Gwynne Dyer: Waiting game US will lose

"The French Foreign Minister ... said he was not completely satisfied with the resolution but supported it in the interests of 'unity of the international community'. Translation: we give up, you're bigger than we are."

That was how the Los Angeles Times greeted last Thursday's United Nations Security Council resolution recognising American control of Iraq.

But it isn't quite that simple.

The debate in the Security Council before the war was not about whether President George W. Bush should attack Iraq. He was obviously determined to do that anyway.

It was about whether the UN system would be more damaged by defying American power and risking a US boycott, or by cynical complicity in an attack that most members saw as unjustified.

Eleven out of 15 members, including all the major powers except the US and Britain - decided to take the risk and defy Washington.

That didn't stop the war, but they got away with it, more or less.

Bush no longer takes phone calls from French President Jacques Chirac, but he will be at the G8 summit meeting in France this week and smile with Chirac for the cameras - and the US and Britain have already had to go back to the Security Council to get some legitimacy for their occupation of Iraq.

Once again, the question for the other Security Council members was how to minimise the damage to the UN.

Should they grant the invasion a kind of post-dated legality by ending the UN sanctions against Iraq and recognising the occupying powers as legitimate so that they could get on with selling Iraq's oil, rebuilding the shattered economy and creating some sort of government?

Or should they stonewall, and push the Bush Administration into an outright rejection of the UN's authority?

Put it that way, and the answer was obvious. The Security Council members had to swallow their principles and give the US what it wanted.

But how deeply does the United Nations want to get involved in Iraq?

On the surface, it seemed to be demanding serious authority over Iraq, in which case it was almost entirely unsuccessful.

The oil-for-food programme will end in six months rather than four, giving Russia more time to be paid on existing contracts, and the UN "special co-ordinator" in Iraq has been upgraded to "special representative" - like being promoted from head janitor to building maintenance supervisor.

But there is no timetable for the process of giving Iraq back to the Iraqis, nor any UN veto over how it unfolds, nor even a commitment to let UN arms inspectors return. Game, set and match to the US.

But hang on a minute. Were the Russians and French and Germans and Chinese really all itching to send troops - and money - to Iraq to share the load that the US and Britain have chosen to bear?

The reality is quite different. Most Security Council members see the US occupation of Iraq as a disastrous mistake that will probably end by destroying the Bush Administration.

Six weeks after the end of the fighting, basic services have not been restored in much of Iraq, no-go areas are proliferating in Baghdad and other cities, plans to create an Iraqi transitional government within a month or two have been scrapped, and the first American proconsul has already been fired and sent home.

It may be only a matter of months before armed resistance to the American occupation begins.

Why would France or Germany want to send troops into that? Why would Russia or China want the UN to take responsibility for it?

The default position would be to say to the US and Britain (and Australia and Poland) "You made your bed. You lie in it."

The reason they don't is that they all know there will be a post-Bush US at some point, and it will be necessary to persuade Americans (who will probably be feeling battered and unloved by then) to come back to the UN system.

So don't alienate American public opinion, which remains doubtful about the Bush Administration project to destroy the existing international system. Don't stand on legality, and don't give the US hawks an excuse to abandon the UN entirely.

The more you can limit the damage now, the less you have to rebuild later.

It's a holding operation based on the assumption that the Bush Administration has fatally overreached itself in Iraq, or will do so in the next war.

The UN is not finished. It couldn't stop the US invasion of Iraq, but it has gained enormous credit in the 96 per cent of the world that is not American by its refusal to go along with it.

And it still has a lot of support in the US - after all, Americans practically invented the UN.

Herald Feature: Iraq