UN take-over of Iraqi military operations.

[Nobody]

OK, so I’m not posting this as a debate, but since I’m not sure that there is a factual answer, and because this topic is debatable, I’m posting it here. If it’s in the wrong forum, then my apologies to the mods.

OK, in the war with Iraq, there are two main camps. The first, let the US keep control of military operations in Iraq, and second, let the UN take over.

Now, while I think that the US isn’t doing all it can, as evidenced by the daily, or almost daily news report of more solders or civilians dying, I don’t think of the UN as a very effective organization either. But that’s not what this post is about.

Here’s my question. OK, so say Kerry wins and the UN takes over. How would things be different in Iraq? I’m guessing that it would mean more foreign troops and less US troops, right? What else would it entail? How would a UN run military presence in Iraq be different? What are the arguments for and against it? If all that changes is leadership and the makeup of military forces (what I mean is which countries have troops, and how many from each), I’m not so sure why that would be so bad.

Obviously, I’m missing out on a lot of details. So what all would change, and why would it be good or bad? Thanks.

[Nobody]

Wow, I didn’t realize that this would be such a difficult question to answer.

[BrainGlutton]

Kerry isn’t actually planning to turn the whole show over to the UN, only to “internationalize” the occupation. His plan, actually, is to involve NATO forces, and ask the UN to, in essence, legitimize the new situation. From a speech he gave April 30:

Here is how we must proceed.

First, we must create a stable and secure environment in Iraq. That will require a level of forces equal to the demands of the mission. To do this right, we have to truly internationalize both politically and militarily: we cannot depend on a US-only presence. In the short-term, however, if our commanders believe they need more American troops, they should say so and they should get them.

But more and more American soldiers cannot be the only solution. Other nations have a vital interest in the outcome and they must be brought in.

To accomplish this, we must do the hard work to get the world’s major political powers to join in this mission. To do so, the President must lead. He must build a political coalition of key countries, including the UK, France, Russia and China, the other permanent members of the UN Security Council, to share the political and military responsibilities and burdens of Iraq with the United States.

The coalition should endorse the Brahimi plan for an interim Iraqi government, it should propose an international High Commissioner to work with the Iraqi authorities on the political transition, and it should organize an expanded international security force, preferably with NATO, but clearly under US command.

Once these elements are in place, the coalition would then go to the UN for a resolution to ratify the agreement. The UN would provide the necessary legitimacy. The UN is not the total solution but it is a key that opens the door to participation by others.

In parallel, the President must also go to NATO members and others to contribute the additional military forces and to NATO to take on an organizing role. NATO is now a global security organization and Iraq must be one of its global missions.

To bring NATO members and others in, the President must immediately and personally reach out and convince them that Iraqi security and stability is a global interest that all must contribute to. He must also convince NATO as an organization that Iraq should be a NATO mission-a mission consistent with the principles of collective security that have formed the basis of the alliance’s remarkable history in the pursuit of peace and security.

To bring others in it is imperative we share responsibility and authority. When NATO members have been treated with respect, they have always - always - answered the call of duty. So too with other key contributors. Every one has a huge stake in whether Iraq survives its trial by fire or is consumed by fire and becomes a breeding ground for terror, intolerance and fear.

I know that some will say that this is an impossible task, but I believe it is doable with the right approach. We must lead but we must listen. We must use every tool of diplomacy and persuasion to bring others along.

I also understand that perhaps NATO cannot undertake the entire Iraq mission right away. But it could possibly take control of Iraq’s borders, take responsibility for Northern Iraq and/or the Polish sector, and train Iraq’s army. If NATO did this, it would free up as many as 20,000 American troops, and open the door for other countries outside of NATO to participate.

The immediate goal is to internationalize the transformation of Iraq, to get more foreign forces on the ground to share the risk and reduce the burden on our own forces. That is the only way to succeed in the mission while ending the sense of an American occupation.

We must take these steps because there is greater strength in greater numbers and stronger alliances. And failure to move forward will be seen as a failure of American leadership.

The second key element is the High Commissioner. Backed by a newly broadened security coalition, he should be charged with overseeing elections, the drafting of a constitution and coordinating reconstruction. The Commissioner should be highly regarded by the international community and have the credibility to talk to all the Iraqi people.

This Commissioner should be directed to work with Iraq’s interim government, the new US Ambassador, and the international community after June 30 to ensure a process that continues to move forward on the path toward sovereignty, while focusing on the immediate needs of the Iraqis themselves.

The Iraqi people desperately need financial and technical assistance that is not swallowed up by bureaucracy and no-bid contracts, but instead goes directly into the hands of grassroots organizations. They need to see the tangible benefits of reconstruction in the form of jobs, infrastructure, and services. And they need to be able to communicate their concerns to international authorities without feeling they are being insulted and disrespected in their own country.

We need a massive training effort to build Iraqi security forces that can actually provide security for the Iraqi people. We must accept that the effort to date has failed: it must be rethought and reformed. Training cannot be hurried. It must be done in the field and on the job as well as in the classroom. Units cannot be put on the street without backup from international security forces. They cannot be rushed into battle before they are ready.

This is a task to do in partnership with other nations, not just on our own. This is a task which must be successful. If we fail to create viable Iraqi security forces - military and police - there is no successful exit for us and other nations.

