Negotiate a US exit from Iraq

The United Nations must lead the effort to broker an orderly withdrawal.

from the June 14, 2007 edition

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Who needs to be involved in negotiating this agreement? Iran, evidently, along with all of Iraq's other neighbors. Beyond that, the relevant Iraqi parties need to be involved, for it is only the Iraqi political and military organizations that can assure the US forces' safe exit from, and transit through, their own home turfs.

Can the presently constituted Iraqi government speak for all Iraqis in this? Given its current low standing with the Iraqi citizenry and its chronic dysfunctionality, I think not. Other Iraqi parties and movements need also to be involved.

So how can these two required levels of negotiation – international and intra-Iraqi – be convened? Kissinger, the authors of the Iraq Study Group report, and many others seem to assume that the US will be able to convene the needed negotiations.

I beg to differ. The US is itself too much a party to the many-layered conflicts in Iraq to have the political and diplomatic credibility to run these negotiations. For this reason, since early 2004 I have urged an approach similar to the one used by South Africa when it faced a very similar challenge in Namibia in 1988-89: It called in the United Nations.

I realize the UN has many organizational flaws. It also suffers from the deep distrust of many Iraqis. But there is no other organization that has the global legitimacy, political credibility, and institutional capacity that this job requires.

Any orderly US withdrawal from Iraq requires a leading role from the United Nations. It also requires a more capable and empowered UN than the one we see today, and this requires that the whole US political system undertake a serious recommitment both to the world body and to the egalitarian global values it embodies.

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