Vilnius Letter - Overview

Overview

The letter of the eight was followed on 6 February by a letter from the Vilnius group comprising Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Romania, and Slovakia which effectively supported a US military intervention in Iraq. The letter expressed confidence in the evidence presented by Powell and agreed that Iraq had clearly violated UN resolutions. In capitals around the world, the letter could not be interpreted as anything but support of a US military intervention in Iraq.

By expressing support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq — by that point seemingly inevitable — the Vilnius letter was a public rebuke by ten EU candidates of France and Germany's vocal opposition to American and British policy. The signatories were later dubbed "New Europe" by the US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and were to receive emotional criticism from the French president Chirac. Observers noted that the signatories by the letter indicated that they this time prioritized U.S. interests instead of the European Union's at a time when it was too late to reverse their admittance into the Union.

According to reports in respected national newspapers cite?, the US envoy Bruce P. Jackson was the architect behind both the letter of the eight and the Vilnius letter. He arranged a meeting in the Lithuanian embassy in Washington, where the foreign ministers of all ten countries participated. The text had been proposed in advance, but according to the press reports it was Bruce Jackson who convinced the participants to accept the proposal and to disregard efforts by Bulgaria — then a rotating member of the UN Security Council — to alter the text. Since the early 1990s, Bruce Jackson had been an informal advisor to central European governments, advising them on the road to admission into NATO. He allegedly now convinced the foreign ministers of the Vilnius ten, that their support for the US in this international conflict would give them much better chances in the US Congress when it was to vote on accepting those countries into NATO.