PARIS (Reuters) - The egg on Washington’s face over its seizure of a North Korean arms shipment to Yemen spread across the pages of the European press on Thursday as allies questioned U.S. tactics in its war against terror.
“Intercept of North Korean missiles misfires” was how Britain’s Financial Times headlined its story on the dramatic seizure by Spanish warships in the Arabian Sea on Wednesday and the reluctant U.S. decision to release the ship hours later.
“The whole affair was a flop,” the French daily Le Figaro wrote. “It looks like the Americans screwed up,” Liberation, another Paris paper, remarked.
Richard Murphy, former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, told Italy’s La Stampa that the freighter incident was “really very embarrassing to the United States.”
Acting on U.S. information, Spanish warships stopped the unflagged cargo ship So San on Monday and found 15 Scud missiles and conventional warheads as well as 85 drums of unidentified chemicals hidden under cement bags on the ship.
It handed control over to the United States.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld denounced North Korea on Wednesday as “the single largest proliferator of ballistic missile technology on the face of the earth” and said the arms would not reach their destination.
But later in the day, Washington reluctantly handed the shipload of missiles over to Yemen, which insisted it had bought them legally and would not hand them over to anyone else.
FIGURING OUT A FLIP-FLOP
Washington’s flip-flop raised suspicion in Madrid that Spanish forces had been made fools of by their American ally.
“Spain has had to carry out a thankless task which undoubtedly carried risk for our troops,” the conservative daily El Mundo wrote in an editorial demanding an explanation
USA Missfire Bigtime!
:nono: So Yemen supposed to be ally of America and it gets treated like a cotton field slave as usual. No consultation or enquiries but the usual gung ho we do what we like where we like even though it another country or waters or that we happen to be thousands of miles away behaving like this in other nations affairs.