COMMENTARY UN and Iraq: The Brahimi
lesson By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
As the June 30 date for the
"transfer of sovereignty" in Iraq approaches, the question
of the United Nations' role in the country remains
under a thick cloud of uncertainty. This is so both
because of the US's mixed preference, ie, to enhance
the legitimacy of its occupation with a UN seal of
approval, yet without giving up any real authority to the UN
in Iraq, as well as the UN's less than shining record
on Iraq. This stems in part from its chief's inability
to stand up to Washington; the mere fact that
Lakhdar Brahimi, the UN's special envoy on Iraq, has
reportedly tendered his resignation out of frustration with
the Bush administration, which undercut his efforts to
install an interim government in Iraq after
misleading him into thinking that this would be essentially
his call, represents another sobering lesson of
"roads not taken" by the world organization vis-a-vis a
major international crisis.
Brahimi would be, in fact,
the third top UN diplomat to quit his job after being
undermined by Washington. In March 2000, Hans von
Sponeck, the head of the UN humanitarian program in
Iraq, a German career UN official, resigned after
publicly criticizing the economic sanctions imposed on
Iraq, much like his predecessor, Dennis Halliday, who
quit his job in 1998 after stating on record that the
Iraqi sanctions were serving the US's "strategic
interests" and "undermining the UN's credibility".
Indeed, notwithstanding the scandalous on-going
investigation of UN corruption in the oil-for-food
program, potentially implicating secretary general Kofi
Annan's close advisors as well as his son, there is
little doubt about the harm to the UN's credibility
likely to outlast the tenure of Annan. In the Muslim and
Arab world, particularly among the intelligentsia, the
image of the UN acting as a front for the US occupation
and its general secretary's compliant behavior toward
the US's global policy has been gaining currency.
To pause on the Third World criticisms of the
UN's role in Iraq, last year many Arab editorials and
intellectuals echoed the sentiment of the Ba'athist
regime's denunciation of Annan's following decisions:
(a) His pressuring the Iraqi regime to show "proactive"
initiative with respect to its disarmament, calling its
compliance with the inspection regime inadequate; (b)
Annan's unilateral decision to remove the UN
peacekeeping "observer mission" at the Iraq-Kuwait
border on the eve of the invasion, when he could have
balked at the US pressure and utilized the buffer UN
force to deter or postpone the invasion. Historically,
Annan's move has been lumped with the blunder of another
UN chief, U Thant, who removed the UN forces separating
Israeli and Egyptian forces in 1967; (c) Annan's
decision to halt the UN oil-for-food program once the
invasion began, thus contributing to the subsequent
anti-UN animus of many nationalist Iraqis.
In
fairness to Annan, his many defenders argue that it is a
mistake to overlook the net of power relations in which
the UN swims and which fetters the UN's leadership, and
to blame Annan for various shortcomings and failures
which are actually structural and "trans-personal". Fair
enough, but it is equally wrong to ignore the role of
leadership and long-term significance of weak or inept
leadership at the UN with respect to the future of the
preeminent world organization responsible for
maintaining world peace.
Perhaps Annan should have never
been selected as
the UN's secretary general after his self-admitted blunder with
respect to the genocide in Rwanda. That aside,
the onus is on Annan now to quiet his critics by
taking bold initiatives with respect to the Iraq crisis,
beginning, if the reports are accurate, by appointing a suitable
replacement for Brahimi, who dared to call the
chief US civil administrator in Iraq, L Paul Bremer, a
"dictator". Annan's worst mistake would be to bring on
board another diplomat lacking Brahimi's independent
spirit and prone to toe the US's lines on Iraq. To do so
would be to add to the legitimacy problems of the UN in
Iraq, and lessen its prospects for an effective role in
Iraq's post-war political reconstruction.
Concerning the latter, Annan, while fully
endorsing the Security Council's recent call for a
greater multinational peacekeeping force in Iraq, has
nonetheless balked at the idea of a UN force.
Consequently, the Bush administration's current quest to
"internationalize" the Iraq mission has translated into
a rather circumspect role for the UN, lending itself to
the US occupation in the form of Security Council
Resolution 1546, which self-delusionally refers to
"affirming that the United Nations should play a leading
role in assisting the Iraqi people and government in the
formation of institutions for representative
government".
Yet, looking through the darkly
tinted glass, it is difficult to see how the UN would
ever be able to fulfill this role as long as it remains
averse toward the idea of a UN peacekeeping force for
Iraq. After all, the attacks on UN peacekeepers in other
parts of the world, eg, Sierra Leone and Bosnia, never
deterred it in the past, so why should Iraq be any
different, especially if the UN works in tandem with the
Arab League and or the Organization of Islamic
Conference (OIC).
Interestingly, at the recent
OIC summit of foreign ministers in Istanbul, June 14-16,
Annan sent a message calling on the OIC member-states to
contribute to the peace and stability of Iraq. At the
summit's end, three OIC states, Tunisia, Morocco and
Pakistan, announced their readiness to send peacekeeping
forces. Other OIC countries are sure to follow suit if
the UN welcomes their input, instead of bypassing them
in lieu of the US's hidden antipathy tied to fear of
losing control of the military calculus in Iraq. To open
a caveat here, at the previous OIC meeting in Malaysia,
in April, Iraq's deputy foreign minister explicitly
opposed any OIC force in Iraq, and yet his boss, Foreign
Minister Hoshyar Zebari, refrained from echoing the same
sentiment at the Istanbul summit. Should the insecurity
crisis in Iraq linger much longer and the US and its
"coalition of the willing" prove unable to restore
order, then the quest for alternatives, such as a unique
OIC-UN force, may prove inevitable.
In
conclusion, at this critical moment, when the fate and
well-being of millions of Iraqis is on the line, the UN
must display a bolder, more prudent leadership and be
cognizant of the irreparable harm to its credibility and
prestige if it continues to mishandle the Iraq question
and to allow the will of the United States to continue
to push its own national interests at the expense of the
interests of the world community.
Kaveh L
Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After Khomeini:
New Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview
Press) and "Iran's Foreign Policy Since 9/11", Brown's
Journal of World Affairs, co-authored with former deputy
foreign minister Abbas Maleki, No 2, 2003, and an
occasional contributor to the UN Chronicle.
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