It's becoming quite clear this country may need a new leader AND a new approach to conducting foreign policy...The U.S. is spending tens of billions of our tax dollars on Iraq because Bush CHOSE to rush into Iraq WITHOUT backing from the major allies and the U.N....It made it more dangerous for our troops and more expensive for our taxpayers....Bush and his 'go it alone' policy towards Iraq has antagonized many allies and hurt U.S. prestige and credibility around the world. If Bush were a former war hero, he would NOT have been so quick to commit our troops (only someone who has been in combat can really appreciate that going to war should be A LAST RESORT)...Of course, I didn't mention the fact that it now seems clear that there was NOT an 'imminent threat' from Iraq and we had the choice to continue with the 'vigilant containment' of Iraq...Yet, politics and a NeoCON agenda made our stubborn Administration determined to roll right on into Iraq WITHOUT taking adequate time to win appropriate support from the Allies and do IMPORTANT post-war planning. We now have what many call a Quagmire -- Has Bush considered firing the architechts of the plan (Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz)..? It's what any good CEO would do after key General Managers make costly mistakes...It's like a CEO being forced into doing a merger that was NOT thought through carefully...then the board and other stakeholders wake up and realize someone's got to be accountable and lead the organization out of the mess...Here we are in Iraq and look what's happened...
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WHAT GOES AROUND COMES AROUND; U.S. finds tables turned at U.N.
Nations not eager to pick up Iraq costs or pledge troops
ANALYSIS
msnbc.com
UNITED NATIONS, Aug. 27 — Having launched the Iraq War in defiance of the United Nations Security Council and repeatedly vowed to “go it alone,” the Bush administration finds itself back at U.N. headquarters seeking help in stemming the costs, both in blood and dollars, of occupying Saddam Hussein’s former realm.
OVER THE PAST week, efforts by senior American diplomats — including a personal visit to U.N. headquarters last Thursday by Secretary of State Colin Powell — failed to win new pledges of money or troops from any of the world’s major powers. With the United States determined to control both the military occupation and the distribution of reconstruction contracts, many large nations are treating Washington to a taste of its own hardball tactics.
“We always knew there would be a day of reckoning on this, that the U.N. would wind up cleaning up the mess,” says a diplomat from a smaller Security Council country. “As you say it, it goes around, it comes around.”
LINGERING BITTERNESS
The U.S. mission at the U.N. is painfully aware of this dynamic but pushing ahead nonetheless with the process of “floating ideas, taking ideas from other parties and basically seeing if there is something we can do to make the operation more conducive to contributions from other countries,” as one U.S. diplomat says.
So far, however, the world’s asking price has been too steep for the Bush administration. Many things complicate discussions on these issues, including a lingering bitterness that runs both ways about the Iraq debate last winter and spring. But at the foundation is a demand by Security Council states that the U.S. make the post-war reconstruction effort “more transparent” and allow a U.N. Security Council resolution that would internationalize the military occupation, even if it remains under U.S. command. To date, neither the White House nor the Pentagon has expressed any desire to see either happen.
PAYING THE BILLS
So far, it has been a week of poor news for the administration. On Monday, preparing the ground, President Bush warned of “substantial” new costs associated with post-war Iraq during a speech to the American Legion. The president did not go into details, but on Tuesday, the other shoe dropped. L. Paul Bremer, the president’s top man in occupied Iraq, told reporters that the costs of the occupation would be far greater than $100 billion over 10 years that Bremer told Congress would be needed earlier this summer, about $40 billion of which the United States was expecting to pick up itself.
But Bremer, in noting that Iraq’s economic needs would be “almost impossible to exaggerate,” raised the prospect of an even higher price tag — this at a time when Washington has been unable to find anyone willing to commit to a major aid effort, at least under post-war Iraq’s current configuration.
Coupled with new congressional report on America’s budget deficit suggesting that huge fiscal problems are on the horizon, and word that post-war U.S. military deaths now have surpassed those suffered during the war, the news was difficult to sugar. The administration’s Iraq intervention, as President Bush noted Monday during remarks to the American Legion, “will require a substantial commitment of time and resources.”
UNCLE SAM WANTS DU, TU AND VOUS, TOO
So far, the financial burdens of the Iraq war have taken a back seat to the more visceral issue of American casualties. But the administration also hopes that bringing more international troops into its coalition in Iraq will defuse some of the anger directed at American forces.
Powell, during his U.N. visit last week, accentuated the positive, noting that 30 nations were contributing nearly 21,000 troops for the effort. But outside the 11,000 British forces holding southern Iraqi regions around Basra, and a Polish division of 9,000 that will assume command of the south-central Shiite district of Iraq, most of the other nations on board are more like Bulgaria, whose 250-man contingent took control of Karbala on Tuesday. The overwhelming majority — over 145,000 — continue to be American combat troops, and Iraqis continue to view them with mixed emotions.
More important than bringing in platoons of Slovenians or Lithuanians, diplomats say, is the lack of permanent Security Council member countries or Muslim states willing to take part — a fact that underscores the continuing anger much of the world’s major powers feel about the way the United States conducted itself in the Iraq debate.
In recent weeks, several powers have rejected requests to make major troop contributions for post-war peacekeeping, including Pakistan, Turkey and India. All three, along with Russia and France, have indicated that they might revise their policies if the U.S. would formalize the United Nations’ role in the occupation.
“No one is asking the U.S. to make its troops wear blue helmets,” says a European diplomat. “But, the feeling is among many, why should we put our troops under American command in a fight we opposed in the first place?”
POSSIBLE MODELS
Last week, following Powell’s visit, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan attempted to square this circle by proposing that American forces could remain in command of a multinational post-war force in Iraq if Washington would agree to allow the Security Council to pass a resolution that gave the force a U.N. mandate. But Annan, reflecting demands from other Security Council states, said such a move “would imply not just burden-sharing, but also sharing decisions and responsibility with others.”
“People remember the president saying that the U.N. would be ‘irrelevant’ if it didn’t go along with American policy,” says a European diplomat. “Now they find it interesting that the U.S. is back here looking for help.”
To be sure, many in Washington would prefer to keep the United Nations completely out of Iraq. Indeed, according to an American diplomat, the current U.S. thinking is something along the lines of the Kosovo mission, in which the United States led a force primarily composed of its NATO allies. Better still, the diplomat says, would be a force like the U.N.-approved army that intervened in Korea in 1950 “that was commanded by the U.S. with a majority of the troops coming from the U.S. But to get there is doing to take a lot of give and take.”
Philip Gordon, a Brookings Institution scholar, predicted that the administration’s would have to compromise on some of these issues or risk serious damage to American interests in the long-term, not to mention a political debacle for Bush.
“The failure to broaden the U.N. role in the occupation and secure greater international support is a mistake that will cost the United States in dollars, lives and reputation,” Gordon wrote in the International Herald-Tribune. |
