Blame Bush Doctrine for Blowing U.N. Hopes in Iraq

[reprehensor]

I Lived to Tell the Tale

Published on Thursday, August 19, 2004 by the Guardian / United Kingdom

It wasn't Last Year's Bomb but American Policy which Destroyed the UN's Hopes in Iraq

by Salim Lone

Even before that awful bomb ripped through our Baghdad headquarters on August 19 2003, taking the lives of 22 of my colleagues, the UN mission in Iraq had already become marginal to the epic crisis being played out there. Iraq had become the center of both the US war on terror and the war between the extremities of two civilizations. The vicious terrorist attack a year ago today surprised no one working for Sergio Vieira de Mello, the UN secretary general's special representative. Indeed, the UN chiefs of communication in Iraq had met that morning to hammer out a plan to counter the intensifying perception among Iraqis that our mission was simply an adjunct of the US occupation.

Little did the Iraqis know that the reality was quite the opposite: by August, the UN mission had grown very distant from the Americans. The intense early relationship that Sergio, the world's most brilliant negotiator of post-conflict crises, had fashioned with Paul Bremer, the US proconsul, had already fractured. Contact was intermittent now that Bremer's coalition provisional authority (CPA) could deal directly with the Iraqis whom it had appointed, with Sergio's help, to the governing council. General dismay over occupation tactics aside, Sergio had already parted company with Bremer over key issues such as the need for electoral affirmation of a new constitution, and the arrest and conditions of detention of the thousands imprisoned at Abu Ghraib prison.

The low point came at the end of July last year, when, astonishingly, the US blocked the creation of a fully fledged UN mission in Iraq. Sergio believed that this mission was vital and had thought the CPA also supported it. Clearly, the Bush administration had eagerly sought a UN presence in occupied Iraq as a legitimizing factor rather than as a partner that could mediate the occupation's early end, which we knew was essential to averting a major conflagration.

Sergio had nevertheless continued to squeeze whatever mileage he could from what he called the "constructive ambiguity" of a terrible postwar security council resolution; one that sent UN staff into the Iraqi cauldron without giving them even a minimal level of independence or authority. It is not an exaggeration to say that it was this resolution that rang the death knell for the UN in Iraq. Having heroically resisted American pressure to authorize the war, security council members decided to show goodwill to the "victors". "A step too far" was how an Iraqi put it to me on my second day in Baghdad.

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