NATO apparently heeding Turkey's reservations on missile shields plans

NATO seems to be heeding Turkey's insistence that a planned NATO missile shield system should not include an explicit reference to any country, including Iran. "I don't know what's going to be in the final documents, but what I can say is the way that we're approaching this is that there are at least 30 countries … that have or are acquiring ballistic missile capability," said NATO spokesman James Appathurai on Wednesday. "So this is not just about one country. It's about a growing and, in essence, generic, potential threat to our territory. … and I think (the) allies want to look at it in that sense." NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, after previously singling out Iran, recently declined to name it as a potential threat.