NATO in Iraq? by Sean Kay

NATO in Iraq? But Not Yet

By Sean Kay (Aug. 26, 2003)

(This article first appeared in the Toronto Globe and Mail.)

The United States is suffering severely from George W. Bush's failure to establish a true multilateral coalition, with international legitimacy, for the war and its aftermath in Iraq. As one soldier on average dies each day, and as the costs of the Iraqi engagement are doubling, Washington has begun to hear a bipartisan call for bringing NATO into the management of Iraq.

This summer, the Senate voted 97-0 to urge President Bush to "consider requesting formally and expeditiously that NATO raise a force for deployment in postwar Iraq similar to what it has done in Afghanistan, Bosnia, and Kosovo." Last week, in a letter to the White House, two key members of the Senate foreign relations committee, Senator Joseph Biden, a Democrat, and Charles Hagel, a Republican, said that bombings -- of pipelines and of United Nations headquarters in Baghdad -- proved the "urgent need to recruit additional military and police forces from other countries, particularly from our NATO allies, to improve the precarious security situation."

While NATO would do well in planning and generating multilateral forces for troop deployment, there is little to suggest that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is the right tool for managing Iraq. The problem facing U.S. forces in Iraq is that the military is overstretched in both civilian police operations and a reconstruction that the army and marines are not trained to manage. Besides, NATO's record in this sphere is also limited: Nearly eight years after NATO deployed into Bosnia-Herzegovina, indicted war criminals continue to roam freely.

A NATO engagement would internationalize the existing problem but would not solve the dilemma of how to build stability in Iraq. Indeed, the European Union has far better civilian police and infrastructure capacities, and has a proven track record of training police forces via multilateral programs.

Other problems with the option of involving NATO include distracting it from its nascent mission in Afghanistan and shifting command influence away from the U.S. Central Command where considerable Middle East experience exists. It would also grant political leverage to Turkey, a NATO member, over the Kurdish areas of Northern Iraq.

There is also no guarantee that all of Washington's Canadian and European allies will achieve the required consensus for a NATO mission in Iraq. Having had their opinions discarded by the Bush administration before the war, it seems unlikely that key allies in Europe will embrace a NATO mission in Iraq if the primary objective is to legitimize the U.S. occupation and provide for cost sharing. What Canadian or European leader would line up to spend money on Iraq and have their troops shot at -- yet have no say in the future direction of Iraq?

In turning to NATO, the United States would have to cede political and economic gains to those allies, such as Canada and France who initially chose to sit out the war.

So, despite the Senate's support of the idea, many U.S. officials give the NATO question low priority. Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld recently testified that he did not know whether NATO had been consulted on Iraq. Stubbornly holding onto the unilateral moment, the Bush administration appears incapable of making the strategic shift that is necessary to bring allies truly into the Iraqi equation. Indeed, turning to NATO would suggest the prewar assumptions that key decision makers had about a postinvasion Iraq were, in fact, wrong.

As Canada's leaders well know, NATO needs to be returned to a position of greater relevance in international politics. Indeed, Finance Minister John Manley would make a great contribution to NATO should he become the organization's next secretary-general. However, the idea that turning to NATO now would be some kind of resolution to the United State's Iraq problem is a false promise.

NATO will become relevant to Iraq when it is part of a general rethinking of U.S. foreign policy priorities. Without that, key allies such as Canada should reinforce to Washington the idea that a comprehensive solution to the United States's growing Iraq problem can only be attained by handing over lead responsibility to the United Nations and engaging the European Union for police training and infrastructure reconstruction -- while making the NATO allies equal partners in political and military planning for Iraq's future.

Until then, NATO is better left to finish the jobs it started in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo, and those that it is only just beginning to undertake in Afghanistan.

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