WARSAW, Poland — Washington needs to provide more security for Poland if it wants Warsaw to host a U.S. missile defense base, the Polish defense minister said in remarks published Saturday.
Bogdan Klich, who will go to the United States on Tuesday for talks on the program with Defense Secretary Robert Gates, said a base would expose Poland to new threats, chiefly from terrorists, and it would be “very difficult” to persuade Poles to support the program without more security measures.
“We believe that the injection of Americans’ funds into modernization of our armed forces would balance the risk to our security linked to the construction of the base,” Klich was quoted as saying by the Dziennik newspaper.
Washington has proposed the base as part of an international system to protect the U.S. and Europe from threats from places like Iran.
But the proposal has angered Russia, which says an installation so close to its border threatens its security and has warned its missiles could target the base in Poland.
Klich said Poland wants a military cooperation agreement similar to those that Washington has with some other countries. It would be justified by the “unconditional” support that Poland has offered to the U.S. in recent years, including providing troops in Iraq, he said.
“The Americans must be involved in the modernization of our armed forces, if we are to be a serious ally,” Klich said.
He said Poland, which lost 21 troops in Iraq, feels “big frustration” over the “discrepancy between the declarations coming from the U.S. . . . and the actual state of our cooperation.”
Poles also have expressed widespread dissatisfaction over the lack of business contracts in Iraq, despite the country’s involvement there, and about being kept out of the U.S. visa waiver program.
