How To Surrender To The U.N.
March 3, 2004, 10 a.m.
President George W. Bush has no choice now: either surrender to the United Nations, or lose any chance of being re-elected.
Iraq is unraveling too fast for the Bush administration to have any hope of salvaging the U.S. position there. Here's my suggestion for U.S. policy: announce a firm date for the pullout of all U.S. forces from Iraq, say, by the end of 2004; state clearly that the U.S. does not want any bases or forward positions in Iraq after that; send Colin Powell to the U.N. to start negotiating the U.S. surrender, asking for a U.N. resolution for an international peacekeeping force led by Arab forces in Iraq; give full authority to Lakhdar Brahimi, the capable U.N. official who has reluctantly taken on the Iraq portfolio, to design both the transitional authority and to organize the elections; and then fire the neoconservatives who got us into this mess.
The U.S. can't prevent the disintegration of Iraq now. Maybe—just maybe—the U.N. can.
But it won't happen with U.S. forces occupying Iraq. In a sensible comment, the Russian deputy foreign minister, Yuri Fedotov, said over the weekend that no elections can occur with U.S. troops overseeing them. "The participation of the UN can only happen when the occupation of Iraq is ended." Earth to Bush: take the exit ramp.
It has long been obvious that Washington doesn't have a clue what to do next in Iraq. They are hoping that Brahimi will come up with some sort of idea about how to organize a post-June 30 transition regime and how to organize elections. But unless Bush gives the U.N. actual authority—through a new Security Council resolution, after abandoning Iraq as the cornerstone of its ersatz empire—the U.N. won't have much incentive to go beyond suggesting ideas. Meanwhile. . . UN Not Happy With U.S. WMD Lies
The U.S. isn't making a lot of friends among UN weapons inspectors and Iraq experts.
Listen to two reports about the U.N.'s latest Iraq WMD inquiries. First, the U.N. (reports USA Today ) says point blank that Iraq had no WMD since 1994. Not that Saddam secretly hid them in Syria as U.S. troops entered Iraq, not that Saddam destroyed them secretly last year, not that they are still hidden in some Iraqi spider-hole-all of these possibilities were raised by Bush in his interview on Meet the Press two weeks ago. The UN says they were long gone:
A report from U.N. weapons inspectors to be released today says they now believe there were no weapons of mass destruction of any significance in Iraq after 1994, according to two UN diplomats who have seen the document. The historical review of inspections in Iraq is the first outside study to confirm the recent conclusion by David Kay, the former U.S. chief inspector, that Iraq had no banned weapons before last year's U.S-led invasion. It also goes further than prewar U.N. reports, which said no weapons had been found but noted that Iraq had not fully accounted for weapons it was known to have had at the end of the Gulf War in 1991.
The report, to be outlined to the U.N. Security Council as early as Friday, is based on information gathered over more than seven years of U.N. inspections in Iraq before the 2003 war, plus postwar findings discussed publicly by Kay.
And, the UN is complaining (reports Reuters ) that the United States didn't help much in finding them.
U.N. arms inspectors on Tuesday complained that a lack of cooperation by the United States had stymied their efforts to completely account for Iraqi weapons The latest quarterly report by the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, known as UNMOVIC, says Washington never gave the commission a copy of U.S. inspector David Kay's findings on Iraqi weapons, and it failed to seek any U.N. information for Kay's team.
U.N. inspectors withdrew from Iraq a year ago, shortly before the U.S.-led invasion of the country. After the war, the United States deployed its own team under Kay and refused to allow U.N. inspectors to return. Kay's team concluded that Iraq did not have stockpiles banned weapons as alleged by President Bush in making his case for war.
"During the period under review, no official information was available to UNMOVIC on either the work of, or the results of, the investigations of the United States-led Iraq Survey Group in Iraq. Nor has the (U.S.) survey group requested any information from UNMOVIC," the U.N. report said.
"In other words, the selfsame Bush administration that said in 2003, before the war, that the U.N. inspectors were too incompetent to find the WMD that Bush was sure were there also isn't, and wasn't, getting any help to find them.
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