US goes crawling back to UN

For the President, the Least Painful Alternative


By Dana Milbank
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 3, 2003; Page A10


President Bush, in his decision to seek broader help in Iraq from the United Nations, has concluded that blue helmets are better than a black eye.

For months, the president and his administration have resisted the notion of sharing power in Iraq with the U.N. "blue helmets" -- part of officials' longstanding suspicion of the international body and particularly the notion that U.S. troops might answer to foreign generals.

But as more and more U.S. troops are killed in Iraq, and the number of car bombings and anti-America demonstrations there grow, the Bush administration concluded that principle alone will not suffice: The United States needs more help in Iraq.

With too few U.S. troops available to serve in Iraq, and too few nations volunteering troops in the absence of a U.N. imprimatur, the administration decided to do what the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Joseph R. Biden Jr. (Del.) suggested recently: "swallow our pride and do what's supposed to be done: go back to the international community."

In the end, it was the least painful alternative. "In the long term, they don't have to eat too much crow," Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution said last night. "They can keep the military influence, and it's a smart way to get international help." But, he added, there will be an immediate cost: "In the short term, everybody like John Kerry can say, 'We pushed them into it,' and there will be some truth to that."

Indeed, Kerry, the senator from Massachusetts and Democratic presidential candidate, has been pounding away at the administration to do essentially what it decided to do yesterday. "I think this administration has made an extraordinary, disastrous decision not to bring the United Nations in in a significant way," he said on NBC's "Meet the Press" on Sunday, adding that "tomorrow morning is not too early" to ask for U.N. help.

In reaching a decision to return to the United Nations for a resolution of support, the administration overcame a number of deeply held internal objections to such an action. The Bush White House has taken pains to avoid what many there perceive as misguided adventures taken with the United Nations by the Clinton administration in Africa and the Balkans. And, burned by France, Germany and Russia during the failed effort to win U.N. backing for the invasion of Iraq last winter, Bush officials are loath to be seen as pleading for their support now.

Ultimately, though, Bush concluded that it was possible to get U.N. help largely on U.S. terms. "They had it in their heads that the U.N. would take over and run the whole thing," said Kenneth Adelman, a security expert close to several top Bush officials. "But we can have it both ways. We can have a U.N. mandate, and American and British military control."

That said, Adelman, like many foreign-policy hard-liners, has doubts about how much good it will do to seek help from the United Nations. "I don't have much faith that a U.N. mandate will bring more boots on the ground or money in the pocket," he said, arguing that many countries used the lack of a U.N. mandate as an excuse to resist contributing.

Bush is likely to get complaints from some in his own party who oppose a U.N. role. "The legitimacy of an American foreign policy initiative derives from its justness, wisdom and congressional approval, not from the vagaries of U.N. Security Council resolutions," former Reagan Pentagon official Frank J. Gaffney Jr. wrote last week in the Washington Times. "Now is no time to go wobbly on that principle."

The U.N. resolution, though its contents and its prospects are not yet fixed, will be certain to have one key, face-saving component for the Bush administration: The military occupation of Iraq will not be run by the United Nations. Indeed, the task in Iraq is far beyond the United Nations' military capabilities. The organization's military command is only about the size of the Pentagon. Rather, Security Council approval of the operation would allow nations to contribute troops under U.S., British or NATO command.

Until now, the administration had sought to assemble a patchwork of international troops, mostly from smaller countries. Bush said last week that 31 countries had contributed 21,000 troops to the effort. But this was a cumbersome way to build a fighting force. The Poles committed to send 2,400; Ukraine offered 1,640; Spain volunteered 1,300, and countries such as Hungary, Romania, Latvia, Estonia, Slovakia, El Salvador, Dominican Republic, Honduras, Nicaragua, Mongolia and the Philippines offered smaller contingents.

But with much larger numbers of troops needed -- Biden put the number at 40,000 to 60,000 -- it became clear there were too few U.S. troops not already committed elsewhere to supplement the current presence of nearly 140,000 U.S. troops in Iraq. The administration needed a way to bring in a larger number of troops from other countries. In addition to Western European nations, countries such as Turkey, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh have indicated they would look more favorably on supplying troops with U.N. support.

In exchange for this infusion, the administration must give up some of the control it prizes. In its Iraq policy, as elsewhere, Bush has limited control to just a few top officials, such as Vice President Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Iraq administrator L. Paul Bremer.

Rumsfeld, in particular, has sounded contemptuous of the world body. "We do need international support and assistance. It's a big help," he said last week. "Second question: What is the likelihood of our forces serving under a blue-hatted United Nations leadership? And I think that's not going to happen."

