Mr President, Mr President-in-Office of the Council, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, I would firstly like to thank the draftsman of the opinion of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, Human Rights, Common Security and Defence Policy, Mr Van Hecke, for his work and his wonderful spirit of consensus and for his choice of the difficult priorities which have been included. What we need now of course is for these priorities to be accepted by the Committee on Budgets and by Parliament as a whole, with any modifications which the Committee on Budgets may have to make. Some speakers such as Mr Wynn or Mr Walter have explained very clearly the pressures which have been facing heading 4 of the Budget and the urgent issues which the European Union has had to deal with over recent years. We have had the case of Kosovo, of the Balkans, of East Timor, of Afghanistan and this year we have the problem of Iraq. Since this has been discussed during this debate, I would like to say that my political group believes that the European Union must make a significant contribution to the rehabilitation, reconstruction, pacification and democratisation of Iraq, because we believe that the democratisation of that country must not be the exclusive responsibility of the United States, but that it must also fall to the whole of the international democratic community. Nevertheless, Mr President, tomorrow the European Parliament is going to approve a resolution on Iraq which states very clearly, as Mr Van Hecke has quite rightly said, that the action in Iraq must not be funded to the detriment of other areas or other commitments made. I have listened with great interest to the comments that the Commissioner has just made and I note that the Commission's intentions or forecasts are not going to go as far as that EUR 500 million. I would ask you, Commissioner, whether you intend to consider the complete mobilisation of the flexibility instrument, which was not used last year or this year, and whether you intend to consider other very interesting possibilities such as those referred to by the general rapporteur, Mr Mulder. Next year, with the incorporation of the candidate countries, there will be lines within the external action of the European Investment Bank which could perhaps be used for that priority. It may perhaps be worth considering that possibility. Mr President, the problem we are facing this year with Iraq is a recurrent problem, we cannot live from hand to mouth, we must try to find a permanent solution to the urgent issues which arise in the field of external action and try to mobilise instruments which, in a flexible manner, allow us to assist with these priorities but without, I would insist, prejudicing others. Mr President, as the President of Romania said this morning, or as the President of the Convention, Mr Giscard d'Estaing, said the other day in this Chamber, if our aspiration is for the European Union to play a key role on the international stage, we will have to seek permanent solutions to these problems, because otherwise we will have to be content with being a non-governmental organisation or a kind of international Red Cross which has no other purpose or job than to pay the bill for the great dramas of our times.

Political group: PPE-DE