanians were looking west and waiting for U.S. troops as the war ended, the Soviets swept in from the east, bringing a half-century of communism that kept Romania poor and backward while Western Europe thrived.
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The deal for the U.S. military presence here was signed in December by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Romanian Foreign Minister Mihai Razvan Ungureanu. Details are still being negotiated, but U.S. Army Col. Pat Mackin, a spokesman for the U.S. military in Europe, said troops could begin arriving by summer 2007. Mackin said the presence in Romania -- about 100 permanent headquarters staff members, and as many as 2,000 soldiers rotating through at any given time -- would be far smaller than at traditional U.S. bases in Europe.
Mackin said the idea was to have smaller and "more agile" forces in strategic locations in Europe, where the United States is reducing its troop level from a Cold War presence of about 315,000 to as few as 65,000 over the next decade. A similar deal is being negotiated with neighboring Bulgaria, Mackin said.
Basescu said Romania saw close military ties with the United States as critical to its own security, especially in the face of what he called the increasing traffic of drugs, arms and illegal immigrants across the Black Sea region into Europe. Military cooperation between the two countries has increased markedly since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States, he noted, adding that Romania's more than 800 troops in Iraq and nearly 600 in Afghanistan would remain in place as long as the United States and those countries wanted them.
By Kevin Sullivan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, February 6, 2006; Page A10
MIHAIL KOGALNICEANU, Romania -- Camelia Mohorea stood outside the Vascov Nonstop shop with a big bottle of beer and a huge sack of pig feed, waiting for a ride home and daydreaming about American soldiers. "If the Americans come, they will give us a better life," said the 43-year-old woman, puffing a cigarette as cart-pulling horses clomped by, hauling hay.
U.S. soldiers have been the talk of this poor little town since last month, when U.S. and Romanian officials announced that the Romanian air force base here would soon host the first permanent U.S. military presence in a former Warsaw Pact country. From the presidential palace in Bucharest, 130 miles west of here, to the humble pig and chicken farms of this Black Sea hamlet, the announcement has been greeted with undisguised delight.
"The dramatic wish of Romanians at the end of the Second World War was to be occupied by the Americans and not by the Russians," President Traian Basescu, a cheerful former oil tanker captain, said in an interview.
Echoing a widely held sentiment here, Basescu said that while Romanians were looking west and waiting for U.S. troops as the war ended, the Soviets swept in from the east, bringing a half-century of communism that kept Romania poor and backward while Western Europe thrived.
>
>
The deal for the U.S. military presence here was signed in December by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Romanian Foreign Minister Mihai Razvan Ungureanu. Details are still being negotiated, but U.S. Army Col. Pat Mackin, a spokesman for the U.S. military in Europe, said troops could begin arriving by summer 2007. Mackin said the presence in Romania -- about 100 permanent headquarters staff members, and as many as 2,000 soldiers rotating through at any given time -- would be far smaller than at traditional U.S. bases in Europe.
Mackin said the idea was to have smaller and "more agile" forces in strategic locations in Europe, where the United States is reducing its troop level from a Cold War presence of about 315,000 to as few as 65,000 over the next decade. A similar deal is being negotiated with neighboring Bulgaria, Mackin said.
Basescu said Romania saw close military ties with the United States as critical to its own security, especially in the face of what he called the increasing traffic of drugs, arms and illegal immigrants across the Black Sea region into Europe. Military cooperation between the two countries has increased markedly since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States, he noted, adding that Romania's more than 800 troops in Iraq and nearly 600 in Afghanistan would remain in place as long as the United States and those countries wanted them.
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