[Mb-civic] NYTimes.com Article: Editorial: Still Worlds Apart on Iraq

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Editorial: Still Worlds Apart on Iraq

November 26, 2004
 


 

Foreign ministers from all the right countries were
present. The timing - two months before the scheduled date
of Iraq's all-important elections - was promising. The
Mideast location was symbolically apt. Too bad, then, that
this week's big international conference on Iraq in the
Egyptian seaside resort of Sharm el Sheik, bringing
together all of Baghdad's neighbors and every permanent
member of the United Nations Security Council, did so
little to change the dismal overall equation. 

The ministers came, they dined and they endorsed the
familiar uncontroversial list of desirable goals. They
encouraged free elections. They condemned terrorism. They
endorsed Iraq's territorial integrity. They reiterated the
importance of humanitarian assistance. Then, still
fundamentally disagreeing about how to achieve these goals,
they flew off again, without committing themselves to
anything likely to make any real difference. 

International conferences like these can be quite useful
when the participants start out with some basic agreement
about the nature of the problem and the outlines of some
possible solutions. On Iraq, there is still no such
agreement. More than 20 months after the United States
unilaterally assumed responsibility for Iraq's future by
invading without the support of the Security Council or
most neighboring countries, it still finds itself largely
on its own, with much of the rest of the world watching
skeptically from the sidelines. 

This is not a healthy situation - for Iraq, for the United
States, for the Middle East or for the international
community. How things go in Iraq over the next few months
will probably have widespread and lasting consequences for
all. And they are unlikely to go very well unless all, or
at least most, of the governments represented at Sharm el
Sheik begin actively working together. 

But don't expect that to happen any time soon. The newly
re-elected Bush administration seems more determined than
ever to rely on military force to crush the Sunni
insurgency, even if that means going ahead with elections
next January that are not broadly inclusive. Most of the
rest of the world, doubting that this strategy can bring
security, legitimacy or real sovereignty, seems equally
determined to remain largely aloof. 

The preferred strategy seems to be to hope for the best and
offer such low-risk gestures as forgiving bad Iraqi debt
that would surely never be repaid anyway. But even debt
relief, which Western and Japanese government creditors
agreed to last weekend, is further than Iraq's major Arab
creditors, like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, are now prepared
to go. That makes it far more difficult for the new Iraqi
government to obtain the credit it will need to revive and
rebuild a devastated country. And so far only Romania and
tiny Fiji have offered soldiers for the protective force
needed to send more election workers to Iraq. 

That leaves America still going it almost alone. Apart from
the British, most remaining multinational troops are more
symbolic than militarily significant. Washington's other
main partner is Iraq's interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi,
who has not done enough to reach out to the estranged Sunni
minority and now may be in danger of losing Shiite support
to the new anti-American alliance of the former rebel
leader Moktada al-Sadr and the former Pentagon favorite,
Ahmad Chalabi. 

The newly trained Iraqi security forces the administration
likes to talk about still do not exist in large enough
numbers to safeguard polling places in January, nor has
their reliability under fire yet been convincingly
demonstrated. The more than 135,000 United States troops
now on long-term occupation duty cannot remain there
indefinitely without seriously eroding America's worldwide
readiness and credibility. 

To begin changing this bleak picture, the Bush
administration will have to work much harder at
international bridge building than it did in its first
term. Simply soliciting support for current American
policies will not be enough. Washington must also be
willing to consider changing some of those policies as part
of a renewed process of international consultation. That
might lead to more productive international conferences in
the future. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/26/opinion/26fri1.html?ex=1102491643&ei=1&en=0fb42e7db8cf7608


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