India refuses U.S. request to send troops to Iraq

NEW DELHI, July 14 (Reuters) - India said on Monday it would not send peacekeeping troops to Iraq without a United Nations mandate, rejecting a request from Washington for help in the war-torn nation.

"Were there to be an explicit U.N. mandate for the purpose, the government of India could consider the deployment of our troops in Iraq," Foreign Minister Yashwant Sinha told reporters after a two-hour meeting of the cabinet's security committee.

Monday's decision came after Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee's Hindu nationalist coalition government failed to build domestic consensus in support of sending troops to Iraq, an old friend of India. India had opposed the U.S.-led war against Iraq.

More: http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/DEL6834.htm

The world should tell the US to take a walk while laffing in our faces. We made the mess; we should be forced to clean it up.

It amazes me that this administration expects the world to help them out in a war that most of them were against in the first place.

Looks like we're going to be left to "twist slowly in the wind".

American and British clean up.... the way it should be...

I'm glad to hear this. No troops should go to Iraq without not only a UN mandate, but an effective UN-coordinated transfer of political power to the people of Iraq. Only then is "peacekeeping" not tantamount to colonial occupation.

These were the guys who were going to be one of our NEW allies.

soon, Pakistan will get the shiny new F-16s, unless India offers to send its troops to Iraq.

young soldiers into the wood chipper. The whole world sees that the
American people are getting sick of watching it, and that it is
hurting Shrub's re-election "aspirations". Why should any country
sacrifice its youngest so that the death toll for America can go
down? The buck stops with Rumsfeld who convinced the White House
that he could win this war "on the cheap". Well, it ain't won,
and it ain't cheap.