By Arthur Max, Associated Press Writer
Three hundred years ago Holland was the biggest military power on earth, master of a globe-spanning empire. Today, the Dutch have only a modest role in the world military scene, taking part in NATO missions in Bosnia and Afghanistan and relied upon more for humanitarian work than for battlefield prowess.
So why do they need cruise missiles?
That's what critics asked when the government said it intended to buy 30 Tomahawk missiles, an advanced version of the weapon that hammered Baghdad in 2003 to soften up Iraq before the U.S.-led invasion.
The purchase would make the Netherlands - whose 65,000-member military is dwarfed by other NATO armies - only the third in the world to own the missile after the United States and Britain.
The debate over the [euro]57 million (US$67 million) deal is largely finished - the opposition tried and failed to block it in parliament.
But it forms part of a larger question over the Netherlands' military ambitions and how it sees its role in the complex web of alliances within Europe and with the United States.
There is a key contradiction in Dutch security policy: As the military becomes more muscular, politicians are becoming more timid about accepting high-risk missions.
Last month, the government almost abandoned plans to dispatch 1,100 troops to a mountainous southern province of Afghanistan rife with Taliban insurgents following the release of a military intelligence report warning of potentially high casualties.
Since then, the United States and NATO have drawn up detailed plans to send rapid-reaction forces to rescue the Dutch from any concerted attack; officials are to decide Friday whether to go ahead with the dispatch. The troops would join the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force, or ISAF.
Some military analysts say the Tomahawk deal may have as much to do with politics than with any battlefield capability the Dutch might need.
"It would give them greater weight in the decision-making process in NATO," said Jean-Yves Haine, of the International Institute of Strategic Studies in London.
Haine says the Dutch already are more active in NATO than could be expected of a nation with 16 million people. "It has a punch that is greater than its intrinsic size," he said, also noting that a Dutchman, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, is its secretary general.
Actually firing a Tomahawk missile in combat would be fraught with political repercussions, in a country which saw massive demonstrations in the 1980s about the deployment of U.S. missiles on European soil.
"The fear is that we are like little kids wanting to play among the big boys," said Edwin Bakker of the Clingendhael Institute, an independent foreign policy think tank in The Hague.
The Defense Ministry argues the purchase is little more than an upgrade of the Armed Forces, the next step in moving from a static Cold War defense to a modern expeditionary force.
"The days of big armored maneuvered operations are in the past," said Claus Meijer, a ministry spokesman. "Today we are focusing on pinpoint operations with Special Forces, high quality intelligence, and high quality weapons which have a minimum risk of collateral damage."
The Dutch public has little appetite for military adventures. People were unhappy about the 20-month mission in Iraq, where two Dutch soldiers were killed. And they are still traumatized by the disgrace of Dutch peacekeepers in Srebrenica, Bosnia, in 1995 when - left undermanned and stranded by the U.N. command - they stood by while Serb forces massacred some 7,500 Bosnian Muslims.
A critical report of the failed mission toppled a government seven years after the events and said politicians had been more interested in boosting the country's international reputation than evaluating the risks.
The agony of Srebrenica may go some way in explaining the decision to buy Tomahawks.
"It's clear you need more of your own capacity so you don't have to rely on others," said Bakker.
The military hasn't completely shied away from combat. Some 165 green-beret Special Forces are operating in Afghanistan's mountains as part of the U.S.-led multinational Enduring Freedom task force hunting down Taliban resistance - a separate and more aggressive mission than ISAF's peacekeeping tasks. Another 450 Dutch soldiers are stationed in Kabul and northern Afghanistan.
But critics wonder what situation would call for a Dutch missile strike.
"Why are we buying these things? We are good at peacekeeping. The Tomahawk is for a first-strike policy," said Luk Blom, the defense expert for the opposition Labor Party in parliament.
