The Bush Plan - The
The Bush Plan - The first priority, obviously, is winning the war. The second part, the left reminds us ad nauseum, is "winning the peace" (which some on the left remind us we've already lost, but I digress).
Two points:
- Bush has big plans for Iraq, and
- The UN isn't in them
The WSJ
said this:
The Bush plan, as detailed in more than 100 pages of confidential contract documents, would sideline United Nations development agencies and other multilateral organizations that have long directed reconstruction efforts in places such as Afghanistan and Kosovo. The plan also would leave big nongovernmental organizations largely in the lurch: With more than $1.5 billion in Iraq work being offered to private U.S. companies under the plan, just $50 million is so far earmarked for a small number of groups such as CARE and Save the Children.
Watch for the "non-profit community" to squeal like stuck cats over this.
And yet doesn't it make sense? This war is partly being waged over the UN's dead administrative body - why include them? Why would they want to be included?
And since part of the aim of this war is to create a free-market democracy, what sense would it make to entrust the rebuilding of the nation to people who hold free-market democracy in contempt?
Washington is under international pressure to broaden a postwar rebuilding effort, even as it continues to do battle with traditional allies over the merits of launching a war on Iraq. The administration recently has signaled it may seek down the road to give the U.N. and other countries a larger role.
Indeed.
I'd suspect as much. The President's entire approach has been to play good cop/bad cop with the UN and our pricklier "allies".
And the UN can't afford to lose this fight. They have to know how perilously close to irrelevance their opposition to Bush on this war has made them; being counted out of the rebuilding of Iraq might just seal the UN's irrelevance for good.
President Bush, after a one-hour summit in the Azores Islands, said yesterday that if it comes to war he plans to "quickly seek new Security Council resolutions to encourage broad participation in the process of helping the Iraqi people to build a free Iraq."
But U.N. officials said they still have no clear indication how the administration might involve the international body, especially if many of the large rebuilding tasks are already farmed out to U.S. companies directly answerable to Washington.
Hm.
Note to the UN - if you hadn't spent the last six months Blixing up, you might have been able to work on that...
Posted by Mitch at
March 17, 2003 07:12 AM
