Will Hutton: Alone, the US will fail

[T_i_B]

Interesting article from the UK Observer calling for UN involvement
in Iraq. Make of this what you will.

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,1028403,00.html

Even if the UN has been compromised by the role forced on it by the United States, it remains Iraq's last best hope. Those who attacked it revealed their fundamental value system to be breathtakingly at odds with those of common humanity. Their action is a commentary on the pre-Enlightenment barbarity of Islamic terrorism which menaces not just the Middle East but the entire West.

Yet there can be no retreat from Iraq now, whatever your original position on the war, as the French government - the leading critic of going to war - formally recognises. But if the rebuilding of Iraq is to be successful we must be realistic about the scale and duration of the engagement that will be required. As the latest atrocity claims three British lives in Basra, we also need to transform the framework and mindset of waging war to one of how to conduct the peace.

The priorities must be legitimacy, legitimacy and legitimacy; and there is no legitimacy in trying to reconstruct Iraq with the same pre-emptive unilateralism which characterised the launch of the war. The reconstruction must be internationalised as quickly as possible. But internationalisation is a two-way process. The US must give up its pretensions; the rest of the world has to be realistic about the scale of the challenge.

The mismatch between post-war reality and the Pentagon's pre-war reconstruction planning is huge, revealing how ideologically blinkered America's conservative leadership has been. Iraq's reconstruction, believed George Bush, would be analogous to that of post-war Germany and Japan, and could proceed similarly but on more ultra-free market lines.

(snip)

[chiburb]

1. Same guy (Hutton) who wrote:

The American Prosperity Myth (scroll down, its here somewhere).

[T_i_B]

2. You mean this?

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=103&topic_id=7158

If you want more of Hutton the best starting point I can reccomend is his book The world we're in.

As to the article in question, I think the main priority now should be quite simply building a better Iraq. I don't think that the current occupation can do that but on the other hand to withdraw the occupying forces at present would most likely create a huge power vacum that would set Iraq on the road to even worse hardship, possibly even civil war. The UN has the experience and the ability to gather in resources that the US/UK occupation does not and as such I think that we ought to hand over to the UN for the sake of the Iraqi people.

Of course that would involve handing over a lot of control and I cannot see Bush and Blair doing that any time soon, hence I think that if we are going to do anything to really improve Iraq we will most likely have to kick Bush & Blair out of office to do it and replace them with leaders who are prepared to do what is right to improve the lot of the Iraqi people.