Under yesterday's decision to seek a U.N. mandate in Iraq, Rumsfeld and the rest of the administration have concluded that, even if the military command is American, they must give some control in Iraq to the blue hats.

 

Hey, the U.S. is seeking an international coalition to help deal with Iraq! That's great news!

Too bad it's six months too late.

But it is nice the U.S. is offering to let other countries help with cleanup.

 

Skepticism Greets Bush's Multilateral Move


By Jefferson Morley
washingtonpost.com Staff
Wednesday, September 3, 2003; 1:12 PM


The Bush administration's hopes of getting more foreign troops in Iraq depend not only on winning over the United Nations – the White House also confronts vocal opposition in the key countries that it hopes will supply the soldiers.

Bush officials now seek what they once disdained: a Security Council resolution granting the world body greater control over peacekeeping and the formation of a new Iraqi government. U.S. policymakers hope this will persuade other nations to relieve U.S. troops stretched thin by hit-and-run attacks, heat and hatred. The Post suggests that the U.S. is especially keen to enlist nations whose armed forces include Muslim soldiers, namely Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and Turkey.

But commentary in the English-language online media in those countries suggests the hazards of Washington's new multilateral message. Most pundits express little enthusiasm and lots of resistance to the idea of an international force under U.S. military command.

A U.N. force under U.S. command is "an absurdity," writes Shireen M. Mazari, in the News International, a leading daily in Pakistan.

"The whole idea of bringing in a U.N.-mandated force is to allow them to do the job the U.S. is not being able to do because of a lack of credibility and trust," Mazari writes. "To simply replace U.S. soldiers with foreign soldiers but to retain U.S. command would hardly serve the purpose, unless the intent is to simply use the foreign soldiers as cannon fodder."

Mazari, director of a security think tank in Islamabad, favors rejection of the Bush overture.

"Unless the U.S. is prepared to truly concede some political authority to the U.N., it would be disastrous for the U.N. to agree to a U.N. peacekeeping force for Iraq. And the command must also be non-American and British if the force is to have credibility with the Iraqi people," she writes.

"All in all, as September 11 nears once again, it is a tragic irony that the spirit of multilateralism that the 9/11 terrorist attacks created has over two years dissipated, thanks to the U.S. assertion of unilateralist pre-emption. And the world is the poorer and destabilised as a result. "

In India, R. Kannan, the head of the civil affairs office of the U.N. peacekeeping force in Cyprus, advocates replacing the U.S. occupation with a U.N. administration. Writing in The Hindu, Kannan states "Reconstruction is not simply about infrastructure alone. In the case of Iraq, it is as much about healing the wounds of the occupation - by restoring Iraqi pride and dignity.

"From the Arab League, to the French to the Indians, the preference is for a U.N. umbrella for getting involved in Iraq," he writes. "There is precedence. Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan have all benefited in varying degrees from the presence of a U.N.-authorised multinational force."

But Kannan cautions the U.N. cannot work miracles.

"Iraqi resistance, as some have observed, is still unwilling to distinguish between impartial aid workers and others. Improving the security climate is therefore critical and is a prerequisite for not just holding elections but providing space for the U.N. and other aid agencies to play their rightful roles," he writes. "A higher political profile for the U.N., one hopes, will come sooner for it can only advance the day when Iraqis will govern themselves."

The debate is perhaps most contentious in Turkey. In the run-up to the Iraq war, the country's moderate Islamic government chose not to back the United States, traditionally the country's most important military and economic ally.

Columnist Murat Yetkin, writing in the Istanbul daily Radikal, writes that with the U.S. now asking for help, Turkey faces an excrutiating dilemma.

"If Turkey deploys its troops there, bilateral relations with the U.S. would be mended but our soldiers are very likely to be seen as 'collaborators with the foreign invaders.' But if the troops don't go, Turkish-U.S. relations would worsen," Yetkin states.

"As a country that claims to be the leader in its region, we cannot remain indifferent to the developments," writes columnist Mehmet Ali Birand in the Turkish Daily News. "We cannot say, 'The Americans have made a mess of it. Let them sink. Why should we too take a risk?'

Such an approach, he says, will marginalize Turkey.

"There is a seriously growing risk that Iraq will be split into three while the possibility of a democratic Iraq with a unitary administration diminishes. All these assumptions compel Turkey to intervene," Birand states.

"Let's not mince words," counters H. Bulent Kahraman in Radikal ."Under the present circumstances, there is no good reason for Turkey to send its troops to Iraq. Sending our soldiers there would be sheer insanity."

"Our soldiers' mission will be exclusively restricted to the Iraqi capital," he predicts. "Under these circumstances, the U.S. will use our soldiers as a tool for its selfish purposes, in other words, as collaborators for its dirty and difficult jobs in Baghdad."

