Troops for Iraq, Arab News

Opinion, August 2003, www.aljazeerah.info

Troops for Iraq

Arab News

25 August 2003

While the security situation in Iraq shows no signs of improving, the US continues to ask its friends around the world to help it out with military personnel, although it now says it doesn’t “need” so much as “welcome” help. It hardly needs saying that such requests are embarrassing for the superpower in view of its swagger before the invasion, when it told the world it would if necessary go it alone. How tempting now to say that since the US did more or less go it alone, it alone should deal with the consequences. But a better way of approaching the question is to look at the opportunity that could arise from the tragic developments in Iraq.

Germany, which opposed the war, yesterday made it clear that it would not send troops to help out its NATO ally without a clear United Nations mandate to do so. It refused not because it saw an opportunity to get its own back for prewar taunts about “Old Europe” and similar unpleasantness from across the Atlantic. It did so on the basis of two rational considerations. The first is that it feels that the most immediate need in Iraq is for civil reconstruction of the war-torn country. “That is not a job for soldiers,” German Defense Minister Peter Struck said. The second reason is that Germany says Washington has not changed its overall position, which is roughly that while others may come and expose themselves to danger in place of American soldiers, the overall occupations statute has not changed: In other words, all the decision-making powers would remain with the US. As long as the US insists on that position, Stuck says, there is no point even discussing the matter. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has said pretty much the same thing.

But Germany also said that a request from the UN would be quite another matter. That has also from the beginning been the position of Saudi Arabia, India and many others: They too have insisted that a UN mandate is a must if they are to help keep the peace and reconstruct the country’s infrastructure and facilities. With the devastating bombing of the UN headquarters in Baghdad last week, such a mandate now looks increasingly likely, and the international community now has a far more powerful bargaining position. If it were to make a mandate for peacekeeping forces conditional on a demand that the US hand over at least some of the decision-making power in Iraq to the UN, it could pave the way for a legitimate peace that is acceptable, if not to those behind the bombing of the UN, at least to a significantly larger proportion of Iraqis and Arabs in general.

Gloating now that the US finds itself in a bind is counterproductive. Instead, the international community should do all it can to offer the US an honorable way out of the terrible mistake it is beginning to realize it has made.

Earth, a planet hungry for peace

The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03).

The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers in the West Bank (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03).