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Yet, the time has come for the coalition of the willing and the coalition of the unwilling to work hard to narrow the divide. As the military operation is entering its final phase, the United States and Britain -- de facto in control of much of Iraq -- are thinking increasingly in terms of winning the peace. They are right to stress that an allied military government is only a short-term proposition. Any succeeding Iraqi administration, however, will need international legitimacy, which can only be supplied by the United Nations.
The France-Russia-Germany troika, of course, is coming from the opposite end. The three nations are seeking to assert a measure of international autonomy vis-a-vis the United States by restoring the UN's role in postwar Iraq.
However, they can only succeed if the United States agrees that they can have a piece of the action on the ground -- on certain conditions. Thus, they will have to let the United States and Britain finish the job, and accept the outcome of the war as the starting point.
In the postwar environment, in fact, the central interests of the United States and the other major world powers largely overlap. No one is interested in the destabilization of Iraq and its possible break-up. No one can hope to benefit from ethnic, religious or clan-driven conflicts; and all will suffer from the rising wave of Islamic extremism, which will be difficult to contain within the borders of Iraq. Thus, all have a major stake in seeing to it that the end of Saddam Hussein's dictatorship is not followed by the scourge of civil war.
Initially, this will be the responsibility of the United States and Britain, subsequently shared by the Iraqi authorities. A UN administration is not in the cards. Iraq is neither East Timor nor Kosovo. It is not a nation to be built. Rather, it is a state that has to be thoroughly overhauled. And as a state, Hussein's Iraq was closer to the former East Germany than to neighboring Saudi Arabia. To prevent a dangerous deficit of legitimacy, it is vital that a new interim Iraqi government emerges in time to take that nation's seat at the UN General Assembly, so that it is able to speak for Iraq early in the reconstruction process.
The exact composition of the interim government will probably reflect the judgment of the Americans and the British more than anything else. Hopefully it will stretch way beyond the well-known group of emigre figures. The key to success is to recruit those pragmatic and patriotic Iraqis who see in the fall of Hussein a chance for their country to move ahead to become the Arab world's genuine leader in modernization. This means promoting secular Iraqi nationalism for the task of domestic transformation.
As a means toward that goal, a Bonn-type conference, along the lines of the one that followed the end of the Taliban's rule in Afghanistan, makes little sense. It is best if the interim administration is composed of capable and respected people, rather than representatives of the warring factions. Elections to a constituent assembly should be set now, but not take place too soon, to allow the Iraqi authorities and the allied government to win a measure of credibility, and to allow Iraqi society to come to terms with the trauma of war and (even if partially) the preceding decades of despotism. Organizing elections and certifying their results could be the UN's first major responsibility.
Inevitably, in the run-up to this one would expect a certain amount of horse-trading between the United States and the France-Russia-Germany group. The United States would be unwise to rule out the three countries' participation in the reconstruction effort completely. It needs partners in peace even more than in war. It is unlikely, however, that the French, Russians and Germans will in the end get more than a token consolation prize. Tactically, they must know they have lost through miscalculation, and they have to accept this. They must also know that they will lose much more heavily if they continue opposing the United States, and attempt to keep their axis going. The troika has run its course.
Next time, the five permanent members of the UN Security Council should be meeting together, and getting down to business.
Dmitry Trenin, deputy director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, contributed this comment to The Moscow Times.
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