Posted on 05/03/2003 3:48:02 AM PDT by kattracks
Saturday May 3, 4:39 PM
The United States and its allies are forming a multinational force to "stabilize" post-war Iraq and will seek neither a UN mandate nor active participation of countries that opposed the war, a senior US official said.
Iraq will be divided into three sectors to be commanded by the United States, Britain and Poland, which will enlist other countries to provide forces to secure the peace, said the official Friday, speaking on condition of anonmity.
"The thought is the force would be generated by a coalition of the willing on a bilateral basis," said the official. That would exclude a UN-backed force.
British Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon set the plan in motion at a meeting in London Wednesday of 16 NATO and non-NATO states.
On the Greek island of Rhodes, meanwhile, European Union foreign ministers were looking for ways of bridging divisions over post-war Iraq.
British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said they were "very concerned to look forwards and not back."
Germany's Joschka Fischer, a fervent opponent of the US-led war on Iraq, also sought to downplay divisions, saying, "I don't have the impression that we are at loggerheads."
EU countries, he added, "have different positions on Iraq, but I think that we agree that we need stable progress in the whole region's democratisation."
France, Germany and Russia, which all opposed the war, were not invited to the London "Initial Coalition Stabilization Operations Conference."
The US official said there was a consensus in Washington that the UN role should be restricted to "what it does best" -- humanitarian affairs, dealing with refugees and internally diplaced people, and reconstruction.
A draft UN resolution has been devised to frame the UN role in Iraq, he said, adding, "There is complete agreement in the (US) government on how to proceed."
The three sectors have not yet been delineated, but their boundaries will not be along religious or ethnic lines, the official said.
The senior official said the stabilization force would supplement the US and British ground forces now in Iraq, which would be maintained at current levels as long as necessary.
At a press conference before leaving London after talks with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Rumsfeld said it was not yet known how many troops will be required in Iraq and for how long.
But he said other planning meetings will be held, in Britain on May 7 and in Poland on May 22.
"And of course the larger number of countries that participate, the fewer number of forces from the United States will be necessary," Rumsfeld said.
About 132,000 US and 23,000 British troops are in Iraq.
All coalition forces in Iraq, including the stabilization force, would fall under the command of US General Tommy Franks, the official said.
"It would be a terrible mistake to think of Iraq as fully secured, fully pacified. It is not. It is dangerous," Rumsfeld said in London.
"There are people who are rolling hand grenades into compounds. There are people who are killing people, and it's not finished," he said.
The stabilization force will be heavily weighted toward military police and likely include engineers, medical units, ordnance disposal specialists, demining units, and units that specialize in detecting and decontaminating nuclear biological and chemical warfare.
The United States, Britain, Poland, Italy, Spain, Ukraine, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Bulgaria have offered troops for the force. Albania already has an infantry company in Iraq.
The Philippines, Qatar, Australia and South Korea offered aid but not troops.
At the UN Security Council in New York, Pakistani Ambassador Minir Akram, who assumed the rotating month-long presidency on Thursday, said he had scheduled four meetings in May on "the inter-related issues" of sanctions, the UN oil-for-food programme in Iraq, and weapons inspections.
Together with humanitarian aid to Iraq, "these are issues it will be almost obligatory to deal with," he said, adding that "decisions will need to be taken" by June 3, when the current six-month phase of oil-for-food runs out.
The United States has said it wants the 13-year-old UN sanctions on Iraq removed as soon as possible.
Meanwhile the World Health Organization (WHO), said only 20 million dollars (18 million euros) a month is needed to get Iraq's battered health services going again.
But a statement warned, "Without this small initial investment, much more will be needed to repair the damage that will inevitably result."
"WHO estimates that just an additional few thousand US dollars per month is all that is needed to make sure that each one of the key hospitals in the country can continue to provide basic health services for the people who depend on it," it said.
Aid group Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders, MSF) for its part blasted the US-led coalition over post-war Iraq's health care system Friday and said it was falling short of its legal obligations.
"Urgent medical needs are not being addressed and disorganisation in hospitals is posing a threat to the health of people in the country," the group said.
In Iraq itself, the southern city of Basra took another step toward post-war normalcy Saturday, with children returning to school.
And Iraqis near the southern city of Babylon discovered a mass grave believed to date back to an uprising crushed by the government after the 1991 Gulf War and had already dug up 35 corpses, an AFP correspondent reported.
US Secretary of State Colin Powell meanwhile was visiting Iraq's northern neighbour Syria for talks with President Bashar al-Assad which he said would focus on the changed situation following the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
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