The United Nations can help the US to exit from Iraq

The United Nations might be the only international partner capable of offering the Bush administration a face-saving device to exit from Iraq without seeming to be defeated.

On January 1, 2007, Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary-General many American conservatives loathe, will hand over to Ban Ki-Moon of Korea. During the election process, Ban, whose country is a close US ally, received firm support from John Bolton, the outgoing US Ambassador to the UN.

The unassuming Ban is a consensus builder and consummate diplomat who helped the US in the past to tackle North Korea. His voice was one of moderation holding back those who were pushing to penalize that regime for its defiance of Washington.

After the Democrats take over Congress and Senate next January, the choices on Iraq will be stark. The Iraq Study Group has analyzed the Bush administration’s failures in Iraq but has not offered any clear ways out of the mess.

Its complex analysis and proposals boil down to two issues. It suggests that the warring Iraqis may come together in compromise if they know that America will not baby sit them after 2008. It also suggests some kind of negotiation with other regional powers, including Iran, to ensure safe American withdrawal and Iraqi stability after that.

Neither is likely to happen without UN involvement. The UN is the only international body with sufficient legitimacy in the eyes of all countries, except Israel, to offer an acceptable forum for negotiations.

The UN of Kofi Annan lost legitimacy in Iraqi eyes because, in the opinion of many Iraqis who are now insurgents, it collaborated with the US and Britain in causing the deaths of over half a million children. The children are alleged to have died through lack of medicines and nutrition during the draconian sanctions imposed after the 1991 war and before the oil for food program began in late 1996. They also hold the UN partly responsible for ruination of Iraq’s economy during those sanctions.

However erroneous those views, that era is now over. Ban will open a new phase in the UN’s activities and perceptions. There is no negotiating forum other than the UN that the current Iraqi government, dominated by Shiites and Kurds who oppose the insurgents, can trust.

The various factions in Iraq’s current regime are too distrustful of one another to make enough common cause to find solutions that would make the ISG scenario feasible. Some outsider will have to knock their heads together. That outsider cannot be American since it is the occupying power and is not trusted by anybody. Nor can Washington be seen to impose solutions on a democratically elected government.

Therefore, one of Ban’s first acts in office should be to name a UN envoy who would work with all the factions in Iraq to fashion the kind of compromises the ISG suggests regarding power and revenue sharing. Ban cannot do so without a consensus in the UN Security Council asking him to provide this service.

Without such a concentrated effort by an extraordinary UN envoy, the ISG’s exit scenario may remain wishful thinking. The factional violence and insurgency is too far advanced in Iraq for a local leader to emerge who has enough acceptability and prestige to knock heads together.

Often a high powered outsider gets a better hearing than a local protagonist when it comes to finding ways to end a conflict among factions blinded by mutual mistrust.

The UN envoy’s work could lead to a wider conference to build a framework of security and stability in the region. No entity other than the UN has the acceptability required to sponsor such a conference.

Washington will lose face if the initiative for a conference comes from such opponents of its Iraq policies as France, Russia or China. An initiative by one of its allies in the Iraq war would stumble at the starting gate.

Democrats may find it to their advantage to take the UN route as soon as they settle in Washington. If the peace effort fails, the UN can again be the scapegoat, this time under a different Secretary-General. Without the UN, the Democrats, the White House or both will have to bear the brunt of blame if American soldiers are still dying in Iraq in 2009.