The UN is hardly well placed to step into an Iraq that it was complicit in ruining. The time is now for it to renew its legitimacy by addressing the issues independently of conquering powers, writes Ayman El-Amir* The United Nations has long been viewed as a safety net where international crises could land softly rather than crash in on the world. The world body is still a net but with holes that are sometimes big enough to pass an elephant. The Anglo-American invasion of Iraq is a good example of how the world body can be, and has been, manipulated to pass a behemoth of a war through a loophole of seeming international legitimacy. It is a good reason to view with caution the prospective role being coined for the United Nations in Iraq, after the Coalition Provisional Authority hands over power by the end of June. It is true that the United Nations did not authorise the war, denying the coalition forces legitimacy and indirectly giving cause to the daily resistance and bomb attacks that are slowly decimating Iraq. It did not broker a peace either. It served merely as the playground of the big powers where the case of Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) was stage-directed, played and over-dramatised. Everyone then, including the United Nations secretary- general himself, lent to the case against Iraq. The Security Council adopted a stringent resolution in November 2002 warning Iraq of "serious consequences" if it did not reveal to the world its cache of WMD. This was a big enough hole in the net for the Anglo-American coalition to invade Iraq. When that invasion was completed and Saddam Hussein toppled, US President George W Bush said the coalition had "enforced the will of the United Nations", regardless of whether the community of nations wanted the war against Iraq or not. Today, senior officials of the Bush administration are quarrelling over who misled whom about those weapons which, according to Chief US Weapons Inspector David Kay were not there anyway. Iraq lay in ruins as the name of the game changed from ridding the country of WMD to ridding it of Saddam Hussein. Good enough cause, but was it worth the price the Iraqis are paying? One year after the overthrow of the regime of Saddam Hussein Iraq is chaotic. Bloodletting violence, insecurity, unemployment, lack of essential services and political uncertainty are so far the hallmark of post- Saddam Iraq. Daily killing of Iraqis, coalition forces and foreigners is now a way of life in the country. Reports this week that the Shia majority is launching an uprising against foreign military occupation is a grave premonition. Iraq has not only become the melting pot of terrorism, it has also ignited a near-global war of terrorism, running from Spain to Uzbekistan, and acting up again in Afghanistan. The provisional constitution signed by the Iraqi Governing Council on 1 March has yet to make its presence felt in the day-to-day lives of Iraqis. The "coalition of the willing" is preparing to declare victory and leave the messy scene to the United Nations to pick up the pieces. Not a very happy mission assignment. The United Nations could not have overthrown Saddam Hussein's regime; the United States does not have the credibility to build a new order to replace it. So we are back to the Kosovo model where the locals run affairs while KFOR, the NATO military force, watches over and retains the role of eminence grise. But Kosovo's continuing ethnic conflict makes it far from being a model for healing traumatised nations with the potion of foreign military intervention and the United Nations. Iraq and the United Nations are not particularly the best of friends. With 12 years of crippling sanctions, an oil-for-food programme reeking of a corruption scandal reportedly involving senior UN officials and the wreckage of a war in the name of dismantling Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, the return of the world body to the scene to reconstruct and reshape Iraq may well be viewed with scepticism. For the United Nations, it would be a mission fraught with guilt and trepidation. It is still traumatised by the loss of some of its best and brightest in the terrorist attack on UN offices in Baghdad on 18 August 2003. Those high-level representatives were dispatched to Iraq under pressure from Washington on a mission of dubious purpose, without a solid political mandate or a provision of security. To many in the UN, they were placed in a hotbed of violence to paint a veneer of international legality onto a war of choice. Iraq needs the best efforts of the entire United Nations system to transcend its trauma and rebuild its physical and political infrastructure. To regain its credibility and minimise potential dangers to its operations the UN is required to present itself as a true representative of a caring international community, not a surrogate of the forces of invasion and military control. The terms of the UN involvement must be carefully worked out by international consensus, not by the will of the conquerors. Reconstruction is now a priority for Iraq but it cannot take place without a political and electoral framework that could guarantee truly representative and democratic institutions. The United Nations estimates the required framework may take months to prepare and the elections probably a year to organise. It has good technical expertise in this area. But stabilising the explosive situation in the country and charting out a future course of action require all the will the Iraqi people can muster and the support the United Nations can offer. The Anglo-American invasion of Iraq has opened up a Pandora's box in both Iraq and the region. Saddam Hussein has been ousted and arrested, to no one's regret, but a new conflict of competing foreign interests, potential ethnic strife and rampant terrorism is just beginning. For the international community, the story of the invasion of Iraq, its shifting target and the grave consequences it has created in the region has not been its most shining moment. For the United Nations, which has been endowed with the consequences, this is a tough one to crack. * The author The writer is a former correspondent for Al-Ahram in Washington, DC. He also served as director of United Nations Radio and Television in New York.
