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Analysis
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.
<font color=red>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."<font color=black>
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.
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