It’s No Time to Go It Alone

God, Napoleon remarked, is on the side of the bigger battalions. The examples of Davids vanquishing Goliaths -- the wars of the Vietnamese communists and the Afghan moujahedeen come to mind -- are famous precisely because they are rare. History virtually assured our success in the war to oust Saddam Hussein, but it offers little reassurance as we prepare to manage the peace. Candidate George W. Bush derided nation-building; President Bush will have his fill of it.

The dubious prize for victory is responsibility for a battered country the size of California whose 23 million people are divided by religious, tribal and ethnic tensions. Iraq could become Lebanon or Yugoslavia if Sunnis and Shiites, Turkmens and Kurds, the repressed and the repressors start settling scores.

Although the U.S., having paid in blood to defeat Hussein, will not agree to be one of many in an international relief and reconstruction effort, it also cannot bear the burden alone. Nor can it expect others to finance an American dominion from the sidelines. The American role in postwar Iraq will of necessity be bigger, but other nations can and must play important parts through consultation, compromise and contributions. And the United Nations should be asked to help coordinate and legitimize the overall effort.

A democratic Iraq would be wonderful. But institutions and values cannot be exported like bags of rice, and Iraq’s history is not reassuring. This multilateral effort must, then, settle for a stable, functional Iraq at first.

There are three ways to increase the odds of that outcome:

* Because our postwar honeymoon with Iraqis will prove brief, we must improve the quality of their daily lives rapidly and substantially. Otherwise, slogans and speeches stressing our democratic ideals and honorable intentions will amount to blather that spawns cynicism, even hatred. Hostile nationalism and radical Islam can best be averted by quickly delivering life’s necessities -- food, shelter, clean water and medicine -- particularly in the political nerve centers of Baghdad, Basra and Kirkuk.

* Iraq’s interim government must have an Iraqi face. Few Iraqis will mourn the end of Hussein’s blood-drenched rule, which killed about 300,000 people. But suspicion of foreigners remains. Although outsiders will necessarily manage Iraq’s institutions for a time, there must be a clear, public timetable for increasing the presence of Iraqis in the upper echelons of power. An American-backed regime will create mistrust if it is dominated by people who have not set foot in Iraq for decades or represent ethnic and religious minorities. That includes Ahmad Chalabi, the London-based exile leader who was airlifted into Iraq this week. It is essential to identify respected notables from Iraq’s various constituencies who can serve in an interim administration while Iraqis begin drawing up a new constitution and preparing for national elections.

* The pillars of Hussein’s dictatorship must be razed while also safeguarding public order. The Baath Party, senior military officers and the paramilitary groups and internal security forces must be uprooted if Iraq is to enjoy stability, let alone democracy. But the danger that a power vacuum and disorder will result is very real. The omens have appeared already, with the murders Thursday of two clerics -- one of them was Abdel Majid Khoei, the son of a former Iraqi grand ayatollah -- by rioters who stormed a reconciliation meeting at a Najaf mosque. The job of providing stability now that Hussein’s security apparatus has disappeared will fall initially to American and British soldiers, but the sooner it becomes a multinational affair, the better.

Order is essential for securing the time needed to create a professional police and civilian militia, but the costs and complexities of maintaining it must be shared. That would include bringing to justice people guilty of war crimes, which should be a United Nations task -- not a U.S.-sponsored operation involving the tainted Iraqi judiciary.

Destroying Hussein took weeks; building a new Iraq will take years. Under the best of circumstances, it will tax American resources and endurance far more than the war did.

The Bush administration, having scorned multilateralism in the past, must embrace it in the future, not because it is a virtue but because it is a necessity.