"My, how things have changed," writes columnist Mumtaz Iqbal in the Bangladesh weekly, Holiday.

"Last November, Bush said the U.N. would be 'irrelevant' if it didn't sanction war against Iraq. Ten months later, the U.S. is knocking at its door harping, as befitting a hyper power, on the international community's obligation to help Washington clean up its Iraq debris," Iqbal writes.

"Who'd have thought last year that the U.S. Gulliver would even condescend to chat with the Lilliputian U.N.? Of course, things may change again."

 

Well we did seek the UN's help, they declined.

I think it is a great move by the administration.

Although, I would have liked this move far earlier in the gambit.

DD

 

I agree it's a good move, but like the economy, it should have never come to this.

Here's Josh Marshall's take...

I'm reviewing a book on the president's foreign policy. And there's a reference late in the book to a May 3rd article in the New York Times. If you want to get a sense of just how unprepared this administration was for what they were getting themselves into, you can't do much better than rereading this piece.

(Unfortunately, the Times no longer posts their archives.)

The plan at that time was to quickly draw down the American troop presence in Iraq until they numbered about 30,000 by the fall of 2003. Needless to say, the fall of 2003 is pretty much now.

Just think how wide of the mark these guys were.

Not that any of this was a surprise, of course. Just before the outbreak of war, then-Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki told a Senate committee that he thought "something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers" would be necessary to pacify and stabilize post-war Iraq.

He had some experience. He'd led the peace-keeping operation in Bosnia. And he'd dedicated much of his tenure as Chief of Staff to preparing the Army for peace-keeping and other non-traditional and low-intensity combat deployments.

A few days later Paul Wolfowitz went up to the Hill and said Shinseki had no idea what he was talking about. His estimate was "wildly off the mark," Wolfowitz said.

Obviously it was Wolfowitz who had no clue what he was talking about.

And now we have this: according to a new Congressional Budget Office study, the US will only be capable of maintaining our current troop strength in Iraq till next March. By this time next year, says an AP story about the study, "the 180,000 American troops now in and around Iraq would have to be drawn down to [between] 38,000 to 64,000."

Let's walk through what this means.

Virtually every independent observer believes our forces in Iraq are stretched too thin. The issue isn't only numbers. But it's a key, probably the key part of the puzzle. People who work at the pleasure of Don Rumsfeld say differently. And so do a few mumbo-jumbocrats on the right. But no one else.

Large areas of Iraq remain quiet and peaceable. But key sections of the country appear to be teetering either on the edge of chaos or a sort of endemic violence that will be hard to pacify. And those sections are arguably some of the more pivotal in the country -- Baghdad, Najaf, etc.

We may be moving toward a situation in which intra-ethnic and intra-religious rivalries break out into open, if low-level, violence -- a sort of slow-motion civil war.

I doubt we're close to that yet. But even seeing it on the horizon is ominous. Because were that to happen our difficulties would grow almost immeasurably.

Absent a substantial increase in the size of the Army, or lengthy deployments and reserve call-ups which most experts consider unsustainable, we clearly need others to come in and lend a hand. Now we find out that we can only sustain current levels for roughly six months. How much leverage do you figure that gives us with the countries we'd like to have send in their own troops? How much leverage does that give us with France, Russia and China?

Right. Not much.

We're about to make a big push for greater UN involvement -- perhaps circulating a new resolution as early as tomorrow. Unfortunately, this request comes not at a moment of strength for us but in the face of four car-bombings in a month and a palpable sense that we are not in control of the country we are nominally occupying. Add that to the fact that we're already stretched thin and, according to our own government study, can't maintain the current force for much more than six months. Again, put that all together and then ask, how much leverage do we have?

In real life we have a word for this sort of situation: a jam. We've managed to leverage our mammoth strength into an improbable weakness. And so much of it was not only predictable, but predicted.

Consider an analogy. When a heart surgeon loses an occasional patient, that's simply the price of inherently dangerous work. When a heart surgeon tries a risky procedure for a patient who will die without it, and the patient dies, that's just a tragic end to an unavoidable risk. When a dermatologist cracks open a patient's ribs to try out a new approach to open heart surgery which most cardiac surgeons say will never work, and the patient dies, that guy probably gets sued or kicked out of the profession or maybe thrown in jail. Maybe all three.

True enough, the patient hasn't died. As Fareed Zakaria says in Newsweek, "It might already be too late to achieve a great success in Iraq. But it is not too late to avoid a humiliating failure."

All true enough. But the real question is, who gets fired over this mess? And when?

