How come no one seems to call for a UN Peacekeeping force in Iraq?

[Phoebe Loosinhouse]

I don't recall anyone offering this up and it seems such an obvious solution. If it has devolved into a civil war, wouldn't it be a lot like Bosnia?

[BlueJac]

1. Bush doesn't want that..........

PNAC has a plan and GW Bush must stick to it. Iran next then Syria.

[Phoebe Loosinhouse]

3. But what about our current Congress critters and our candidates? nt.

[Bobbieo]

5. Is the UN Interested???

[PresidentObama]

2. Peacekeeping?

Sorry, Bush isn't interested.

[Kagemusha]

4. The UN doesn't have those kinds of resources

the US has made damned sure of that.

It's physically impossible.

[Mojambo]

6. Doesn't there need to be a peace to keep? n/t

[TheCowsCameHome]

7. No outside force can bring peace to Iraq. It's too far gone.

If Iraqis won't do it, no one can.

[babylonsister]

8. I think the idea was floated but the UN deemed it too dangerous. nt

[sam sarrha]

9. nothing can save Iraq.. NOTHING.. we F*cked it up for ever..

[Eugene]

10. The last UN operation in Iraq had its HQ blown up and its chief killed.

The US is calling for the UN to come back and help secure Iraq in the interests
of regional stability. However the Iraqi civil war is a US-made mess in which
Bush and Rumsfeld initially refused UN input. Don't hold your breath for a
UN rescue.

As other posters have already said, for peacekeeping to work, there first has
to be a peace to keep. Peacekeepers don't march in and shut down wars in progress.

[IndianaGreen]

13. The UN is not liked in Iraq by either Shia or Sunni

The UN is seen as responsible for the suffering caused by sanctions and by onerous reparations imposed on Iraq.

Few Iraqis cried when the UN mission was blown to bits.

[jaysunb]

11. A regional coalition is the only hope...

Syria,Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran Jordan and Turkey. They hold the key to any peace & security that can be had at this point.

[Phoebe Loosinhouse]

12. And then Iraq gets carved up like Berlin after WWII

and i'm not necessarily saying that's a bad thing. Iraq was a made up nation in the first place.

[kenny blankenship]

14. No peace to keep. UN peacekeeping forces don't do counterinsurgency

and besides nobody would want to pour the lives of their soldiers down the drain like that: it's political suicide for leaders in most countries with smaller resources than we have. If there were a UN force to take the place of the US/UK allowing us to get out, that UN force would take much higher casualties since it would lack technological resources to command the battlefield and to stand-off from guerilla opponents and reduce them with air power. There is a reason the US is spending more than the rest of the western nations' defense budgets combined on its military. We have toys that no one else has and we have them in numbers that no one else has. I'd rather we spent our money differently but no one listens to me. If there was UN force to replace us it would have to fight the "enemy" in Iraq on a much more equal footing than we do, which means it would be a slaughter with much higher casualties for the "peacekeeper" side and also much higher casualties for the Iraqi civilians caught in the lotech, grabasstic crossfire.

And besides, the UN rightly regards this mess as totally the doing of the United States, why should they get stuck with the impossible task of cleaning up? It's not like they're rolling in dough over there with no humanitarian relief priorities elsewhere in the world.

And besides, even though the UN looks at Iraq as an American mess, the people who're shooting at us in Iraq view the UN as a prime accomplice of the United States. To the extent that the Americans have had any international legal cover to make the Iraqi people suffer the way we have done (for the past 15 years!) the United Nations has been the rubber stamp allowing us to do it. The UN Security Council is the body granting authorization and cover for that harassment and invasion. The fact that the UN Security Council refused to grant new sanctions for an invasion of Iraq and regime change doesn't matter much to Iraqis since it was the Security Council resolutions that had already passed which Bush used to harass Saddam Hussein over his long dismantled weapons programs and which Bush claimed gave him all the legal authorization he required in order to press on with regime change and invasion. Did the UN Security Council contradict Bush? No it would not. It was the UN which applied strangulating economic sanctions against Iraq for more than 10 years prior to the invasion. It was the UN, through its weapons inspectors, which refused to contradict the United States' propaganda concerning WMDs in Iraq. The UN could find nothing more but, with war looming on the horizon, the UN refused to declare that Iraq had been disarmed. The most they would do to contradict the US was to ask for more time to inspect. So there is no love for the United Nations in Iraq. Indeed, the first major act of the Sunni insurgency was to bomb the shit out of the newly created UN relief mission compound, killing the head of the UN mission. They'll be equally happy to kill representatives of the UN as Americans, and probably even more so since UN personnel will be much easier to get at.

The only thing obvious about Iraq is that there is no obvious solution that can come from outside, geographically or from outside the medieval consciousness that still reigns over the vast majority of Iraq's inhabitants. They will sort this out the Iraqi way, and I'm afraid we won't be able to understand that or stomach it.

[blm]

15. Kerry did in 2003-4, stabilize Iraq so UN and NATO forces could takeover and

US could quickly stop the perception of OCCUPATION which would relieve most of the tensions and apprehension of the Iraqi people.

That would have worked in 2005, but no way would UN and NATO go in now - not without some MAJOR DIPLOMACY with the insurgent forces included.

[LWolf]

16. Kucinich did in '03/'04, and has updated that plan for '07:

<snip>

Prepare an international security and peacekeeping force to move in, replacing US troops who then return home. The UN has an indispensable role to play here, but cannot do it as long as the US is committed to an occupation. The UN is the only international organization with the ability to mobilize and the legitimacy to authorize troops.

The UN is the place to develop the process, to build the political consensus, to craft a political agreement, to prepare the ground for the peacekeeping mission, to implement the basis of an agreement that will end the occupation and begin the transition to international peacekeepers. This process will take at least three months from the time the US announces the intention to end the occupation.

http://www.kucinich.us