NATO has formally agreed to boost Turkey's defences "as a matter of urgency" after resolving a dispute over Iraq that stretched the alliance's unity to breaking point.
Bypassing France, ambassadors on NATO's Defence Planning Committee (DPC) cleared the way for NATO to field AWACS surveillance aircraft, Patriot missile systems and chemical-biological response units to Turkey.
The DPC - of which France is not a member - tasked NATO military chiefs "to implement, as a matter of urgency, defensive measures to assist Turkey," said a NATO statement.
"Alliance solidarity has prevailed," said Mr Nicholas Burns, the US ambassador to NATO.
"By taking this step, NATO has lived up to its core responsibility under Article Four of the Washington Treaty to respond to an ally in a time of threat," he said.
Washington is pressing Turkey, NATO's only Muslim member and the only one to share a border with Iraq, to welcome tens of thousands of US troops in return for an economic aid package worth billions of dollars.
Belgium, France and Germany had blocked NATO from initiating military planning, arguing that it would send the "wrong signal" while diplomacy continues in a bid to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction.
But Belgium and Germany were brought on board late on Sunday after the rest of NATO agreed to include language reaffirming their commitment to diplomatic efforts to solve the Iraqi crisis.
"It's a done deal," said a NATO diplomat, expressing hope the alliance could now move forward.
But few are under any illusion that the crisis, one of the worst since NATO was founded in 1949, has called into question the consensual method by which the alliance takes its decisions.
Above all the deadlock, which continued for nearly a month, has underlined the isolation within NATO of France, which withdrew from the alliance's integrated military command structure in 1966 and therefore does not sit on the DPC.
NATO Secretary-General George Robertson, who left today for a three-day visit to Washington, acknowledged that the alliance's credibility had suffered from the row.
"Damage has been done to some extent to our credibility, to relations between the United States and the other countries," he said in an interview published today by eight European newspapers, including the Wall Street Journal Europe.
AFP