 

Hey, let them crow, and let Bush eat some crow. Saddam is gone, his WMD threat is gone, his state sponsoring of terrorism is gone, his genocidal regime is gone. Let the UN wholesale take over the operation in Iraq. This never should be about who gets post-Saddam contracts, or even about getting a hearty 'thank you' from everyday Iraqis. In the end history will judge the US all the more favorably for handing over control to the UN, just as has happened in the Balkans when the UN balked at action but still helped post-action.

 

I was all right for a while, I could smile for a while
But I saw you last night, you held my hand so tight
As you stopped to say "Hello"
Aww you wished me well, you couldn’t tell

That I’d been cry-i-i-i-ng over you, cry-i-i-i-ng over you
Then you said "so long". left me standing all alone
Alone and crying, crying, crying cry-i-ing
It’s hard to understand but the touch of your hand
Can start me crying

I thought that I was over you but it’s tru-ue, so true
I love you even more than I did before but darling what can I do-o-o-o
For you don’t love me and I’ll always be

Cry-i-i-i-ng over you, cry-i-i-i-ng over you
Yes, now you’re gone and from this moment on
I’ll be crying, crying, crying, cry-i-i-ing
Yeah crying, crying, o-o-o-o-ver you

 

hell yes, it's the Big O, Roy Orbison, may he rest in peace


Then you said "so long," left me standing all alone, alone and crying.

 

I was against the war, but I'd love to see the U.N. handle what is essentially state-building.

But Bush going to war without their approval and then asking for help afterward definitely throws a wrench into the process.

It's like a parent telling their kid not to take the car out. The kid does, wraps it around a tree, and then expects the parent to pay for the damage.

 

It's about time, I'm not sure what the heck the administration was worried about. Are they worried the UN will not do a bad job? That they don't deserve it? Or did they think the US could democratize and stabilize Iraq in a few months and not need more troops?

 

The Administration just might be worried that the UN will tell them to f*ck off. In other words, you broke it, so you fix it.

 

You broke it? You think 'it,' assuming 'it' is Iraq, was working 'properly' before? What in the name of AndyMoon are YOU smoking?

Except in this case the kid produced his his parents (yuch!), gave his parents the money to buy the car in the first place, and now will pay them money to fix the car. Oh yeah, and the kid finally got the genocidal nuke seeking bum that had been hiding in the trunk...out of the car.

 

Of course not. And I wish I were smoking something other than Marlboro Lights in the name of AndyMoon!

What I was stating was that the US attacked Iraq basically alone. Since the US caused the destruction alone, perhaps the UN will want to keep to the sidelines to let the US reconstruct it alone, with the help of Haliburton of course.

 

HayesStreet, what do you think accounts for their reluctance? I think they thought the stabilization and democratization of Iraq would be much easier. With Rumsfeld's theories about light forces being deployed with lighting quickness around the world, they probably thought our moderate presence was enough. It's too bad Bush keeps talking about democracy, that's probably not a realistic goal.

 

Why does everyone ALWAYS marginalize the Poles?

 

I was lucky enough to see his concert at the Austin Aqua Festival (may it rest in piece as well) less than a year before he died.

He was incredible. He hadn't lost one bit of his voice.
And after singing "Crying" to thunderous applause, he told his band, "Let's do it again" and they did. From start to finish and even better than the first time.

I'll never forget it.





Rumsfeld and Wolfonitwitz are beginning to really look stupid to much of the general public, imo.
They couldn't help strutting around prior to the war and it's not helping Bush now.
I think they both should resign.

 

How is the WMD threat gone? None were found. If you believe they existed the most common suspicions and theories on them now are that they've been transferred out of country. So how's the threat gone? Seems to me if there actually were WMD the threat now is larger than ever. I can't believe you'd claim that the WMD that were never found aren't a threat anymore. Oh boy...

 

Believe!

Assumptions for my conclusion:

Saddam wanted WMD capabilities on a large scale. Especially nukes.

He had WMD before.

Everyone believed he had 'some' WMD, but we didn't know what kind and how much. Saddam himself specifically tried to conceal the status of his WMD program.

What happened to the WMD? We don't know. He could have destroyed it, or he could have relocated it.

He would have inevitably restarted (assuming he did destroy it) his WMD. He definitely would have restarted his nuclear program. He had the means (oil money), the motive (power), and the history to make it probable he would do so.

He is no longer in power.

He is no longer a WMD threat.

See? That's easy isn't it?

 

You lucky guy! I wish I would have been able to see him before he passed on. I was lucky enough to see Little Feat on New Years Eve 1978-1979 in the Sam Houston Coliseum which turned out to be Lowell George's last show in Texas before he died.