QUESTION: … And, Mr. President, who will you be handing the Iraqi government over to on June 30th?
THE PRESIDENT: We will find that out soon. That's what Mr. Brahimi is doing; he's figuring out the nature of the entity we'll be handing sovereignty over. …
(From President Bush's April 13 press conference.)
Don't worry folks, Lakhdar Brahimi will fix everything. We are in a jam, but Lakhdar Brahimi will save us.
It has come to pass that, to a remarkable extent, America's fate rests in the hands of Lakhdar Brahimi.
So, okay then, who is Lakhdar Brahimi?
He's usually identified in wire-story shorthand as the "U.N. envoy to Iraq" or as a special adviser to U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan. Brahimi's U.N. bio offers more history and detail. Brahimi, 70, is a capable and respected Algerian diplomat who for decades represented his country everywhere from the Arab League to the United Kingdom. He also has a great deal of experience in the world's trouble spots — Lebanon, Haiti, Bosnia, Afghanistan. He's fluent in Arabic, English and French.
In less than two years, the Bush administration has gone from ridiculing the United Nations as irrelevant to placing all of its eggs in the basket of this Algerian envoy.
Retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni put it this way:
"We're betting on the U.N., who we blew off and ridiculed during the run-up to the war. … Now we're back with hat in hand. It would be funny if not for the lives lost."
This irony hasn't gone unnoticed at the U.N., either, as The New York Times' Warren Hoge reports:
The United Nations, once snubbed and excluded from the task of shaping Iraq's future, suddenly finds itself pressed to play the major role in that effort, but it is taking up the task with some foreboding.
"There is a mixture of vindication on the one hand and great apprehension on the other," said Edward Mortimer, a senior aide to Secretary General Kofi Annan.
Mr. Mortimer contrasted the recent calls for assistance from President Bush with the disparagement he said the United Nations had become used to from the administration. "It's quite nice when you've been generally dissed about your irrelevancy and then suddenly have people coming on bended knee and saying, 'We need you to come back,' " he said. "On the other hand, it's quite unnerving to feel you're being projected into a very violent and volatile situation where you might be regarded as an agent or faithful servant of a power that has incurred great hostility."
In the same press conference in which President Bush assured us that Lakhdar Brahimi would rescue our sinking enterprise in Iraq, Bush also took the opportunity to continue to portray the United Nations as an irrelevant, do-nothing institution:
I went to the U.N., as you might recall, and said, either you take care of him, or we will. Any time an American President says, if you don't, we will, we better be prepared to. And I was prepared to. I thought it was important for the United Nations Security Council that when it says something, it means something, for the sake of security in the world. …
When John Kerry discusses working with, rather than at odds with, the United Nations in order to provide multilateral legitimacy, the Bush administration derides this as a threat to America's sovereignty. Kerry wouldn't act, they say, without a "permission slip" from the U.N.
Yet before the war, before the invasion and the disastrously ill-planned occupation had painted America into a corner, the United States would have had much greater leverage in its dealings with the United Nations. We had an opportunity to work with the international community from a position of strength. Now, instead, we go "hat in hand" and "on bended knee."
Even the distorted caricature of "permission slip" multilateralism seems preferable to the bended knee of the supplicant.
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