IRAQ POLICY IS BROKEN. FIX IT.

  Artículo de Fareed Zakaria en “Newsweek” del 14-7-03

The administration’s problem is that calling on NATO means bringing France and Germany back into the fold. My suggestion: get over it.

We’re utterly surprised,” a senior U.N. diplomat told me. “We thought that after the war, the United States would try to dump Iraq on the world’s lap and the rest of the world would object, saying, ‘This is your mess, you clean it up.’ The opposite is happening. The rest of the world is saying, ‘We’re willing to help,’ but Washington is determined to run Iraq itself.” And what are we getting for this privilege? The vast majority of the costs, for starters.

MOST ESTIMATES SUGGEST that Iraq is now costing U.S. taxpayers $4 billion a month. The gush of oil revenues is going to take much longer than expected. Meanwhile the country is in worse shape than almost anyone predicted. If past experience with nation-building is any guide, aid levels will need to rise significantly to achieve success.
        The military situation is even more difficult. Right now, more than a third of active-duty U.S. Army forces are deployed in and around Iraq—180,000 out of 480,000. Without a serious change of strategy, this is not sustainable for more than a year.
        And what if current levels are not enough? President Bush tells us that we have the forces needed to maintain order in Iraq. But in Bosnia and Kosovo, NATO deployed significantly larger forces per capita—and those were situations where the fighting had actually stopped. Gen. Eric Shinseki’s original estimate that at least 200,000 troops would be needed to administer Iraq looks increasingly closer to the mark, at least in this early phase.
        The solution is obvious: internationalize the occupation. The Pentagon claims it already is—by getting troops from various Coalition partners. Here is what that means: Britain, Poland and maybe India will each lead a division. But few countries have active, well-trained troops in the numbers needed. So the British division will include troops from seven countries, sometimes just a few hundred. (The Czech contribution is 650.) The Polish division will have only 2,300 Polish troops, the rest coming from Ukraine, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia and Hungary. Even so, the division will be a small one, about 9,000 (as opposed to 15,000, which is more the norm). I’m not a military expert, but can this work as a fighting force?

There is one group of nations with large numbers of well-trained troops, experienced in peacekeeping and in working with the United States Army. It’s called NATO. The problem for the Bush administration is that calling on NATO means bringing France and Germany back into the fold. My suggestion: get over it. Even for NATO countries, sending large numbers of troops is not going to be easy. Besides, without NATO at the core, the Coalition of Iraq forces will be constantly changing, an ad hoc group with no experience working together.
        But we will still need more troops. In order to get other countries—perhaps Muslim countries—to participate, Washington should give the United Nations a more central role. (Alternatively, create a multinational body specifically for the reconstruction of Iraq, blessed by the United Nations, with many foreign faces.) In virtually every negotiation the administration has had for more troops, countries have expressed a strong preference to be part of a U.N. mission rather than a U.S. mission. In India right now, the government is keen to send a division to northern Iraq, but it knows that it will pay a political price without U.N. cover.
        The enormous economic advantages of a more multinational process are also obvious. The European Union and Japan, the two donors with big aid budgets, are far more likely to put large sums of money into a U.N. operation than a U.S. occupation. The United States pays about 20 percent of the combined military and administrative costs in Kosovo. If the costs stay in the range of $50 billion for this first year in Iraq, help would be nice.
        And what would we lose? Washington would still maintain effective control because it is the dominant military force on the ground. In Afghanistan, where the United States runs the military and the United Nations the administrative side, no one doubts where the power lies.

Today the United States gets to decide which Shiite leader will be mayor of Najaf—thereby annoying 100 other contenders. Meanwhile the United Nations distributes food, water and medicine. Why is this such a great deal for America? Why not mix it up so that the political decisions are made by an international group? And why not have the United States more involved in relief work?
        From the start, internationalizing the Iraq operation has seemed such an obvious solution. But the Bush administration has not adopted it because it holds a whole series of prejudices about the United Nations, nation-building, the French, the Germans and multilateral organizations. In clinging on to ideological fixations, the administration is risking its most important foreign-policy project.