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Analysis: Battles ahead over U.N. role
By CNN European Political Editor Robin Oakley
LONDON, England (CNN) -- The decision by the U.S., the UK and Spain to promote a new jumbo U.N. resolution calling for an end to economic sanctions against Iraq now the Saddam Hussein regime has been removed and to define a political role there for the U.N. is a calculated risk. Nothing divides the U.S. and most of Europe more than precisely how big a role the UN should play in post-conflict Iraq. Although George Bush and Tony Blair have talked repeatedly of making it a "vital" one, EU nations suspect the U.S. in particular of wanting to palm off the U.N. with little more than a humanitarian aid function. Jonathan Eyal from the Royal United Services Institute in London told CNN: "The decision to put through the resolution is just an attempt to see how far opponents of the U.S. are prepared to go. Are we going to witness the kind of paralysis we've seen in the United Nations before the war or are ultimately the French and Russians going to accept a deal? No one knows for the moment." There have been some signs of a thaw between the allies who took Baghdad and the nations who opposed the war. French President Jacques Chirac, for example, sent Tony Blair six bottles of 1989 Mouton Rothschild claret, worth more than $2,000, for his 50th birthday this week. His de fence minister Michele Alliot-Marie has expressed her worries about media campaigns against the French in the U.S. and said that more must be done to recreate understanding between the two nations. The Russians, like the French, have publicly accepted a need for the rest of the world to be "pragmatic" in order to end the suffering of the Iraqi people. But there was no deal when Blair went to see President Vladimir Putin to ask him to drop his insistence that U.N. inspectors should go back to Iraq before sanctions were ended. Instead Putin publicly mocked Blair for the coalition's failure to find any weapons of mass destruction. Some "Old Europe" leaders have been irritated anew by the decision to hand control of a sector of Iraq to Poland, one of the "New Europe" nations which backed the US. They see in that decision the hand of U.S. De fence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Significantly the ever-diplomatic EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana has been warning the U.S. not to seek to divide Europe but to treat it as a whole. Different voices must be heard, he says, not ostracized or punished. Even those in Europe who think that Jacques Chirac has overdone his America-baiting have been alarmed to hear the moderate U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell argue that France will have to face "serious consequences" over its stance on Iraq. And EU chiefs have been worried too by a U.S. State Department official who began talking of the advantages of "disaggregating" the EU. Or, in other words, dividing and ruling. Greater EU unity has been a U.S. cause for 30 years and more. Beside the traditional EU/US tensions, another difficulty looms for the coalition partners. Poland's Foreign Minister Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz insists his country wants a U.N. mandate for any stabilization force. He told CNN "We believe that to be very important. There are legal elements and also political consequences. We're among those European countries that believes the U.N. should play an important part." But diplomats who've seen the resolution say it doesn't deal with the stabilization force, and that could lead to still more argument. French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin argues that any force operating without a U.N. mandate will do so in a legal vacuum. The other key point is made by Jonathan Eyal. He says: "Some of the key European countries which opposed the war -- France, Germany, Russia -- view the creation of the force as just about the last opportunity they have of influencing the U.S. Everyone knows that if the force is created and it happens then nobody would have much influence over the American troops who remain on the ground." Once the sanctions have been removed from Iraq, once the stabilization force has been set up, there will no longer be any need for the U.S. to consult anybody again on Iraq. Which is likely to mean that those eager to play a role in the region in the future will be arguing plenty before they let through any resolution.
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