The Bush administration is desperate for international help in Iraq, but it is still reluctant to give up any of its military and economic authority.
Published September 7, 2003
The Bush administration is challenging the assumption that beggars can't be choosers. Although the White House is finally beginning to acknowledge that it desperately needs the international community's military and economic help in Iraq, it still is insisting that the help has to come on its terms. But the countries that were insulted and ignored in the runup to war aren't likely to participate in any plan to bail out U.S. forces as long as the administration insists on maintaining complete control of military and economic decisionmaking. After all, the administration's decisionmaking in Iraq hasn't inspired much confidence so far.
"The question is whether the world is ready to pick the United States up off the floor and dust them off," a senior Western diplomat told the New York Times. "A lot of people aren't ready yet."
Even many of our traditional allies aren't likely to be ready until they receive assurances that their points of view, as well as their soldiers and money, will be welcome. In the meantime, U.S. troops on the ground in Iraq and U.S. taxpayers at home continue to pay the price of going it virtually alone.
In the short term, patching up relations with France and Germany is less important than finding a formula under which Islamic troops from countries such as Turkey and Pakistan can play a significant role in Iraq. Politically as well as militarily, it is important to lower the profile of American forces, which still constitute almost 90 percent of the foreign troops on the ground. U.S. officials also have begun to stress the importance of speeding the recruitment, training and deployment of Iraqis to take over policing and other duties now being performed by U.S. soldiers.
The White House hawks who insisted on controlling the planning of the war in Iraq don't just need to patch up relations with the rest of the world; they need to repair the rifts they created within our own government. Secretary of State Colin Powell and other U.S. diplomats were marginalized by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his like-minded minions. The Rumsfeld bloc even punished top Pentagon officers who dared to disagree with their war plans.
It is now painfully obvious that some of the Rumsfeld bloc's basic assumptions were flawed. They overstated the threat of Saddam Hussein's weapons programs. They underestimated the challenge of maintaining order in Iraq after Hussein fell. They misjudged the reception our troops would receive from ordinary Iraqis. And they overestimated their ability to control nation-building duties in Iraq for which our troops are not adequately trained.
Retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni, former head of U.S. Central Command, can afford to be more candid than his active-duty peers. He clearly was speaking for many of them last week when he criticized the administration's war plan, or lack of same: "There is no strategy or mechanism for putting the pieces together," Zinni said in a speech to a group of officers in Washington. "We're in danger of failing."
Zinni was especially critical of the decision to allow the Pentagon to control postwar efforts in Iraq. "Why the hell would the Department of Defense be the organization . . . that deals with the reconstruction of Iraq?" he asked. "Doesn't make sense."
It happened because a handful of cocksure ideologues in the White House thought they were smarter than everyone else, and they isolated those governments - and those officials within our own government - whose pragmatic views conflicted with their pat assumptions. Now, as Zinni put it, they are going back to the United Nations "hat in hand."
Even many of our old friends are in no mood to bail out the Washington officials who insulted them only months ago. They may not even care about relieving overextended American troops and taxpayers. But for the sake of the suffering people of Iraq, the international community should be prepared to work with the Bush administration to repair the dangerous divisions that this war exposed.
