Candidates All Press for Global Iraq Effort

Reopening their central prewar divide with President Bush, all of the major Democratic presidential candidates are urging him to cede to the international community authority for devising a path to Iraqi self-government.

As the U.S.-led effort to forge a new government in Iraq continues to struggle, the leading Democrats argue that Iraqis are more likely to accept the process if it is designed by the United Nations or another international body.

The Democratic demands offer more evidence that the foreign policy debate in 2004 is likely to revolve around the question of how much the U.S. should rely on allies, and how much it should pursue its goals alone.

After months of accusing Bush of alienating friendly nations, the Democratic contenders have begun to detail their plans for building closer ties to the world -- what Massachusetts Sen. John F. Kerry, in a speech Wednesday, called “a new era of alliances.”

These ideas include Kerry’s new call for a global summit to develop a worldwide antiterrorism agenda, retired Army Gen. Wesley K. Clark’s proposal for a new “Atlantic Charter” that would make NATO the tip of the spear for fighting terrorism and reforming the Islamic world and Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman’s embrace of an “Alliance for Democracy” to unite “the free world in our common struggle against terrorists and tyrants.”

These proposals flow from the belief among all the Democratic contenders that Bush has isolated the U.S. by ignoring other nations’ concerns, not only on Iraq, but also on issues such as global warming and the international criminal court.

Yet even some Democratic foreign policy experts worry that the party’s candidates may be underestimating both the difficulty of developing a common strategy with Europe on terrorism and the risks of asking the U.N. to untangle the knotty disagreements over Iraqi self-government.

“You hear way too much from the Democrats in this race about turning over the whole mess to the U.N.,” said Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute, a centrist Democratic think tank. “Well, that’s not credible and most people know it. It doesn’t have the power to achieve the only outcome we can accept.”

Even before the Iraq war last spring, Democratic contenders were accusing Bush of driving away traditional allies through an excessively “unilateral” foreign policy symbolized by decisions such as his withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and renunciation of the Kyoto agreement on global warming.

Since the end of major combat operations in Iraq, even Democrats who supported the war, such as Kerry and Rep. Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri, have revived that criticism as aggressively as contenders who opposed the invasion, such as former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean and, for the most part, Clark.

In recent weeks, several of the Democrats have elaborated on how they would seek to rebuild the bridges they say Bush has damaged. Most ambitiously, Clark laid out plans to expand NATO’s mission to include fighting terrorism across the globe and constructing a long-term plan to modernize and democratize the Middle East.

On Wednesday, Kerry told the Council on Foreign Relations in New York that as president, he would “immediately convene a summit with European and world leaders” to design a similar strategy. And he said he would pursue new international efforts to cut off terrorist financing, to engage Iran’s cooperation against terror and to “track and account for existing nuclear weapons” while deterring the development of chemical and biological weapons.

“The new era of alliances I propose will take different forms to deal with different and urgent challenges,” Kerry said. “But the overriding imperative is the same -- to replace unilateral action with collective security.”

Yet as the Democrats unfurl such plans, their most pointed difference with Bush still centers on Iraq.

As each new choice in Iraq has emerged, Bush and the Democrats have repeated the same pattern, with the president placing the greatest emphasis on maintaining American flexibility and authority, and the Democrats insisting the U.S. should surrender more control to win more assistance.

In the latest example of this, the leading Democrats have called for the U.S. to relinquish its control over the difficult negotiations to design the steps through which a new Iraqi government would be selected.

L. Paul Bremer III, U.S. civil administrator in Iraq, has held extended talks with an array of Iraqi factions, hoping to win support for a complex process of caucus-style elections that would produce a sovereign government by next summer.

The negotiations have been complicated by resistance from Shiite Muslim clerics, who fear the system is designed to prevent the nation’s Shiite majority from obtaining power; in turn, many U.S. experts worry that more straightforward elections could produce a fundamentalist and anti-Western Shiite government.

Among the Democrats, Gephardt, Lieberman, Edwards, Kerry and long-shots Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio and former Sen. Carol Moseley Braun of Illinois all say the U.S. should hand off these negotiations to the U.N.

Dean has said he wants to provide more decision-making authority in Iraq to the “international community,” but hasn’t specified exactly what institutions he anticipates playing that role.

Clark joined in calling for the U.S. to relinquish control, but insisted “it’s simply unrealistic to have the United Nations take over” the responsibility. Instead, borrowing from the model used after the end of the war in Bosnia, he proposed to transfer authority to an ad hoc Iraqi Reconstruction and Democracy Council, with representatives from the U.S., Europe and countries neighboring Iraq.

Overall, the Democrats have raised two principal arguments for surrendering authority over plotting the steps toward Iraqi sovereignty. First, they maintain that any government that emerges from the process would have more legitimacy if it is seen as a product of more than just the coalition forces. Second, as Kerry argued Wednesday, the Democrats warn that the U.S. “will continue having difficulty persuading other countries, particularly those with meaningful military capabilities, to contribute troops and funds for reconstruction” unless Bush surrenders more control over the political process.

Apart from Kucinich, none of the Democrats has called for completely withdrawing American troops from Iraq; Kerry’s advisors said Wednesday he might even support increasing the number of troops. But all insist the U.S. needs to convince other nations to send more troops of their own.

In a nationwide poll by the University of Maryland’s Program on International Policy Attitudes released Wednesday, 71% of Americans said the U.N. should take the lead in working with the Iraqis to devise a new government. That was up from 64% in June, and 50% in April.

“Impatience with the process of Iraq reconstruction seems to be creating increasingly robust support for putting the operation under the U.N.,” said Steven Kull, the program director.

Yet the idea draws mixed reviews from policy experts often critical of Bush’s approach.

Kenneth M. Pollack, a leading Democratic expert on Iraq who now works at the Brookings Institution think tank, said that while the U.S. should share more authority, “it can’t just give Iraq to the U.N.” because that would create the impression America was walking away from the problem.

Amy Hawthorne, an expert on Arab governance at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, agreed with the Democratic argument that both Iraqis and neighboring countries would view a U.N.-authorized government as more legitimate than one designed by U.S.-led efforts. But she cautioned that it would likely be no easier for the U.N. than the U.S. to create a stable, moderate government in Iraq.

“Any outside group, whether the U.S.-led coalition or the U.N., is going to have a very hard time changing the facts on the ground,” she said.

Citing such potential problems, one Republican strategist close to the White House said the Democratic push for U.N. control of the reconstruction was a “fig leaf” designed to appeal to antiwar primary voters without committing the candidates to support a withdrawal of American troops that could hurt them in the general election.

“The Democrats are trying to make a distinction that doesn’t work,” the strategist said. “You are either going to run things because you believe the war was the right thing to do and you are going to finish the job, or you’re not. You can’t achieve what one would hope to achieve in Iraq by giving the U.N. full control. It simply wouldn’t work.... “