Associated Press September 24, 2003
Iraq is biggest 21st century test of 20th century practice
By RICHARD PYLE
The call for United Nations-backed multinational forces to join U.S. troops in Iraq is the 21st century's biggest test of a 20th century practice - the forging of alliances to achieve military, political or humanitarian goals.
From World War II through Korea, Gulf War I and Kosovo, success has been regularly achieved by like-minded nations acting in concert. Numerous brush-fire wars and civil conflicts also were ended by the intervention of forces from several countries under U.N. or other unified command.
"Global challenges also require global solutions, and few indeed are the situations in which the United States or any other country can act completely alone," says Sashi Tharoor, U.N. undersecretary-general for communications and public affairs.
"When American actions seem driven by U.S. national security imperatives alone, partners can prove hard to find - as became clear when, in marked contrast to the first Gulf War, only a small 'coalition of the willing' joined Washington the second time around," Tharoor wrote in the current issue of Foreign Affairs magazine.
While other analysts agree the United States can still act alone against unilateral threats, "it has to be something that poses a 'clear and present danger' to the United States," said retired Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, who led Desert Storm, the 34-nation coalition that drove Iraqi invaders from Kuwait in 1991.
In an interview, Schwarzkopf cited the 1962 Cuban missile crisis and al-Qaida terrorism as examples of such threats. "What al-Qaida did to the World Trade Center, and their rhetoric regarding the U.S., gives us the green light to go ahead with unilateral activities as required," he said.
Patrick Garrett, who studies multinational warfare at the think tank GlobalSecurity.org, said that "if the task is small, the United States can probably act on its own, but if the task is huge, it needs to have some extra support, as it now does in Iraq."
Korea and Gulf War I, where multinational forces were called on to restore a pre-conflict status quo, were "clear examples of aggression that could be identified by everyone," Garrett said.
Schwarzkopf recalled that Desert Storm had "no fewer than seven U.N. mandates to kick the Iraqis out of Kuwait," but any further move against Saddam Hussein would have met resistance from coalition members, especially the Arabs.
Had the United States tried to go that alone, he said, "I'm certain that we would have run into the situation we ran into today. We would have been like the dinosaur in the tar pit."
Now, with a conquered Iraq proving more problematical than expected, the Bush administration seeks a U.N. peacekeeping mandate to strengthen the hand of the 138,000 American and 23,000 other foreign soldiers, and perhaps induce other nations to send forces.
The U.S.-led effort to establish a new order in Baghdad reflects a legacy of military intervention dating back to 1803, when Commodore Stephen Decatur was dispatched to quell the Barbary pirates preying on Mediterranean commerce.
Decatur became an overnight hero on the shores of Tripoli, and later coined a phrase that would guide Americans through two centuries of adventures abroad: "Our country! In her intercourse with foreign nations may she always be in the right; but our country, right or wrong."
Right or wrong, Americans later forced feudal Japan to open its doors, freed Cuba and the Philippines from Spain, and helped install some governments and depose others, chased border bandits and enforced stability from China to Mexico to Haiti to Grenada.
In some cases the United States acted alone, in others it had allies.
When communist North Korea invaded South Korea in June 1950, Washington called for the United Nations' first military intervention, then led the fight to restore the prewar dividing line at the 38th parallel.
In three years of war, U.N. forces from 18 countries suffered 16,000 dead - along with 415,000 South Koreans and 33,000 Americans. Fifty years later, the two Koreas remain technically at war and U.S. troops are still based there under a token U.N. flag.
Intervening a decade later in Vietnam with a handful of allies - South Korea, Australia, New Zealand and Thailand - but no U.N. sanction, the United States lost a war that seared the nation's conscience and left it wary of military adventures with unclear or shifting purpose.
That was manifested in President Reagan's decision to quit Lebanon in 1983 after a truck bomb killed 241 Marines, President Clinton's pullout from Somalia a decade later after 18 Army rangers died in an operation gone wrong, and Clinton's refusal to send ground troops or attack helicopters into Kosovo.
The U.S. humiliations in Lebanon and Somalia were not eased by the fact that France - now at odds with Washington over Iraq - was a key ally in Beirut and lost 58 soldiers in another bombing the same day, or that 24 Pakistani U.N. peacekeepers died in a Somalia ambush.
President Bush recently warned America's enemies not to assume from the examples of Beirut and Somalia "that if you inflict harm on Americans we will run from a challenge."
The truck bomb that killed the senior U.N. envoy in Iraq, Brazilian diplomat Sergio Vieira de Mello, and 22 others last month prompted the United Nations to sharply reduce its Iraq staff, but also spurred U.S. officials to seek U.N. backing for an expanded multinational force.
As in Korea, Vietnam, Kuwait and the former Yugoslavia, the United States would insist on overall command of any such force and be justified in doing so, experts say.
"The key is preponderance of forces - whoever has that, there is no question they should be in command," Schwarzkopf said. He recalled that in Desert Storm, the first President Bush flatly rejected a Saudi demand to command all forces based on its soil.
Former Secretary of State Madeline Albright, a critic of the current president's decision to attack Iraq without full U.N. approval, agreed, saying on television shows Sept. 21 that the United States, with the largest armed component, is entitled to lead.
Being in charge, however, has its limitations, Garrett said.
"The United States is vested in Iraq, with no way to get out. It is there to occupy the country and push it in a certain direction," he said. "Other countries, like Poland, have said their purpose is security, to keep people from killing each other, and they aren't going to be involved with the political leadership."
Other complications could arise within the coalition from different ways of dealing with Iraq's civilians and fractious religious rivalries, differing tactical concepts, and incompatible equipment and communications, Garrett said.
A partitioning of Iraq into separate sectors, akin to post-World War II Germany, could lead to strains among allies and aggravate Iraq's already severe ethnic and religious tensions.
There also is the complication known as "mission creep" - a force sent to perform one role being forced to assume others for which it is ill-prepared.
A classic example was Somalia, where the original U.S. deployment to protect aid distribution segued into "national reconciliation" and "nation building," which in turn led to bloody clashes with Mogadishu's warlord-led street armies.
Copyright 2003 Associated Press
