President Bush has wisely bitten the bullet and asked for help in Iraq from the United Nations. But he still lacks a clear strategy for restoring sovereignty to the Iraqi people so that U.S. troops can eventually leave.
The most interesting plan I've heard for this political transition comes from Ghassan Salame, a Lebanese political scientist who was senior political adviser to the U.N.'s chief in Iraq, Sergio Vieira de Mello, and who narrowly escaped when Vieira de Mello was killed by a truck bomb on Aug. 19.
Salame said in an interview yesterday that France, Russia and other members of the Security Council will probably support a new U.N. resolution calling for a multinational force in Iraq under U.S. command. This U.N.-sponsored force will help stabilize Iraq, but Salame argues there must also be a rapid devolution of political power to the Iraqis. He wants to replace U.S. civil administrator Paul Bremer not with a U.N. substitute but with Iraqi sovereignty.
Security will remain the crucial issue in Iraq, and the addition of U.N. troops to handle routine peacekeeping will allow the U.S. military to concentrate on the harder task of fighting the Iraqi terrorist resistance. But foreign troops won't put this shattered nation back together. That's the importance of Salame's plan, which he stressed is personal rather than a U.N. proposal.
Salame's basic argument is that Iraqis have to take more responsibility for their country, and the only way to achieve this goal is to give them the political power they have been demanding. To that end, Salame proposes that three steps be taken immediately:
• First, a provisional government should be created. The easiest way to do this would be to merge the existing Governing Council and cabinet. The two 25-member interim bodies are duplicative, with the heads of key political factions sitting on the council and their deputies typically serving as ministers. The merged body would be reduced to 20 to 25 people, and the United Nations would then recognize it as Iraq's legitimate government.
"The present political situation is not tenable," says Salame. Instead of "creeping" gradually toward eventual Iraqi control, America and its allies should agree to "go straight to the Iraqis."
• Second, Iraq should quickly regain control of its national budget, so that the provisional government is forced to make hard decisions about where to spend limited money.
Rather than give Iraqis this power of the purse, the United Nations is currently planning to replace its cumbersome "oil for food" program with a jury-rigged "development fund." Bremer would sign checks, in consultation with a monitoring group drawn from international organizations such as the World Bank.
But if Iraqis controlled the budget, they would have to negotiate the compromises that are the essence of politics. Instead of blithely calling for 1,500 new schools, as the interim Governing Council recently did, the new provisional government would have to set priorities.
• Third, a constitutional conference should begin work now on a document that will provide a democratic political structure for the new Iraq. Its membership should include the 25 members of the constitutional committee already named, plus another 100 or so members to be selected by the provisional government. The goal would be to have a new constitution ready for a nationwide referendum in January, with elections to follow in March or April.
Salame, whom I first met more than 20 years ago in Beirut in the last, convulsive stages of the Lebanese civil war, says he is worried that in its efforts to stabilize Iraq, the United States is turning back the clock by transferring power to tribal and religious leaders.
"It's a Lebanization of Iraq, and I regret that," he says. "The country is becoming less secular, and reverting to its old cleavages." He hopes the new constitution will not mirror Lebanon's religious spoils system but will create something more modern and stable.
Bush swallowed his pride this week and admitted that the United States doesn't have the resources, financial or military, to go it alone in Iraq. He was acceding to pressure from his uniformed military, and also to reality. Hoping for the best simply wasn't a strategy.
As Salame notes, long-term U.S. administration of Iraq would require perhaps 10,000 civilians -- an unimaginable financial and military burden. So in that sense, Bush may not have an alternative to the kind of devolution Salame suggests.
What makes Salame's proposals compelling is that they are quick and clean, and they place responsibility where it has always belonged, with the Iraqi people themselves. To those who wonder if the United States can risk moving so fast, Salame would probably answer: Can it risk moving more slowly?
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