The US comes to the UN today, asking the organization that the Bush administration has kept at a deliberate distance from its Iraq stabilization plan to step in now and help rescue it.
In off-the-record comments, many here complain about being asked to validate a process from which they were excluded, and wonder if the world organization is not being manipulated by the White House for election-year political purposes.
The November agreement between the US and the Iraqi Governing Council to transfer sovereignty to the Iraqis on June 30 made no mention of any UN role, and the omission was one that UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said he took as a snub.
But today, Paul Bremer, the American administrator in Iraq, and a delegation of the US-appointed Governing Council will be asking Annan to commit the UN to saving the arrangement, after it has come under fire in Iraq.
Asked what the UN's mood was after being disparaged often by the Bush administration, Fred Eckhard, Annan's spokesman, said: "The gut instinct here is not, `I told you so.' It's more relief that we are getting back to normalcy where governments work with each other, where international understanding is a national priority."
Annan has made it clear that while he favors a speedy timetable for giving authority to Iraqis, he is unwilling to commit the UN to an ill-defined mission. Today's meeting is consequently not expected to produce any definitive announcements.
It could serve, however, to ease the deep worry at the UN over the threat the strained relations with the Bush administration are seen to pose.
"It has been a truism since the time of the League of Nations that without the United States committed to and participating in international organizations, they are not going to work," said one official.
David Malone, a former Canadian ambassador to the UN who heads the International Peace Academy, a research institute across the street from the UN, said of today's meeting, "The positive feature is that the US belatedly, but importantly, is realizing what its friends have told it all along -- which is that the UN can be useful in these situations and can build confidence among multiple populations."
But he added, "The risk for the UN is that the US could simply be seeking to establish a scapegoat for the failure of its grand design."
The Security Council will hear a report on Iraq in a closed session this afternoon from the current Governing Council chairman, Adnan Pachachi. The president of the Security Council, Heraldo Munoz of Chile, said members were no longer focusing on the differences they had with the US over the war.
"My feeling is that the moment of divisions has been overcome and that there is a strong consensus on the Council around the idea that, even given the circumstances, we must do everything possible to assist the political process," Munoz said in an interview.
He noted that up until now the US appeared to want the UN kept out of the political transition and included only in the second stage after the June 30 transfer of power, where it could employ its experience in writing constitutions and setting up elections.
"It is now welcome that the US would like the UN to play a role in the first stage," Munoz said. "But what has to be elucidated is what that role is and whether the responsibility will be commensurate with the risk."
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