“The United States and our international partners would have to be completely devoted to the reconstruction of Iraq,” Condoleezza Rice, the president’s national security adviser, told me in an interview in September. That was a message that George W. Bush himself repeated just a week before the war began, in a mini-summit in the Azores with the British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his Spanish counterpart Jose Maria Aznar. With a new United Nations resolution behind him, President Bush was convinced he could–in his own words–“encourage broad participation in the process of helping the Iraqi people to build a free Iraq”.
It hasn’t worked out that way. Like the hunt for weapons of mass destruction, the task of rebuilding Iraq has been a lonely and frustrating one for the United States and its British allies. This week the Indian government dumped a huge disappointment on the White House by rejecting its long-negotiated plans to send 17,000 troops to help stabilize Iraq.
Given the steady killing of American troops, the extended deployment of the U.S. army and the long delays in restoring normal life to Baghdad, the White House now faces a critical challenge. That’s not the challenge of how to explain the pre-war intel on African uranium. It’s the far more urgent challenge of how to get the rest of the world’s help in saving Iraq.
Part of the problem is that the rest of the world doesn’t want to burn itself by helping the Bush administration out of its own hole. Other leaders look at the agonies of Tony Blair and conclude that it’s just not worth the trouble. That seems to be part of the Indian decision to back off sending a division of soldiers to the Kurdish region of Iraq. (To put that in context, the Indian division would have been far bigger than the British force in Iraq.)
Against those fears about domestic politics, the Indian government balanced any potential gains from helping the United States. That meant influence and, yes, money. Diplomacy rarely touches on the grubby details of deal making. But Indian officials were tempted by the potential for big contracts in Iraq as well as the chance to win political concessions from Washington against Delhi’s arch rival, Pakistan.
This is what American diplomacy has come to: trading troops on the ground for cash and favors in hand. It’s a sad repetition of the Turkish fiasco before the war, when the United States offered Ankara billions of dollars in aid and loan guarantees to use Turkey as a staging post for the invasion of Iraq.
The one other substantial ally in Iraq right now is Poland, part of the much-vaunted New Europe of pro-Washington nations that were once allied with Moscow. Yet one senior Polish official told me that Poland–which has sent 2,300 soldiers–is also pressing for its payoff. At the top of his list: visa waivers for Poles to enter the United States freely. The Polish people, he says, need to see something in return for the body bags that will surely return from Iraq.
Japan, another staunch ally, also undoubtedly has its own agenda. The ruling coalition of Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi-which has committed $100 million in financial aid to help rebuild Iraq–has faced down strong internal opposition over its agreement to send an expected 1,000 soldiers to serve in a non-combat capacity in the occupied country. One key reason: Tokyo wants White House support on the thorny problem of North Korea.
There are alternatives to this kind of horse-trading. One is another trip to our favorite watering hole in New York: the United Nations. India says it would reconsider its decision if there were a U.N. mandate for the troops in Iraq. In other words, U.N. peacekeepers. For its part, the European Union is offering to contribute funds for Iraq’s reconstruction, but only if the money sits in a trust fund administered by some international body just like the U.N. As Chris Patten, the EU’s commissioner for external relations, told reporters in Washington this week: “It’s much easier to go to parliaments and ask them to vote for money if it’s for purposes with which they are comfortable and if it appears we are in control of how the money is going to be spent. Otherwise you run the risk of all sorts of caricature that they are paying for contracts for [companies like] Halliburton or Bechtel or whoever. It’s an unfair caricature, but nonetheless that is politics.”
Another alternative is NATO. Edward Kennedy became the latest senator to jump on the NATO bandwagon this week by proposing that Iraq should be run by a NATO force under a U.N. mandate. Others like Richard Lugar and Joseph Biden, the senior Republican and Democrat on the Senate’s foreign relations committee, have urged the administration to swallow its pride and ask NATO allies such as France and Germany to help in Iraq.
These are not new ideas. The notion of NATO peacekeepers in Iraq emerged at senior levels in Brussels when Colin Powell staged a kiss-and-make-up session with European ministers in April. Yet the Bush administration is highly reluctant to engage in NATO’s messy politics by inviting the alliance into Iraq. “If you look at the British and Polish divisions,” says one senior administration official, “you have a significant part of the NATO nations providing forces of one type or another. The question then becomes: does the alliance itself have to make a political decision to become involved with a stabilization force? There is no obvious reason now on the ground to do that.”
The Bush administration could ask the rest of the world for its help in saving Iraq. But it doesn’t really want to do so–at least not in the way the rest of the world could support. For the moment, it believes the task of compromising with organizations like the U.N. and NATO is just not worth the trouble. But at some stage, the chance to improve life in Iraq–for U.S. troops and ordinary Iraqis–will have to be worth that trouble. If the transformation of Iraq is ever going to succeed, the administration needs to lay the groundwork now for a very different kind of occupation in the months and years ahead.