And here’s an analysis from The Atlantic Monthly, July/August 2004 – “Kerry Faces the World,” by Joshua Micah Marshall (http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2004/07/marshall.htm):

as the situation in Iraq has worsened, Kerry has stepped up his criticism of the Bush Administration. In an April 30 speech at Westminster College, Kerry laid out a three-part plan for the occupation and reconstruction of the country. First he would expand and internationalize the security force by seeking the support of the UK, France, Russia, and China, and also NATO, which, he suggested, might take control of the borders and train Iraq’s army. Second he would propose an international high commissioner to oversee elections, write a constitution, and organize the reconstruction efforts. Third he would launch a “massive training effort” to expand Iraqi security forces. Taking those steps, Kerry declared, “is the only way to succeed in the mission while ending the sense of an American occupation.” On the surface this may sound like merely a difference of emphasis—as though the only change Kerry proposes is a dash more multilateralism and UN involvement. But beyond specifics, the significance of which can be misinterpreted, lies a fundamental difference in world view between Democrats and Republicans—a difference in how they see the nature of the threat facing America. This, more than any distinction between hawk and dove, is also the fundamental foreign-policy difference between Bush and Kerry.

From its inception the Bush Administration has viewed states as the key actors on the world stage, and relations among them as the primary concern of U.S. foreign policy. It is a mindset rooted in the realities of the Cold War, which defined U.S. foreign policy at the time when most of the President’s key advisers gained their formative experience in government. The fixity of this mindset also explains why the Bush Administration spent its first months so heavily focused on the issue of national missile defense, and seemed so surprised by al-Qaeda’s transnational terrorism. The Bush team didn’t discount the problem of weapons of mass destruction; it simply expected trouble to come from an ICBM-wielding “rogue state” like Iraq or North Korea, rather than from Islamic terrorist groups.

Viewed through this lens, the Administration’s fixation on Iraq after 9/11 becomes somewhat easier to understand. As Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith explained to Nicholas Lemann, of The New Yorker, on the eve of the Iraq War, “One of the principal strategic thoughts underlying our strategy in the war on terrorism is the importance of the connection between terrorist organizations and their state sponsors. Terrorist organizations cannot be effective in sustaining themselves over long periods of time to do large-scale operations if they don’t have support from states.”

To the Democrats in Kerry’s orbit, this approach is at best inefficient and at worst akin to fighting fire with gasoline—for example, it has created terrorism in Iraq where little or none previously existed. Last fall, when I asked the presidential candidate General Wesley Clark about Feith’s characterization of the threat, he said it was the “principal strategic mistake behind the Administration’s policy.” Clark went on, “If you look at all the states that were named as the principal adversaries, they’re on the periphery of international terrorism today.”

First as a military negotiator in Bosnia and later as NATO Supreme Allied Commander in Europe during the second Clinton Administration, Clark was one of the figures at the center of the process that shaped current Democratic foreign-policy views. In its early years, rhetoric aside, the Clinton Administration hewed closely to George H.W. Bush’s policy of studied non-involvement in the Balkans, even as Yugoslavia slid into chaos. But over time that region became a forcing ground for re-evaluating Democratic beliefs about foreign policy. The Balkans proved that soft-sounding concerns like human-rights abuses, ethnic slaughter, lawlessness, and ideological extremism could quickly mount into first-order geopolitical crises.

By the mid-1990s this had led the Clinton Administration to focus on terrorism, failed states, and weapons proliferation, and as it did, its foreign-policy outlook changed. The key threats to the United States came to be seen less in terms of traditional conflicts between states and more in terms of endemic regional turmoil of the sort found in the Balkans. “The Clinton Administration,” says Jonathan Winer, “started out with a very traditional Democratic or even mainstream approach to foreign policy: big-power politics, Russia being in the most important role; a critical relationship with China; European cooperation; and some multilateralism.” But over the years, he went on, “they moved much more to a failed-state, global-affairs kind of approach, recognizing that the trends established by globalization required you to think about foreign policy in a more synthetic and integrated fashion than nation-state to nation-state.”

As Winer argues, the threats were less from Russia or China, or even from the rogue states, than from the breakdown of sovereignty and authority in a broad geographic arc that stretched from West Africa through the Middle East, down through the lands of Islam, and into Southeast Asia. In this part of the world poverty, disease, ignorance, fanaticism, and autocracy frequently combined in a self-reinforcing tangle, fostering constant turmoil. Home to many failed or failing states, this area bred money laundering, waves of refugees, drug production, gunrunning, and terrorist networks—the cancers of the twenty-first-century world order.

[Nobody]

So, I’m confused. Is Bush purposely keeping certain allies out of the picture? We already do have allies, but I’m guessing we could get more? What would we need to do to get them to join us?

And how could we get France, Germany and Russia to help, since they were and are against the whole thing, what would make then change their minds?

[BrainGlutton]

@Master Control

So, I’m confused. Is Bush purposely keeping certain allies out of the picture? We already do have allies, but I’m guessing we could get more? What would we need to do to get them to join us?

And how could we get France, Germany and Russia to help, since they were and are against the whole thing, what would make then change their minds?

They were against the invasion, which now is a fait accompli. Now we need help with the occupation – and the nation-building process. Kerry may be hoping that the change in administration will allow America to present a new face to the world – he can blame the whole mess on the Bush Admin and then beg for international help cleaning it up. Might work. Especially if he offers French and German firms some reconstruction contracts, which Bush spitefully shut them out of.

[BrainGlutton]

Also, the NATO countries would gladly have helped out with the invasion of Afghanistan – after 9/11 they staunchly declared they would stand by America, citing the clause of the NATO treaty that says an attack on one member is an attack on all. But Bush refused to let them help, which kind of hurt. Kerry might have a chance to repair that damage by asking NATO, as a whole, to help with the occupation of Iraq.

The point is, Kerry would expressly repudiate the Bush policy of unilateral action.

[Nobody]

Wow, all this info, and I’m still confused on a lot of things. Oh well, at any rate, it’s 10:51 for me, and I need to go to be and get up in 6 hours, so I guess that’s it for me for a while.