Europe balks at Iraq bailout

As France and the United States dig in on opposite sides of the central question hanging over Iraq's future - who should control the country - Washington stands almost no chance of winning broad European support for its new UN Security Council resolution, analysts and officials here say.

America's suggestion that UN members should send troops to Iraq and that the world body could do more there, clearly offers outsiders only a supporting role. "The lead role has to be played by the United States," US Secretary of State Colin Powell insisted on NBC Sunday. "We have governing responsibility."

That clashes directly with European opinion. "There is a deep conviction in Europe that if you keep a dominant American role in Iraq, the stabilization effort will not work ... because of the constant flavor of an occupation force," says Christoph Betram, head of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs in Berlin. "A dominant role for the UN is the essential condition for getting things right in Iraq."

It is hard to see how even the intense backroom horse-trading expected over the next ten days can bridge that chasm of principle. "The Americans are not going to let go of Paul Bremer's primacy, so that essentially makes it impossible for Europeans to join in," says Francois Heisbourg, director of the Strategic Research Foundation in Paris, referring to the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority that runs Iraq.

But France, along with the other permanent Security Council members which opposed the war - Russia and China - are unlikely to veto the US resolution, observers here say. Anxious not to repeat the bruising diplomatic battle that preceded the war, they would probably abstain.

That would give Washington its resolution, but without the wide international endorsement that potential but nervous troop donors such as India are seeking before risking their troops' lives. Nor would such a resolution encourage skeptical European nations to contribute financially to Iraq's reconstruction, or to send experts to help train policemen, judges, and the other pillars of a safe society.

Behind the disagreement pitting Washington against Paris and Berlin today lies the same divergence of views over America's place in the world that set President Bush against some of his closest European allies before the war.

The fate of the UN resolution, "depends partly on the Europeans, but also on the neo-conservatives in America" occupying important posts in the Pentagon and the White House, says Georges LeGuelte, head of research at the Institute for International and Strategic Relations in Paris.

"So long as they defend the idea that the US is all-powerful and can impose its will by all means, including military, so long as they are not ready to give up the idea that Iraq is their terrain, we will get nowhere," he argues.

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