Well, what a strange turn of events we are now seeing in the good old US of A. The gameplan for conquering and controlling Iraq is beginning to fray at the seams. Everything was cosy in the White House kitchen as long as the US public was willing to buy into the idea that the momentum of war was progressive. But once the initial conflict was over, that was never going to be sustained. To say that there was a miscalculation is to understate it wildly. No one in the US administration foresaw that in a post-war situation the army would become so badly bogged down, the situation so intrinsically fraught. And no one in Washington seems to have worked out what the exit strategy was going to be, especially in the event that things did get sticky.

The assumption of the military planners was that once Saddam had been ousted, taking control of the country would be a shoo-in. The oil reserves would pay for the reconstruction of Iraq, American style, and leave a few billion a year in excess to cover the US oil barons for their trouble in helping to extract the black gold. And Iraq would be established effectively as an American protectorate and ally in the region. Nice.
However, that analysis failed miserably to understand either the hostility to the US that is endemic in the region, or the scale of the operation required to police a country the size of Iraq, and with a population of 23 million. As a result, the US army has been meeting increasing opposition from guerilla forces. They have responded badly, killing innocent civilians in a series of incidents that have further alienated ordinary citizens of Iraq from their self-styled ‘liberators’. And they have generally shown themselves to be ill-equipped for the task that they have have had thrust upon them.

The US soldiers on the ground in Iraq are becoming restless. There is a whiff of insubordination, bordering on mutiny, in the air. The US media, which had given the Bush administration a free ride in the build-up to war has begun to turn. The Washington Post, for one, has taken up the cudgels, picking up on the theme of the BBC story about Tony Blair and his advisors in the UK, and accusing the White House of sexing up the case for war against Saddam Hussein. Why they didn’t get the picture earlier is a mystery – but now that the cat is out of the bag, the pressure on Bush and his cronies is mounting.
With a request for another 60 billion dollars to support the war effort going before Congress, it is no longer possible to maintain the illusion that there is an end in sight – and as a result George Bush is suffering at the polls. In this altered climate, the lies, distortions and misrepresentations that had been successfully fed to the American public are being revealed as just that. Against this backdrop, George Bush has been forced to do what six months ago would have been the unthinkable: he has gone to the UN for help.
Consistent with the scorn shown by many of his advisors for the United Nations, the resolution which the Bush administration has tabled there is an insulting one, that would require a United Nations peace-keeping force to operate under US command. But it is not entirely outside the bounds of possibility that it will be accepted.
If it is, we could yet see Irish troops being deployed in Iraq in an attempt to keep the peace in what will be a thoroughly volatile danger zone over the next two to three years (or maybe even longer). It is, therefore, anything but an academic issue for us.

The current talk is that the UN is open to discussion in relation to the resolution. France, Russia and Germany, we are told, are likely to play hardball with Bush in order to extract concessions. The target for them, it seems, is a to have greater involvement in carving up the contracts for the reconstruction project – and doubtless also to have a say in how Iraq’s oil is exploited in the long run. Noble objectives, indeed, you’d have to say.
Well, the right response would be for the UN to tell the US – and Britain – to shove it. The gall of Bush, and doubtless Blair is at the same game, asking the UN now to share the cost and the burden – not to mention the danger – of clearing up the mess created by them in Iraq, while accepting a subordinate role, is staggering. The US and Britain went to war without the required UN mandate. They did so on grounds that have subsequently been revealed to be almost entirely spurious. They should be left to stew in it.
Why should the international community come to the rescue of George Bush, with an election campaign looming in the US? Why should they cone to the rescue of Tony Blair at a time of political crisis for him?
Bush’s purpose in going to the UN is to cut the commitment that is required of the US in money terms. On the basis of his record, he doesn’t deserve any help whatsoever in this. Let the American people see just how wrong-headed the grotesque piece of adventurism into which he led them was. Let them know that they will have to pay for it themselves. Let them be aware that if they want their army to continue to stay in Iraq, and to influence events there, any lives that will be lost will be those of US soldiers. Ditto for Tony Blair.
Is there not a humanitarian issue? And what about the Iraqi people? I am not convinced that anything good would come of a UN involvement, in collusion with the US. The likelihood is that Iraqi guerillas will fight on, and that the army or armies charged with the peace-keeping mission will suffer casualties. The feeling in Iraq and in much of the middle east region is now passionately anti-American; that could easily turn into a more generalised anti-’Western’ sentiment that would see any UN force being defined as friends of America and as enemies of Islam.
There is no positive way forward from a catastrophic miscalculation of this kind, but the best one would be for the US and Britain to withdraw – and to agree to pay the price of whatever re-construction package might be put in place without their involvement. The road ahead will be a difficult one, no matter what. But the situation might be easier to negotiate, and to manage, if George Bush, Tony Blair and their henchmen (and women) were out of the picture. That’s what the UN should be looking for.
And it is the position that the Irish government should support.