A year ago Thursday, a suicide bomber drove a cement mixer packed with powerful explosives into the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad, killing 22 people and wounding over 100. The Bush administration would honor the victims of that terrorist attack by taking a hard look at its overall approach toward the involvement of the United Nations in postwar Iraq.
An honest appraisal would conclude that the initial decision to make U.S. officials the sole managers of the political transition process ensured that the administration would fail to build a broad coalition, and that eleventh-hour attempts to promote a more meaningful U.N. role cannot substitute for wise policy from the outset.
The death of Sergio Vieira de Mello, the secretary-general's special representative in Iraq, and 21 others forced U.N. officials to question whether the June 2003 deployment of Vieira de Mello and his team had been a mistake. With the United Nations consigned to the role of bit player in Iraq, most U.N. officials concluded that the risks had far outweighed the benefits they could bring to the Iraqi people. Last year's attack also complicated Bush administration efforts to encourage troop contributions from other countries, many of which had already been reluctant to participate in a mission over which they had little influence.
Even today, as the new U.N. special representative, Ashraf Jehangir Qazi, begins his work in Iraq, Secretary-General Kofi Annan has been unable to convince any governments to contribute troops for a proposed force to protect U.N. personnel.
It didn't have to be this way. When, in April of last year, President Bush declared that the United Nations would play a vital role in the rebuilding of postwar Iraq, the secretary-general took the president at his word and chose Vieira de Mello to run the U.N. operation in Iraq. The secretary-general's decision to call on Vieira de Mello was a signal to Washington -- and a clear message to the U.N. bureaucracy -- that the United Nations would seriously engage in Iraq.
From Indochina to Kosovo to East Timor, Vieira de Mello had gained a well-deserved reputation as one of the United Nations' most effective field officers and troubleshooters. He also recognized that the support and involvement of the United States was crucial to the success of almost any significant U.N. undertaking.
I knew Vieira de Mello well, and thought enough of him to agree to become his chief of staff at the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva, a position to which he had planned to return in October 2003. My admiration for this exceptional public servant was shared by the Bush administration, which had lobbied Secretary-General Annan to send him to Iraq.
Of course, Vieira de Mello was not about to act as an agent of the United States. He and his staff pressed the obvious point that an independent and influential U.N. presence in Iraq would serve the cause of peace and stability by diminishing the Iraqis' sense of humiliation at the U.S. occupation, and by persuading reluctant governments around the world to join the effort.
But President Bush was apparently unconvinced. While he continued to speak about a vital role for the United Nations, his senior advisers, from National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice to Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, were signaling that the president had no intention of relinquishing control of the political process leading to an Iraqi interim government.
Thus, Vieira de Mello was reduced to the role of lobbyist to the Coalition Provisional Authority and its administrator, L. Paul Bremer III. And while he scored some important successes in broadening the composition and the role of the interim Iraqi Governing Council, he could not dispel the notion that the body was a creation of U.S. occupation authorities.
The Aug. 19 attack on U.N. headquarters may have sounded the death knell for serious international engagement in Iraq under any circumstances. But we will never know, as the Bush administration failed to involve others in decision-making in a way that would have given them a sense of responsibility for success and a strong willingness to persevere in the face of adversity.
Instead, the administration's posture gave the upper hand to those governments and U.N. bureaucrats who see U.S. hegemony as a greater threat to international peace than the likes of Saddam Hussein, and who argue that Iraq is, and should remain, an American problem. This has greatly complicated the current U.S. effort to resurrect a role for the United Nations as Iraq approaches elections, and it is unclear whether the administration will achieve the burden-sharing it now belatedly seeks.
Whatever the result of current administration efforts, this will not be the last time that the United States needs the help of others in a post-war environment. The least we can do is to learn from our errors.
In short, if we expect the United Nations and the rest of the world to help us fix broken states, we must be prepared from the start to share responsibility for the critical decisions that impact how the process will unfold. By endorsing that simple proposition, U.S. officials will help to ensure that future postwar engagements are far more successful, and promote cooperation with U.S. friends and allies.
Eric Schwartz was the senior White House adviser on U.N. affairs between 1998 and 2001, and is now a visiting lecturer of public and international affairs at Princeton University (eschwart@princeton.edu). He recently served as director of the independent Task Force on Post-War Iraq sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations.
Email
This report argues that the United States must lead with domestic action on climate change and proposes a U.S. negotiating strategy for a global UN climate agreement that includes commitments from all major economies, while also promoting a less formal Partnership for Climate Cooperation that would focus the world's largest emitters on implementing aggressive emissions reductions.
This Task Force report examines changes in Latin America and in U.S. influence there, while taking account of the region's enduring importance to the United States. The Task Force offers an agenda for U.S. policy toward Latin America and identifies four critical areas that should provide the basis of a new U.S. approach.
