WILL THE U.N. REALLY HELP?

  Artículo de Peter D. Feaver en “The Washington Post” del 04.09.2003

President Bush has reportedly decided to try to give the United Nations more control over the coalition in Iraq. The hope is this will increase the willingness of other countries to shoulder the financial and military burden of reestablishing security there and building a stable, representative Iraqi government.

 This may indeed be the best of a bad set of choices. The United States desperately needs more troops to send to Iraq, at a minimum to relieve those units already deployed there when their rotation comes due in a few months. Efforts to secure meaningful commitments outside the U.N. framework have been disappointing and are essentially exhausted. A greater U.N. role may well be the only way to persuade other states to join.

In taking this move, the Bush administration is making a large concession to its critics both domestically and abroad, who have been harping for a greater U.N. role. Thus far, however, those critics have largely invoked the U.N. as a matter of theological commitment, without making a persuasive case for how it could really help. In the next few months, we will see whether there is more to the U.N. option than a knee-jerk preference for the reassuring rhetoric of multilateralism or whether the critics have simply avoided dealing with six tough questions a larger U.N. role raises.

First, do other countries really want to provide sizable pots of money and substantial numbers of high-quality troops, and will they do so in a hurry once an appropriate U.N. cover is established? It's just as likely that most countries are reluctant to do either, and that they have hidden behind the absence of a U.N. mandate to cover their understandable desire to stay as far away from the conflict in Iraq as possible.

Second, will any troops and money that are provided be additions, or will they merely be one-for-one replacements by the United States, itself eager to reduce a burden? This points to one of the more dishonest arguments in the partisan debate over Iraq. If the situation in Iraq is really as dire as critics maintain, there is no way to reduce the U.S. burden in the short run. All new aid must be added to the commitments the United States is already making.

Third, will U.N.-provided troops be able to handle the quasi-guerrilla war environment in Iraq? For that matter, when is the last time the United Nations did a quasi-guerrilla war well? Its supporters regularly point to the ongoing Bosnia and Kosovo missions as examples of how the U.N. (deputizing NATO) can handle difficult peacekeeping missions. But the current (mixed) success in Bosnia and Kosovo came after five years of quasi-combat during which the U.N. was a disaster. Bush critics studiously avoid discussing a more apt analogy, Somalia -- a nation-building mission that was actively opposed by at least one well-armed militia. In that case, the U.N. was largely a failure. The United States is, of course, counting on a U.N.-NATO operation to run Afghanistan, but it is too early to tell whether that will work. The plain truth is the U.N. does old-fashioned peacekeeping rather well, and neocolonial nation-building fairly well, but only when those missions are not significantly challenged by local militarized groups. If the critics are right that the problem in Iraq is security, then the UN is probably not the vehicle for addressing it.

Fourth, will the U.N. mandate really provide more internal and external legitimacy? A U.N.-run mission might have greater external legitimacy -- meaning Parisians would like the Iraq mission a bit more -- but let's not pretend it will really change how the world views the Iraq situation: It will still blame the United States for everything that goes wrong in Iraq, and perhaps rightly so. At the same time, the bomb that destroyed the U.N. headquarters also destroyed the myth that the U.N. would provide meaningful internal legitimacy. Those who are opposing U.S. efforts to rebuild Iraq will oppose everybody else's efforts too.

Fifth, has anyone seriously addressed the downside of importing Security Council vetoes into the management of Iraq? Many of the current problems in Iraq owe to planning mistakes that derived from the veto-bound interagency system within the United States. It is hard to see how inviting more vetoes into the management will help.

Sixth, has anyone proposed a coherent plan for taking steps that the current U.S.-led coalition is not already taking? All the practical suggestions critics propose -- increase the Iraqi role, seal the border, rebuild basic services as fast as possible and so on -- are being pursued by L. Paul Bremer and the Coalition. Transferring control to the U.N. would not hasten these steps; it might even slow them.

Still, there are two reasons to be optimistic about Iraq, and even about increasing the U.N.'s role there. Iraq is probably a must-win mission for the United Nations; the failure of its members to reach a consensus in the spring of 2003 pushed it to the brink of irrelevancy. If it finally steps up to the plate in Iraq and then fails again, it will largely lose its role as an arbiter of major global security challenges. Even more, Iraq is a must-win mission for the Bush administration, which clearly appreciates the electoral implications and is taking drastic steps to improve the prospects there. We can only hope members of the U.N. also understand the gravity of the situation.

The writer is a professor of political science at Duke University and director of the Triangle Institute for Security Studies. He will answer questions about this column during a Live Online discussion