Global Policy Forum

By Martin Woollacott

It may not be too much to say that the shape of the postwar world and not just of postwar Iraq could be decided in that country once the fighting is over. Iraq could be the site of a partial reconciliation between the United States and its alienated (former) allies, between America and the United Nations, between Americans and Arabs, and, not least, between America's and Britain's rather different purposes in evicting Saddam Hussein by force.

Or it could be the place where the divergence of interest and policy evident in the period before the war is confirmed and deepened. The most immediate issue is the role of the UN in Iraq, and at Camp David tomorrow the prime minister, Tony Blair, will almost certainly be trying to persuade President Bush to agree to talk positively in public, if probably rather vaguely, about such a role. Mr Bush is under pressure from people inside and outside the administration who want to keep the UN out.

Yet he may also see that the UN might be the only "exit strategy" for a US military that does not want to stay in Iraq as a peacekeeping force in any strength, even though, paradoxically, it wants bases there, and for an American civilian mission that may not be able to manage Iraq's difficult politics on its own. Also, after the war, according to Bill Maynes, head of the Eurasia Foundation - a liberal Washington think-tank - "the preference of ordinary Americans for working with allies may reassert itself", and a distaste for going it alone in Iraq may show itself in the polls. For all these reasons Mr Bush will want to keep his options open, but without committing himself at this stage. Mr Blair, on the other hand, needs the UN to the fore now to reassure both his critics and supporters in Britain and as a way of mending fences with France and Germany.

At a deeper level the question is whether Mr Blair's belief in the international institutions at whose head the UN stands will be accommodated by the more pragmatic elements in the Bush administration, or whether the ideologues will prevail. It comes down to the basic question of how Iraq is to be run. A tripartite system for the governance of Iraq has already been created by the Americans. It is unlike any which has been put in place in post-conflict situations in recent years. In Cambodia, East Timor, Bosnia, and Kosovo peacekeeping - the military component - was in the hands of an internationally endorsed force drawn from many countries.

In Iraq that force will be overwhelmingly American, with some Britons and perhaps some troops from other countries which have supported America over the war. In those other territories, a multinational civil administration was established, while the Americans have created a purely American team, headed by retired army general Jay Garner. No jobs for Britons are included in it, probably neither offered nor desired. Finally, in the other territories, the UN agencies and the major non-governmental organisations were the main organisers of aid and reconstruction, while in Iraq commercial firms, so far only American, are bidding for contracts not only for roads, bridges, power plants, water treatment but apparently even for some aspects of political reconstruction, such as the reconstitution of local government. This combination of military occupation, pro-consular administration, and corporate reconstruction is, however, not supposed to continue unalloyed for more than a couple of months.

That is why attention is focusing on the next stage - the partial handover of power to Iraqis, and at the same time, an attempt to agree on a role for the UN. The main behind-the-scenes battle in Washington this week has been between those who want to draw most members of an interim Iraq administration from the leaders of the Iraqi National Congress and those who want an assembly of representatives from all the Iraqi regions to choose such an administration. It is a classic post-liberation conflict between insiders and outsiders and between different groups of both, and it also raises the question of the participation of supposedly "clean" elements of President Saddam's military, police and civil service.

But this phase will also involve, as Thomas Carothers, of the Carnegie Endowment says, an encounter between those who want nothing to do with the security council and those "who can see the UN as a very handy thing enabling us to partially disengage". Yet, as another Washington expert put it, "it is hard to overestimate the sheer bloody minded nationalism of some of these people". Nor would the UN be a passive third party to such an argument in Washington. Jan Kavan, president of the general assembly, says that the security council would have to be convinced that the UN was being given a substantial and honourable role. The US administration is not divided on the need to have the dominant voice in post-Saddam Iraq. But it is divided on the means of doing so, and trapped in many unresolved contradictions. The armed forces want as little peacekeeping as they can get away with, yet the Pentagon wants to re-base its Middle Eastern forces from Saudi Arabia to Iraq.

The administration does not want to pay huge sums, on top of the astonishing $75bn requested for the war this week, to run Iraq, yet knows that taking the money out of Iraq's oil revenues would be politically counterproductive. The anti-UN crowd want the world body kept out of Iraq except for humanitarian work on the fringes. Yet the US state department knows that the UN would bring some legitimacy, Mr Bush knows that the road to other people's money lies through the UN, and that his faithful ally Mr Blair needs the UN to be in Iraq as a partner and not as a servant. The issue can be juggled while the war takes centre stage, but it cannot be for long avoided, and it has the potential to break the bond between the two leaders.

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