After
Iraq's elections,
the U.S. and U.K. must leave
and the UN take over
By
Jonathan
Power
TFF Associate
since 1991
Comments to JonatPower@aol.com
January 26, 2005
LONDON - Why do military
occupations rarely succeed? A study published in a recent
edition of Harvard University's "International Security"
reveals that out of 24 military occupations examined only
seven were a success and six of those came in the wake of
World War 2 as the Cold War was emerging and
concentrating minds.
The Germans and the Japanese were
war weary. Moreover, the allies were well prepared.
During the war the U.S. had established Civil Affairs
Training Schools which provided training in military
administration, language and cultural knowledge of the
countries they expected officers to work in.
By now it is very clear that the
U.S./British occupation of Iraq has hit insurmountable
obstacles. Most of the unrest is actively provoked by
their presence. Without the American and British forces
there might well be violence, but it would not be
constantly fuelled by the presence of foreign occupiers.
It is doubtful if whole towns like Falluja would be
leveled and it is doubtful that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Al
Qaeda's man in Iraq, would find the traction he does
today.
Once the election is over and a new
government is in position it should ask the American and
the British soldiers to leave. Their engineers, doctors
and other crucial civilians should be invited to stay. A
three-month timetable for the transition should be
sufficient.
Will the roof fall in? It may. But
it may not. The Sunni militants have done their best to
provoke the Shia with assassinations of close associates
of the principal Shia religious leader Grand Ayatollah
Ali al-Sistani but his firm leadership has kept revenge
and bitterness in check. Likewise among the Sunnis there
are many who abjure violence and understand the electoral
arithmetic means that it is unlikely they can win power
in the foreseeable future and that energy should be
concentrated on making the best possible deal with the
majority. Without al-Zarqawi being able to use the
Americans as his foil progress should be
possible.
But if the roof only half falls in
and some extra security is needed what is so bad about
going to the UN and asking for help?
Since the killing of the UN's
special representative, Sergio Vieira de Mello, the UN
presence has been tightly limited to giving election
expertise from the safe haven of Jordan, giving civilian
aid ranging from power engineers to sanitation experts
and, at Washington's request, deploying its best
negotiator, the Algerian, Lakhdar Brahimi, to help
compose the membership of the present interim government.
But the election over, and the Americans and British on
the way out, the UN could send in peacekeepers if the
main Iraqi groupings - Sunnis, Shi'ites and Kurds - all
agreed that was the way to go.
In the early 1990s the UN had a
string of successes, now almost forgotten - in Namibia,
Cambodia, El Salvador and Mozambique, all countries that
had been torn asunder by fratricidal civil war far worse
than what is occurring in Iraq. The UN not only helped
keep the peace but set in motion reasonably free and fair
elections. Even in the more difficult situations of peace
enforcement - in Eastern Slavonia in 1996 and in East
Timor in 1999 - the UN won through. According to a recent
RAND study the reasons for UN success are when the
mission is well resourced, the troops well trained,
contains a core of First World troops and has unambiguous
backing from the Security Council. Indeed, if Bosnia's UN
troops had been as well resourced as the NATO troops that
replaced them the UN might have had success there
too.
At the moment the UN has over
60,000 troops deployed in 17 countries. This may be
modest compared with American deployments but it is far
more than that of any other single nation or indeed any
combination of nations.
But even now, as the UN Congo
operation has shown up starkly, the number of troops is
often not enough. Too many of them come from nations that
do not have the funds or the historical experience that
enable their troops to be trained to be both disciplined
and effective. No one who has read the book "We Did
Nothing" by Linda Polman, a Dutch journalist, about the
UN operations in Somalia and the Congo will have few
illusions left about the either the saintly qualities or
the effectiveness of many UN brigades. (Although
according to her the Zambians were exceptional heroic in
the Congo, which goes to show that a good local commander
can make all the difference.)
There could be a workable UN
peacekeeping operation in Iraq, but first the Iraqis have
to badly want it and second, the richer nations of the
world have to properly fund it and man a good portion of
it.
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Copyright © 2005 By
JONATHAN POWER
I can be reached by
phone +44 7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
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