BUSH BUDGING ON UN ROLE FOR POSTWAR IRAQ

 

 

  Informe de Brian Knowlton en “The International Herald Tribune” del 03.04.2003

 

WASHINGTON.

 The Australian foreign minister said Wednesday after meeting with President George W. Bush that an argument within the U.S. administration over the face of a postwar Iraq "has been won by those who believe there should be a role for the UN."

 

European leaders continued to demand such a role.

 

Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain said that, ultimately, Iraq "should be run for the first time in decades by the Iraqi people," not by Americans or others. Any new administration in Baghdad should have a United Nations endorsement, Blair said.

 

Australia and Britain, the leading military supporters of the United States in the coalition fighting Iraq, have been pressing Washington to accept a significant role for the UN - and also to share reconstruction work with their companies - once the war ends. Other countries have made the same case.

 

Where the debate will end is unclear, although the argument for a larger UN role appears to be gaining ground.

 

"The idea of a United Nations special representative or special coordinator is one they feel comfortable with," the Australian foreign minister, Alexander Downer, told Australian Broadcasting Corporation radio in comments broadcast Wednesday. He did not say what authority such an official would have.

 

Bush has said that he favors some UN role but has provided few details. His spokesman, Ari Fleischer, said Tuesday that "the Iraqi people will administer Iraq."

 

Yet debate continues over just how long after a coalition victory the de facto control of American troops and advisers should continue, how soon Iraqis should take genuine power and how broad or circumscribed the UN role should finally be.

 

"There will be difficulties as to when we make the transition to the Iraqi Interim Authority," Blair said Wednesday. But in his strongest comment on the matter of who will control Iraq, he added that "our aim is to move as soon as possible" to an Iraqi-run authority.

 

U.S. plans for the quick installation of a transitional government, to be called the Iraqi Interim Authority, have been slowed by unexpected resistance to the U.S.-led forces and a growing awareness of the complexities of weeding out Saddam Hussein loyalists in the current government.

 

Angering many Europeans, some in the Bush administration have balked at the idea of a central role in Iraq for the UN.

 

Secretary of State Colin Powell upset some European leaders last week when he said that the United States had not taken on "this huge burden with our coalition partners not to be able to have a significant dominating control over how it unfolds in the future." Prime Minister Costas Simitis of Greece said that prolonged U.S. dominance of postwar Iraq could create huge tensions that only a major UN role could prevent. "In the eyes of the Iraqis and the Arab world," he said in Athens, "the identification of those responsible for reconstruction with the aggressors would undermine all reconstruction."

 

Only the UN, said Simitis, whose country holds the rotating EU presidency, "can prevent an explosion of ethnic or regional tensions, the further marginalization of the Iraqi people and, indirectly, an increase in terrorism."

 

The United States, largely on its own, has undertaken a detailed level of planning for reconstruction, relief delivery and the moving of the country toward a representative self-government. A few British and Australian diplomats are involved in the planning, as well as some Iraqi exiles.

 

Part of the debate within the administration has been whether the Pentagon or the State Department should administer billions in reconstruction funds and oversee aid distribution. Some aid organizations fear that their neutrality might be tainted if their work is linked to the U.S. military.

 

Congress weighed in on the matter Tuesday, as the appropriations committees of both chambers voted to shift reconstruction financing from the Pentagon to the secretary of state. Ultimately, said Representative James Kolbe, Republican of Arizona, "reconstruction is a civilian role."