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UN gains the upper
hand
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON -
Now that US President George W Bush has decided to ask
the United Nations Security Council to rescue
Washington's occupation of Iraq, the question here is,
"What will be the price?"
Will the Bush
administration have to give up significant control over
the political and rebuilding process in Iraq in order to
get what it wants: a major infusion of foreign troops
and international economic aid? Or will it be able to
continue running the show, as implicitly suggested by
the draft resolution that Washington began circulating
to Security Council members this week?
Early
returns indicate that the council will now become the
focus of intense and possibly protracted negotiations on
this question. France, which wields a veto on the
council, and Germany have already denounced the proposal
submitted by Secretary of State Colin Powell as
inadequate.
The administration itself remains
deeply divided on what it is prepared to give up. Powell
and the State Department have long argued for a strong
UN role in postwar Iraq, which, unlike the
neo-conservative hawks in the Pentagon and in Vice
President Dick Cheney's office, they do not see as the
staging base for "remaking" the entire Muslim Middle
East.
For now, Powell is insisting that the
resolution should permit Washington to exercise a
"dominant" role in Iraq, although his main concern is
that all occupation security forces should come under a
unified US command similar to the one that applies to UN
forces in Korea. The State Department is less concerned
about sharing power with the UN on matters dealing with
Iraq's political evolution and economic reconstruction.
The hawks, on the other hand, have seen
virtually any substantive UN involvement in Iraq as a
potentially disastrous obstacle to their ambitions not
only for practicing "regime change" in Syria, Iran, and
possibly Saudi Arabia, but also for being able to retain
US military bases on Iraqi territory, now that
Washington has substantially drawn down its forces in
the Saudi kingdom.
In an editorial titled
"Wobbly on Iraq?" on Thursday, the staunchly
neo-conservative Wall Street Journal put the best gloss
on these considerations when it warned that the
administration's goals "to de-Ba'athify the country and
put war criminals on trial" in Iraq are unlikely to be
favored by the French and the Russians. "If they insist
on gaining influence in Baghdad as the price of a new UN
resolution, Mr Bush will have to risk their veto," the
Journal said.
It stressed that the only
acceptable UN resolution should be a "fig leaf" for
continued US control that will nonetheless persuade
India, Pakistan and Turkey to send the tens of thousands
of troops the administration wants to bolster occupation
forces.
Those countries have insisted that they
will only consider contributing troops if the Security
Council approves a new resolution, although they have
not detailed the provisions - including those regarding
UN control - that would have to be included in the
resolution for them to participate.
Participation by the more experienced and
better-equipped military forces of France, Germany and
several other key North Atlantic Treaty Organization
(NATO) allies will almost certainly be contingent on a
resolution similar to the one passed by the Security
Council with regard to Kosovo in 1999. It gave political
authority to a UN civil administrator, while leaving
military and security operations in NATO's full control.
But instead of NATO, Washington's European allies are
considered likely to acquiesce to a US general retaining
command of occupation military forces.
Will such
a resolution be acceptable to the Bush administration?
Powell clearly favors the idea, and the Kosovo model has
been explicitly evoked by US diplomats in informal
consultations with their foreign counterparts in recent
days, according to sources. Britain also reportedly
believes such a solution might be the best that can be
achieved.
As indicated by the Journal's
editorial, the hardliners, not surprisingly, oppose such
a solution. But as a result of the increasingly bad news
coming out of Iraq, they find themselves in a very weak
position, a point made forcefully in a Washington Post
article on Thursday noting that a new coalition between
the uniformed military leadership and Powell has formed
within the administration, tilting the balance of power
against the hawks.
The article stressed that the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, who normally report only through
the secretary of defense, have established an
independent line to Powell in recent weeks to circumvent
the Pentagon's civilian leadership. Long skeptical of
the hawks' optimism about the plans for postwar Iraq,
the uniformed military appears to have moved toward open
revolt against Rumsfeld and chief deputies Paul
Wolfowitz and Under Secretary for Defense for Policy
Douglas Feith.
The reasons are clear. US
soldiers are still getting killed at the rate of at
least one every other day, while, according to another
Post report published on Wednesday, "almost 10 American
troops a day [are] now being officially declared
'wounded in action'."
Worse, the military has
long known what the Congressional Budget Office reported
this week: the current troop presence in and around Iraq
- about 180,000 soldiers - will be unsustainable in two
months' time unless Washington recruits a bigger army or
reduces its commitments elsewhere.
In other
words, the military concluded that unless the occupation
becomes much more international, the Iraq situation
spells institutional disaster. But it was not only the
military's alignment behind Powell that brought Bush
around. Karl Rove, his veteran chief political adviser,
has also backed up Powell, reportedly warning that the
bad news from Iraq could well prove fatal to the
president's chances for being re-elected 14 months from
now.
This week's latest estimates of how much
the administration will need to run Iraq - at least
US$65 billion for fiscal 2004 - have added to the clamor
among lawmakers returning from the August recess for
Washington to bring in the United Nations.
Given
these considerations, it is not clear what bargaining
chips the hawks have as negotiations begin over the
terms of a new resolution. It appears that the world
body - so disregarded and disdained by Bush and the
hawks just three months ago - can name its price.
(Inter Press Service)
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